Winter 2003

This information effective for Winter 2003. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

History

[HIS-030B] [HIS-080A] [HIS-121A] [HIS-150C] [HIS-154] [HIS-196L]

30B. Modern European History: 1789–1914

Note: This syllabus from Winter 2002

[The Winter 2003 syllabus will include Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost," a study of European imperialism, and a book on the Irish potato famine.]

Instructor: Bruce Thompson
276 Stevenson
Office hours: MW 9:30-10:30
Phone: 459-3467 and 459-2555 (message)
E-mail: brucet@ucsc.edu

Course Description:

Why study "the long nineteenth century" (from 1789 to 1914)? The short answer is that this is the period in which the shape of the modern world became clear for the first time. Liberty, equality, fraternity—the great slogan of French Revolution announced an agenda based on democracy, human rights, equality before the law, the career open to talents, and the sovereignty of the people. But the actual outcome of the Revolution was less encouraging: inflation, terror, dictatorship, imperialism, and twenty years of European wars. Meanwhile, the industrial revolution in Britain suggested the possibility of exponential economic growth. But here, too, the actual result, at least in the short term, was alarming: a miserable urban proletariat and poverty in the midst of wealth. Our course traces the uneven interaction between these two revolutions—the democratic and the industrial—across a century of rapid social change. Major stops on our itinerary include the revolutions of 1848; the failures of liberalism in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia; the advent of modernism in the arts; the scramble for empire and the impact of imperialism; and the origins of the First World War.

1. The French Revolution (Jan. 4-11)

Topics: The Old Regime—Why France?—The Revolutionary Bandwagon—The Terror
Readings: Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, chapters 1-3

2. War and Peace (Jan. 14-18)

Topics: Napoleon and the Revolution in Warfare—Empire and the Disasters of War —The Congress of Vienna
Readings:
Censer and Hunt, Liberty, chapters 5-6
Jakob Walter, Diary of a Napoleonic Footsoldier

3. The Industrial Revolution (Jan. 23-25)

Topics: Why England?—Carboniferous Capitalism: The Factory and the Railroad—The Country and the City
Readings:
Victor Kiernan, Foreword to Engels' Condition of the Working Class
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, pp. 50-202
Charles Dickens, "The New Railway" (handout)
James Nasmyth, "Coalbrookdale" (handout)

4. Ideologies (Jan. 28-Feb. 1)

Topics: Liberalism and Conservatism—Socialism and Nationalism—Romanticism
Readings:
Colin Haywood, "Society," in The Nineteenth Century, ed. T.C.W. Blanning
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

5. The Revolutions of 1848 (Feb. 4-8)

Topics: The Hungry Forties—France: February, June, December—Central Europe: Springtime of Peoples?
Reading: Peter Jones, The 1848 Revolutions

6. Nationalism I: The Unification of Italy (Feb. 11-15)

Topics: The Crimean War—Cavour and Garibaldi—North and South
Readings:
Paul W. Schroeder, "The Vienna System" and "The System Undermined" in The Nineteenth Century, ed. Blanning
Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard

7. Nationalism II: The Unification of Germany (Feb. 20-22)

Topics: Bismarck and Prussia—The Franco-Prussian War—Bismarck's Europe
Readings:
Paul W. Schroeder, "The Creation of Prussia-Germany" and "The Bismarckian System in Operation" in The Nineteenth-Century
D.G. Williamson, Bismarck and Germany, 1852-1890

8. Spectres Haunting Europe (Feb. 25-March 1)

Topics: The New Woman—Paris and Impressionism—Darwin's Century
Readings:
James J. Sheehan, "Culture," in The Nineteenth Century, ed. Blanning
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House and Ghosts

9. Politics: East and West (March 4-8)

Topics: The Russian Empire—Anarchism and Populism—Failures of Liberalism
Readings:
Robert Tombs, "Politics," in The Nineteenth Century
Vera Figner, Vera Zasulich, and Olga Liubatovich, memoirs in Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar, ed. Barbara Engel

10. Imperialism and War (March 11-13)

Topics: The Scramble for Africa—Young Winston—Toward the First World War
Readings:
A.G. Hoskins, "1870: The Struggle for the Mastery of the World" in The Nineteenth Century
Paul W. Schroeder, "Imperialism and World Politics" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" in The Nineteenth Century
Winston Churchill, My Early Life, chapters 1-2, 8, 10-11, 14-15, 18-22, 27-29

Course requirements: participation in discussion sections, a midterm examination (February 8), a 6-page essay (March 8), and a final examination (March 19).

