Modern Global Society: Its History and Historiography

Modern global society is the world we live in. Yet different societies arrived at this modern world via different trajectories. To study it, some scholars segment it into social realms, distinguishing the state, the economy, the public, and the private sphere. Others question the very premise of a singularmodern global society, arguing that the concept is shaped by the legacies of European colonialism. Some take modern principles of governance into view, focusing on formal laws, informal conventions, or internalised norms (‘governmentality’). Still others start with different kinds of actors populating society with different levels of power and influence, including organisations (companies, clubs, etc.), individuals, and non-human actors like animals and machines.

Historians and social scientists focusing on actors point out that relations between them are marked by differences in wealth, status, identity, and belief. They ask how social actors connect nevertheless and find shared cultures, common interests, or engage with other actors with whom they come into contact in expected and unexpected ways. Pointing out that actors migrate, communicate, and trade around the globe, scholars will agree that modern society is both global in its geographical scope and diverse in the political and cultural meanings it produces. At the same time, they will acknowledge the continuous importance of the nation as a key component of modern society.

The course pursues two major aims. Firstly, it encourages students to look at modern global society from a historical perspective. Since historical reflection is able to put current issues into fresh perspective, it will zoom in on central aspects of modern society from work to play, from knowledge to consumption to see how these have developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to shape the world we live in. Secondly and in addition to histories of modern global society, the course introduces students to important debates in the historiography of modern society. We ask why historians have turned to certain questions and how they conducted their research and built arguments. Reading pivotal texts on concepts like class and gender, structure and agency, the public and the private sphere, the course intends to deepen students’ understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of historical research on the topic.