HIS 377 - History of Now: Capitalism & Crisis

Have you heard the terms “late capitalism”, or “neoliberal capital” and wondered what they meant exactly, even as you perhaps felt you had a vague sense of their meaning in your own life? In this class, we make sense of the historical development of globalizing forces from the nineteenth century through to the present in order to understand the racial, economic and political logics of capitalism. Students will learn to analyze that which they intuitively know: that capitalism is not merely an economic system, but a social form that penetrates the most intimate realms of our lives. Using crisis as a lens allows us to connect the granular experience of ordinary folks to large scale global power shifts and the abstract realm of finance. It allows us to illuminate the deep structures of history.

A key theme running through the way we follow this connected human history will be to observe the ways in which established grand narratives privilege or center European/Western experiences even if they’re talking about the connections between far flung corners of the globe. One of our main tasks will be to correct this sometimes overt, and very often implicit, bias even as we track how crises have historically shaped and been shaped by the dynamics of globalization, from black sharecroppers in Reconstruction era U.S. to cotton farmer in India and Egypt in the 1890s, to the age of U.S. hegemony in the 20th century and the race for a new global primacy in the post-Covid era.

Satisfies History major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement.
Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.