Sample Lecture Notes
History 30B

Lecture 1
Why France

"Like the Soviet Union, the monarchy of Louis XVI was an overextended empire, trying to be a global power while failing the elementary test of legitimacy: feeding its people. In a desperate attempt to break with a centralized command economy, liberal governments experimented with deregulation that in the short term made things worse. The regime ultimately collapsed from its ruler's fatal inconsistency in the application of reform and his reluctance to embrace representative institutions that could give these changes a democratic sanction." —Simon Schama

1. Storm Clouds

On July 13, 1788, at about 9:00 in the morning, a dreadful darkness spread over the earth in the fertile basin around Paris and issued in a terrible storm. Crops were flattened and livestock were killed by huge hailstones. The harvest was disastrous, and when the autumn and winter arrived there were floods and frosts. Many peasants became vagrants, and some formed themselves into threatening bands that began to terrorize parts of the country as they searched for alms or work or engaged in petty theft. Insecurity and misery spread beyond the ranks of the chronically poor to affect modestly prosperous peasants and artisans as well.

Bread made up three-quarters of the diet for most people in France, so the price of bread was an especially sensitive issue. Even in normal times the poorest wage-earners might spend a third or a half of their incomes on it. And when the price of bread shot up in times of dearth, public opinion, fed by rumor, blamed a conspiracy of greedy hoarders. Meanwhile, as people spent more and more of their incomes on bread, they had less to spend on textiles and other nonessentials. Employment and earnings collapsed at the same time, as the cost of living was rising rapidly.

In this situation, the government could not win: if it prepared for emergencies by storing grain, many people suspected that the government was part of the conspiracy. If the government experimented with a free market in grain in the hope of increasing supplies and bringing down prices, it was accused of being callously indifferent to the suffering of the poor. Louis XVI was incapable of a consistent policy: any minister who attempted serious reforms soon offended one powerful special interest or another and lost his post. The King's policy decisions reflected the influence of a small circle of aristocratic advisers at court who were willing to contemplate only those reforms that did not threaten their own social and political positions.

There were about 200,000 nobles in France (a country of 26 million). They owned between a quarter and a third of the land in the country and had vestigial "feudal" rights over much of the rest. Many of them had only recently joined the ranks of the nobility through the purchase of "venal" offices. All the senior members of the administration, the army, the navy, and the Catholic Church were nobles. But half or more of the nobility were no wealthier than the average bourgeois, or middle class, property-owner, and some were poorer. And only the richest nobles could afford the very expensive life at the Court of Versailles.

2. Blue Water, Red Ink

For several decades, France had been involved in a struggle with Britain for global primacy. Overseas empire—the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the textile markets of India, the fur-trade of Canada—was one of the few really dynamic sectors of the eighteenth-century economy. So the French tried to compete with the British in the pursuit of colonial trade, and they lost one war after another. Why? Because as a continental and a global power, France had to support both an army and a navy. The British could concentrate on their navy to project power overseas and siphon wealth from the colonies.

But there was another source of British strength: the British state had a more efficient fiscal apparatus. Having taken lessons in fiscal discipline from the Dutch Republic (arguably the first modern state), the British government was able to borrow funds at relatively low rates of interest and to sustain a long struggle with the French. By contrast, French finances were notoriously ramshackle: no real budget, no parliamentary oversight, and tax collection in the hands of corrupt private "tax-farmers." Moreover, the landowners who dominated the British Parliament were willing to tax themselves in wartime. In France the aristocrats who dominated the institutions of government were mainly obstructionist, claiming to defend liberty while protecting their own privileges. And most privileges involved exemption from taxation. The result in France was a system in which the burden of taxation fell on those who could least afford to pay it.

The one war in which the French managed to defeat the British was the American war of the 1770s and early 1780s. The French subsidized the American Revolution and offered weapons, advisers, and naval support. But the result was to bankrupt the French state. So when the economic and social crisis of the late 1780s struck, there was already a financial crisis. And soon there would be a political crisis as well.

