070055 UE Working Skills in Global History (2024S)

In this course, students will be familiar with key themes in global history (e.g. migration, flows of capital and ideas, networks, and mobility) by exploring the history of ‘Asian port cities’ from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Through lectures, in-class discussions, group work, and reading assignments, this course will familiarise students with concrete working skills in historical research, including reviewing literature, defining a research question, developing an argument, analysing different sorts of primary sources, and presenting and writing short papers.

In addition to methodological approaches, students will be familiar with theoretical questions in the field of global history today. Cases studies including overseas Chinese connections, modern girls in Shanghai, and displacement in World War II Asia will offer students opportunities to acquire a comprehensive understanding of interconnectedness across Asia and engage in scholarly debates on conceptions of modernity, gender, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism in a non-European context. This course is not about Asian history itself but using Asian cases to approach history as a discipline and global history as an important research trend which looks beyond a single urban, national, or imperial sphere.