AHIS 25A17 - An Introduction to Environmental History of Modernity

For the past two centuries, historians have focused their work on understanding the political, economic and social developments that created the modern world. Debates over the growth of trade, the development of institutions, the causes of war and ways to achieve peace, the creation of health systems, and the evolution of ideas formed the basis of the field. History, for most of history, was considered a purely human endeavour.

In the past few decades, however, climate change and human impact on Earth’s biosphere have demonstrated that this framework is incomplete. Humanity has always been part of and dependent on the non-human world and now, as the Anthropocene debate suggests, the human race is undoubtedly a major cause of changes to Earth systems. The future of humanity and the planet can no longer be separated, which forces us to reconsider the role of non-human environments in the development of modern human societies.

To do so, we will rely on the tools of environmental history, a relatively new and rapidly growing historical subfield that studies the human relationship with the natural world. Each session will address a specific feature of our modern era through an environmental lens, including globalization, industrialization, empires, warfare, food production, and energy use. Sessions will be a combination of lectures, source analysis and group discussions. At the end of the course, students will be familiar with the broad themes of the environmental history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will be able to apply this historical methodology to their own interests.