3. The Revolutionary Bandwagon

When his efforts to increase tax receipts met with the usual obstruction, Louis XVI first called an Assembly of Notables to deliberate with him and then decided to revive France's ancient representative assembly, the Estates-General, in the hope of persuading that body to approve a more rational tax structure. The result in the spring of 1789 was perhaps the most democratic election in European history, with the majority of the male population voting for delegates to the Estates-General. Expectations rose at the very moment when the price of bread was reaching its peak.

But how should the Estates-General be organized? And what kind of voting procedures should it adopt? The King and his ministers gave no clear signal on these important procedural matters. In this vacuum, a struggle for power developed between the privileged estates—representatives of the Church and the aristocracy—and the non-nobles, the Third Estate. The delegates of the Third Estate were generally people who had experience in public speaking, handling meetings, and drafting documents—that is why they had been elected. They were often lawyers and/or local office-holders, and now they had the heady experience of bidding for power at the center of the country. They outmaneuvered the representatives of the privileged orders.

In June the Estates-General transformed itself into a National Assembly dominated by members of the Third Estate, claiming sovereignty in the name of the nation and the mission of preparing a new constitution. But the King was clearly opposed to this development, and there was good reason to fear that he would attempt to suppress it by force. Rumors of troop movements around Paris brought crowds into the streets on July 12. On the 14th, a crowd searching for arms overwhelmed the Bastille, a royal prison, and murdered its administrators. On July 16 the war minister advised the king that the army could no longer be relied upon. The regime had lost its monopoly of armed force—a key moment in any revolution. The king accepted the appointment of a liberal nobleman, Lafayette, as commander of a new "National Guard."

Meanwhile, rioting had spread to the countryside. Economic distress had become politicized and explosive. Those who were suffering from deteriorating economic conditions were now inclined to attribute them to political causes. Most nobles had opposed the transformation of the Estates-General into the National Assembly. Could they be trusted now, or were they plotting a counter-revolution? Were they perhaps responsible for the high price of bread? Were they planning to starve the people into submission? Hadn't they always been responsible for the people's misery?

Under these circumstances of anarchy in the countryside, the National Assembly needed to do something dramatic. On August 4, 1789, it voted to end the vestiges of feudal privilege (the landlords' rights to coerce labor and fees of various kinds from the peasantry); on August 14 it abolished the sale of offices; and on August 26 it issued a Declaration of the Rights of Man. The abolition of privilege meant that government—especially in the matter of taxation—should treat people as individual property-owners rather than as members of status groups. People differed quantitatively in the amount of wealth they owned, but not qualitatively according to social rank or estate.

Here then are two enormous changes. First, there is a shift in the location of sovereignty from the top to the base of society. The crucial idea is that legitimate power belongs to the nation as a whole, not to the King. And, second, there is the abolition of privilege, the egalitarian notion that everyone should be treated equally in the distribution of the benefits and burdens of citizenship. The crucial idea here is equality under the law. And note also the important precedent: when the revolution appeared to be in danger, it was the ordinary people of Paris (artisans, small property-owners) who had rushed into the streets to save it. Perhaps the legitimacy of the revolution itself came not only from "the people," but from popular violence.

4. Why France?

We've seen that a series of crises—fiscal, economic, social, and political—converged in France in the summer of 1789. The Revolution emerged from the politicization of all classes of the population: first, in the voting for the Estates-General, then in the controversy over how the Estates-General should vote. But, in the background, there was a mentality that had its source in one of the great movements in European cultural history. France was the center of the European Enlightenment, an agenda for reform and modernization that embraced such principles as religious toleration, economic liberalization, and administrative efficiency. Enlightenment thinkers were critical of the legacy of the past, with its burden of irrational custom, superstition, force, and fraud. Their goal was to transfer the methods of the natural sciences to human affairs and to chart a course of incremental improvements in both justice and efficiency. They proposed to increase the sum of human happiness, or at least diminish the sum of unnecessary human misery, by discarding the belief in original sin and dismantling the barriers to economic growth. Archaic privileges were among those barriers.

