501 - 510 of 788 results for: HISTORY

This seminar will explore global patterns of Chinese migration, and consider both continuities and change within these movements. We will examine Chinese communities here in California, as well as in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. In addition to the dynamics of specific encounters, the course examines how Chinese migrants contributed to broader patterns of nation building, colonialism, race formation, capitalist development, and global constructions of "Chinese-ness?"

From India to Japan, emperors, European colonizers, reformers, revolutionaries, and ordinary people turned to law courts to implement their ideals of a just social and political order. We will search out how legal sources can be used to tell the histories of South, Southeast, and East Asian states and their subjects between the mid-eighteenth century and the present. We will follow their trail out of stuffy courtrooms, through bedrooms, battlefields, and morgues, below decks, and across the pages of newspapers and novels. Topics include: indigenous legal orders, colonial and postcolonial knowledge, extraterritoriality and sovereignty, gender and sexuality in court, migration and state control, sensationalized trials and the emergence of mass opinion, fundamentalism and modernization, revolutionary and postcolonial justice.

(295E is 5 units; 95E is 3 units.) This course is an introduction to the field of military history. But rather than centering on the typical Western perspectives, it focuses on studying the East Asian modern warfare during the early 20th century. Students will investigate, define, and historicize different kinds of wars, and draw historical lessons to better understand the contemporary military conflicts. From the trench warfare in the Russo-Japanese War, to the guerrilla warfare of the Chinese Communist Party, and to Americans' strategic bombing in the Korean War, students will identify modern warfare's historical characteristics in East Asia and reflect on how they continue to affect the politics in the region today.

Intensive exploration of major issues in the history of race and ethnicity in China, Japan, and Korea from the early modern period to the present day.

The lives of women in the last 1,000 years of Chinese history. Focus is on theoretical questions fundamental to women's studies. How has the category of woman been shaped by culture and history? How has gender performance interacted with bodily disciplines and constraints such as medical, reproductive, and cosmetic technologies? How relevant is the experience of Western women to women elsewhere? By what standards should liberation be defined?

This course provides a social, political and ecological history of South Asia during the early modern period, roughly from 1500 to 1800 CE. Patrons of the arts and sciences, the Mughals developed sophisticated cultural and political idioms, and a rich historiographical tradition. We will investigate these frameworks with which they sought to understand the diverse worlds of early modern South Asia. We will also study other internal and external actors (like the Marathas, Rajputs, French, Portuguese, and other European powers) that played an active role in the somewhat tumultuous stage of early modern India. By studying how the Mughals saw the world, and how the world saw the Mughals, we will develop a nuanced understanding of one of the richest and most powerful political formations in history, one which has been severely vilified and misunderstood in colonial and independent India. Topics include: the use of land and its ecological costs; the role of Sanskrit, Persian and of vernacular languages in the Mughal court; travels across the Indian Ocean, among others.

(Undergraduates, enroll in 296F. Graduates, enroll in 396F.) Modern science, technology and medicine are global phenomena, and yet scientific knowledge, as the product of human activity, reflects the social, political, economic and cultural contexts in which it is produced, mobilized and used. This course explores the dynamic relationship between science and society in South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking scientific practice as not the exclusive domain of the British colonial state, its European personnel or even South Asian scientists, this course explores the knowledge practices of a range of actors in South Asian societies. We will pursue two questions throughout: How and where did South Asians learn, receive, interpret, practice, and produce scientific knowledge? How did they mobilize this knowledge in their own political and social agendas? In these varied practical, social and cultural projects, science became a force for civilization and enlightenment, political domination and national liberation, and economic development and social transformation. In fact, a 'scientific temperament' has also come to be upheld as the appropriate civic attitude of postcolonial citizens. Through these themes, this course examines the making of the power and cultural authority of the sciences and their practitioners in modern South Asia.

This colloquium will introduce students to the exciting and expanding field of Indian labor history and provide them a comprehensive historiographical foundation in this area of historical research. Seminars will engage with one key monograph in the field every week, with selected chapters of the monograph set as compulsory reading. In these seminars, we will explore the world of the working classes and the urban poor in colonial and post-colonial India, as also the Indian labor diaspora. We will understand myriad workplaces such as jute and cotton mills, small workshops, farms and plantations. We will also explore forms of protest and political mobilization devised by workers in their struggles against structures of oppression and in their quest for a life of dignity. Most importantly, these seminars will train students in the methods deployed by labor historians to access the lives of the largely unlettered workers of the region who seldom left a trace of their consciousness in archival documents. Overall, we will connect the debates in the history of labor in modern India to wider discussions about the nature of capitalism, colonial modernity, gender, class, caste and culture.

As the PRC's economic and political clout has grown, Chinese diplomacy and foreign relations have drawn far more attention. Especially following the start of Xi Jinping's Belt and Road initiative, both popular and academic commentators have often referred to the supposedly ancient precedents of the modern PRC's approach to foreign policy. PRC leaders have themselves invoked the Chinese tradition of foreign relations as one that enabled largely peaceful coexistence between China and its neighbors, unlike Western alternatives. This course will take a long-duree approach to understanding the conceptual frameworks, interactions, and historical events that shaped Chinese diplomacy and foreign relations from the time of the Mongol invasions up to the early twentieth century. The questions we will consider include: What basic geographic, environmental, and economic factors influenced Chinese foreign relations? Did frequently invoked concepts like "the tributary system" or "Silk Road" actually exist in Chinese thought, and if so, how did they affect the pragmatic practice of diplomacy? What was the role of ritual, poetry, and other forms of praxis in the sphere of foreign relations? How did the way that Chinese thought about the outside world and foreigners thought about China shift over time, especially in the 19th century with the advent of the much more pressing threat of European powers and Japan? The course will conclude by more directly examining the legacy of imperial Chinese foreign relations for China and the world in the 20th and 21st century.