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WiSe 15/16: Global History of the Middle Classes

Dejung

Kommentar

This lecture addresses a new approach from the emerging research field of global social history by examining the emergence of 'middle classes' and 'bourgeois cultures' across the globe in the long nineteenth century, as well as their encounters, both in imperial and non-imperial contexts. It aims to demonstrate that the nineteenth century saw the formation of similar social groups all over the world that can be described as 'middle classes'. The lecture examines the extent to which the making of these middle classes around the globe can be explained by considering the rising exchange of ideas and goods between the Western and non-Western worlds. Instead of understanding the establishment of middle class society as a distinctly Western phenomenon, which became diffused throughout the rest of the world, the lecture seek to explore the extent to which it was, from its start, the result of global interactions and entanglements in the age of empire. The first part of the lecture familiarizes students with the most common theoretical approaches to both, global history and the history of the middle classes, the second part will point out the emergence of middle classes in different world areas, the third part will highlight the role of global entanglements for the establishment of social fields which were closely linked with the emergence of middle class society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as social reforms, education, science, the establishment of a capitalist economy and the quest for political participation. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Christof Dejung, Auf dem Weg zur Weltgesellschaft? Neuere Ansätze zu einer Globalgeschichte des Bürgertums, in: Neue Politische Literatur. Berichte über das internationale Schrifttum 59 (2014), 229-253: A. Ricardo López / Barbara Weinstein (ed.), The Making of the Middle Class. Toward a Transnational History, Durham 2012: David S. Parker/ Louise E. Walker (ed.), Latin America's Middle Class. Unsettled Debates and New Histories, Lanham 2013: Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes. Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi, New Delhi 2013: Ann Laura Stoler / Frederick Cooper (ed.): Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeoise World, Berkeley 1997: Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East. Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class, Princeton 2006: Michael O. West, The Rise of the African Middle Class. Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898-1965, Bloomington 2002. Schließen