A Global History Of The 1930s, Part 1 Optimism And Crash, 1929 35

This course adopts an international history approach to the “devil’s decade” of the 1930s. Part 1 considers the aftermath of war through to depression in the early 1930s. 

Topics will include a look at the hopes for achieving world peace through the League of Nations, the onset of global economic crisis, the Soviet experiment and its influences, the coming of Fascism in Europe and Asia, anti-colonial nationalist movements, cultural modernism, democratic institutions and challenges to them. 

We will consider ways of exploring the events and processes adopted by many modern historians who contest the familiar Western-centric narrative. By taking the themes of gender, class and race as categories of analysis we consider the role of women’s struggles, the emergence of political and cultural internationalism and the inter-connectedness of historical developments in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Course begins Wednesday 22 September or Friday 24 September 2021