One of the most radical and famous of the Enlightenment thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, advanced the idea of the general will, independent of narrow special interests. The men who made the revolution had read and absorbed the lessons of Rousseau. When they pushed for a National Assembly, they were trying to embody his conception of the general or national will. But if the ideal was so attractive and rational, why did these same men soon begin to distrust each other, to demonize each other, and to kill each other? That will be one of our questions next time.

80A. Introduction to Global History

Instructor: Edmund (Terry) Burke III

When does history begin? with the modern state? with the ancient civilizations of the Middle East? with the origins of agriculture? with the emergence of homo sapiens? A case can be made for all of these dates. It is the premise of this course that if we really want to start at the beginning, we must begin with the origins of the universe—some 14 billion years ago. This perspective, known as "Big History," provides the largest possible chronological context for thinking about history, one which stretches from the beginning of the universe to the present.

Most university courses are about asking smaller and more precise questions about less and less. This course adopts the opposite approach. An introduction to the art of asking significant large scale questions, it necessarily draws upon guest lectures from a variety of fields (especially astrophysics, geology, biology, and anthropology). Students will be encouraged to raise large questions about human beings and their place in the history of nature, the planet, and the universe.

Explicitly interdisciplinary and synthetic, "Introduction to Global History" seeks to provide students with a coherent sense of the past and present over the very long term. At this level of magnitude, the normal subjects of historical inquiry (civilizations, states, religions) become blurred. Other topics, such as the long term impact of human populations upon the global environment, are seen with special clarity. The course is thus a challenge to conventional ideas of the appropriate subject of historical inquiry, as well as to conventional understandings of expertise.

Our focus will be on the great "turning points" of history, such as the origins of the universe, the formation of the earth, the origins of life, origins of humans, origins of agriculture, and the advent of complex societies. Lectures will offer insights into the latest theories on each topic and discuss the evidence for and against these theories.

There will be a total of three exams (one every three weeks) as well as several in-class and/or in-section quizzes. Students will be expected to learn the key concepts and dates for each section of the class, keep up with the weekly readings, and attend the lectures and sections.

A class reader is required and can be purchased in the Campus Copy Center (near the Bay Tree Bookstore).

Required books:

• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs And Steel
• Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism

121A. The Making of the Modern World, 1400–1750

Instructor: Alexandra Haugh
TTh 8:00 a.m.–9:45 a.m.
Crown 208

Course Description:

The first part of a two-quarter world history sequence, this course covers the time period in which our "modern" world began to take shape. We will examine economic, social, cultural, intellectual, and technological developments in the period 1400 to 1750. This course investigates the respective roles of different world regions in the making of the modern world and the transformation of various societies of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the early modern period. The course stresses the nature of cross-cultural interactions in the pre-industrial world with significant attention to patterns of European colonization. Although, as historians, we will study concrete events grounded in specific times and places, we will use our discussions of chronologically and geographically bounded experiences to explore broader patterns of change.

Course Organization and Requirements:

This course meets twice a week for a combination of lectures and discussions. Students who have taken at least 3 quarters of any combination of European, Asian, South East Asian, Latin American, African, or Middle Eastern history will benefit most from this course. Course requirements include periodic map quizzes, three 2-page response papers, a 5-page midterm paper, and an in-class final exam.

Course Readings:

• Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History
  
• John Wills, 1688: A Global History
  
• K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade & Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750
  
• Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
  
• Steve J. Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest
  
• John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400–1680
  
• Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

• Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past
  
• Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution
  
• Hinton, Fanshen
  
• Yang, Spider Eaters
  
• Weston and Jensen, China Beyond the Headlines
  
• Hessler, River Town

154. The Mediterranean in the Modern Era, 1492–1939

Instructor: Edmund (Terry) Burke III
TTh 12:00–1:45
Crown Room 203

Course Description:

The Mediterranean is one of the world's oldest regions. Located at the point of intersection of Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Mediterranean—its history—continues to be crucial to the future of our planet. Today viewed as a major cultural fractal point dividing Islam and the West, the history of the Mediterranean, upon examination, can help us to understand the complex historical connections which unite as well as divide this region. To study the modern Mediterranean is to study in miniature the history of the world.

