070391 SE Globale Interaktionen (2006W)

The seminar seeks to reorient our understanding of South Asian history by locating it within a global frame. By taking its perspective from the notion of "connected histories" (Sanjay Subrahmanyam) it examines linkages - mercantile, political, cultural - between South Asia and other world regions to show how these were constitutive for developments which we often tend to explain from within South Asia alone. The historical developments will be examined in three chronological phases - the 16th to the 18th centuries which focus on the connections with Europe, Central Asia, the regions linked by the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia and the ways in which migration, warfare, travel and trade impinged on the structures politics, economy and society. The second phase looks at the workings of colonialism and the ways in which metropole and colony mutually constituted each other. The third phase looks at the emergence of postcolonial nation-states of the region and their global entanglements. In interpreting the developments during these phases the relationship between multiple factors - endogenous and exogenous - will be analysed. Through a definition of global circulation which is multipolar rather than bipolar, it is hoped to transcend the binary opposition between Europe and non-European world. Instead of understanding "modernity" as a Western civilisational essence that was progressively transferred to the non-western world, a global / connected history perspective can introduce the idea of multiple, entangled modernities that are culturally specific and unfolded as part of a process of connectedness.