13160d
Seminar
SoSe 16: Global Histories of Technology in the Nineteenth Century
Joseph Prestel
Comments
Historians often describe the nineteenth century as a period of technological progress that propelled global integration. In their accounts of this period, scholars frequently draw on examples like Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873, in order to illustrate how innovations such as the telegraph and the steamship enabled globalization processes. This seminar will examine these claims in detail. It will investigate in which way specific technologies contributed to global integration during the nineteenth century by focusing on the spread of four technologies: mechanical clocks, the printing press, the steamship, and the telegraph. In doing so, the seminar will not only hone in on the role of new technologies for globalization processes, but it will also examine the “social life" (Arnold) of these technologies in different societies. Readings will focus mainly on Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. At least one session of the seminar will be dedicated to working with primary sources from the late nineteenth century. close
Suggested reading
Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). close
13 Class schedule
Additional appointments
Wed, 2016-06-08 10:00 - 12:00Regular appointments
Mon, 2016-04-18 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-04-25 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-05-02 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-05-09 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-05-23 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-05-30 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-06-06 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-06-13 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-06-20 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-06-27 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-07-04 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-07-11 10:00 - 12:00
Mon, 2016-07-18 10:00 - 12:00