070189 UE Working Skills in Global History - The Global Middle Ages (2022W)

The course familiarizes students with methods, tools and practices of global historical research, from the identification and study of sources and secondary literature via the presentation of own research to the draft of a research paper. Traditional working skills will be contrasted with more recent debates on how to do and write history beyond the ideal of the lonely historian in the archive.
A special focus will be on global historical research for periods ahead of 1492 and the entanglement of all continents in the course of “European expansion”, for which a similar global framework is considered more problematic. An example is the debate in the field of “world systems theory”; while Immanuel Wallerstein located the first origins of a world system in the early modern period, other scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank identified early world systems even 5000 years ago in the Ancient Middle East. The course will concentrate on the 11th to 14th centuries CE of what in the European tradition has been called the ”Middle Ages”, characterized by wide-ranging phenomena such as the Crusades or the Mongol Expansion. Grounded within a general introduction to working skills, students will be confronted with the special challenges to do global history (beyond a Eurocentric or Eurasian perspective) within a still more fragmented world. Students will also be introduced to methods of historical network research, spatial analysis and environmental studies which have been used successfully for the study of the Global Middle Ages recently. Furthermore, research along these lines in various languages and academic cultures will be critically discussed.