AsiaPacific In Global History Pre

AY2018/2019 Semester 1

In Asia-Pacific in Global History: Pre-1800, students embark on a vicarious journey through time to revisit numerous events, historical personages, and civilizations and societies, for some of which only dilapidated architecture remains. This course begins its narrative with prehistory and investigates how the earliest complex societies developed in the Asia-Pacific regions, such as the Indus Valley and Yellow River region of China. The story spans several millennia from the earliest known appearance of human beings based on fossil remains through the development of societies in Asia and the Pacific up 1800 when different regions could be said to have become integrated into a global system. The course applies -archaeology of knowledge? (Foucault) approach to the study of Asia Pacific from prehistory to 1800; students begin their study from the most recent period and work their way back to the earliest. This survey course will reveal a dynamic world of encounter, cooperation, conflict, interaction, and war. Through 13 weeks of lecture, students can expect to inject themselves into historical events, be it the numerous wars and conflicts of the mainland Southeast Asian polities, the Mongols, and the Korean kingdoms, the political intrigues within the court of Ayudhya and Xi An, or the death and destruction caused by the plague throughout 14th- century Asia and Europe.