The course explores the cultural transformation of the Mediterranean region in comparative historical perspective from the rise of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires at the end of the fifteenth century to modern times. Topics include political and economic transformations, social movements, cultural change, gender, colonialism, and imperialism.

The course is divided into three parts:

In Part 1, "The Mediterranean Divided" (4 weeks), students will learn about the basic human geography of the region and its prior unified history under Islam, the multiple meanings of 1492 (unification of Spain, double ethnic cleansings, the enforced division of the Mediterranean between Christianity and Islam), the Sixteenth century world war between the Ottomans and Habsburgs, and the contrast between the imperial centers and provincial realities.

In Part 2, "The Mediterranean Before Colonialism" (3 weeks), students will deal with the economic underdevelopment of the area following the silver price inflation of the 16th century and the shift of the economic center to northwestern Europe; the importance of Muslim and Christian corsairing, and the persistence of rebellions; and, finally, the looming shadow of the West.

In Part 3, "Making the Mediterranean Modern" (3 weeks), we study the ways in which the nineteenth liberal reforms affected different parts of the region, the onset of colonialism (and its culture), and the rise of nationalism in Turkey and of fascism in Italy.

The class will be conducted by a combination of lecture and discussion. The syllabus assumes that students will come to class having already completed the reading assignments for the week.

Students will be required to complete a short paper, an in-class midterm examination, and a take-home final or a term paper.

Readings are not yet finalized. Please check an updated version of this course synopsis for assigned readings.

196L. Spies: The History and Culture of Espionage

Instructor: Bruce Thompson
E-mail: brucet@ucsc.edu

Course Description:

A. J. P. Taylor, one of the greatest modern historians, once suggested that the tremendous expenditure of money and energy on espionage activities and intelligence bureaucracies in the 20th century made very little difference in the actual course of events. Our course proposes to test that hypothesis by examining the major events of the century—the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War—through the prisms of espionage and intelligence. We will examine both the experience of agents "in the field" and the collation and analysis of data by governments and consider to what extent these efforts have had an impact on policies and outcomes. We'll emphasize the relationship between intelligence and resistance movements in wartime, the importance of code breaking, and the links, in certain notorious cases, between espionage and treason. We'll also examine the image of the spy in popular culture by reading classic spy fiction from each of the major eras in 20th-century history.

Because many of the best studies in this field depend on revelations from recently opened archives, the course should appeal to anyone interested in fresh perspectives on the familiar events of the century. Aficionados of spy literature should benefit from reading classic spy fiction in its historical context.

Recent events have underscored the serious consequences of intelligence failures. Students in this course will surely want to consider whether the history of 20th-century intelligence successes and disasters can illuminate our predicament at the beginning of the 21st century.

The major objective here is to encourage students to rethink familiar episodes in modern history from a relatively unfamiliar point of view. That is, one major goal is to reassess major events and decisions from the perspective of the "inside information" offered by espionage and intelligence. Another is to recover the experience of the participants, particularly that of the agents in the field and the decision-makers who relied on their information, and to consider the reasons for their successes and failures. And, finally, we'll exercise our historical and literary imaginations by examining the links between the actual history of espionage and intelligence activities and the literary representations of them.

Course Outline:

Week 1. Spy Fever: Invasion Scares, Spy Fiction, and the Birth of British Intelligence

Week 2. Gentlemen and Players: The Amateur Agent as Modern Hero

Week 3. From Mata Hari to Room 40: Espionage and the Great War

Week 4. Hitler's Spies: Successes and Failures of German Intelligence

Week 5. Resistance: A French Network in the Second World War

Week 6. Codebreakers

Week 7. Secrets of the KGB!

Week 8. Treason: The Cambridge Spies

Week 9. Fictions of the Cold War: James Bond and Anglo-American Popular Culture

Week 10. The Spymaster: Markus Wolf and the End of the Cold War

Course Materials:

• John Buchan, The 39 Steps (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
  
• Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New York and London: The Free Press, 2000)
  
• Richard Collier, Ten Thousand Eyes (New York: The Lyons Press, 2001)
  
• Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999)
  
• Walter Schellenberg, The Labyrinth: Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, Hitler's Chief of Counterintelligence (Da Capo Press, 1984)
  
• John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
  
• Course pack with select articles