Special Topics In History Global Asia

AY2014/2015 Semester 1

This course will be conducted in a seminar style, through extensive reading of key texts in the subject and intensive discussions in the class.. Students will be required to write three short review essays to present their findings in the class. Discussions will be organized as group presentations. Do you feel that a global world is a part of your life? Globalization is a contested concept and a controversial subject matter. In this course we will try to get an idea how and why it is so. This course will provide a snapshot of the history of some processes that can be described as the globalization of Asia in their regional and Eurasian contexts from the beginning of sustained contacts in the 1600 until today. We will look at how some ideas and goods circulated, why they were appropriated and how they were adapted in different places in Asia. We will pay special attention to two trends of the adaptation that accompanied these globalizing processes of the 20th century, that being indigenization and internationalization. We will look at "creative" adaptations of new ideas that seemed to answer pressing local problems, from Christianity to nationalism, to communism. We will also look at the circulation of people and overseas communities and their efforts to localise and sustain their identities. These worlds were driven by trade and sustained by the circulation of people and ideas that went global and simultaneously indigenous in the early decades of the 20th century. Was the Great Depression and when the world?s connection to capitalism became problematic the end or the dawn of globalization? How did this interwar globalization driven by ideologies contribute to the emergence of today's globalized world of technology and market?