My name is Jeremy Adelman and I am a

professor of history at Princeton

University. And I'd like to welcome you to
this survey of world history since 1300.
This course will cover seven hundred years of global
history up to the present.
And it brings together many themes that
I've been thinking about for the last
quarter century, experiences that I've had
living globalization as a Canadian
educated in Britain, living many years in
different parts of Latin America and
thinking about the ways in which societies
of the world have been affecting each other,
Shaping each other,
Informing each other,
Sometimes involuntarily, over very long
periods of time.
Most historical courses that one takes
tend to focus on an individual society or
an individual nation or region.
What we're going to try to do here, and in
a sense what I've been trying to do for
the last 25 years or so of my life, is to
pull the lens back.
And in this, a history of the world since
1300, going to challenge us in three ways.
The first is to think historically.
How in a sense in other times and other
places people organized themselves in ways
that don't resemble how we live now, but
also in response to external pressures and
impulses.
In a sense, our globalization has
precedence, but they don't look like our
model of globalization.
So thinking historically, asks us to think
about other ways in which societies in
other times and places have experienced
their models of globalization.
Secondly, I am going to challenge us to
think, comparatively, to think about the
ways in which different societies
responded to global pressures.
Not all of them were responding in the
same ways and understanding the differences
between an empire and a republic,
A communist regime and a capitalist
regime, all of them locked into global
dynamics, how they responded differently,
Is going to be very important for
shaping the course of global history
itself.
Economies are not always organized the
same way.
Societies don't always govern themselves
by the same social norms, and so we have
to think about alternative tracks, and so
comparative thinking is extremely
important.
And the third is to think about the actual
forces that bring people together and
drive them apart as they cross national
and regional boundaries.
These forces are often invisible.
We're going to talk a lot about
environmental factors and they way they
shaped global history.
But they're also visible.
From weapons to books and images,
And actually let me say in parenthesis,
we're going to look at a lot of images and
I want you to think about the role that
images, photographs, paintings, covers of
books.
Mobilize our feelings and shape global
public opinion in there for the course of
global events.
All of these are going to be extremely
important.
And they crisscross national boundaries,
and pull us together and drive us apart at
the same time.
And we have to think about these multiple
kinds of forces.
I think, nowadays, a lot of us think of
globalization in purely economic terms.
Their it's almost synonymous.
Globalization means economic trade across
borders.
And I want to, one of the goals I have,
just as a foot note here, is to illuminate
all of the forces in globalization from
epi, from epidemics to culture as well as
economic forces.
In a sense the anchor of the course is
what I am going to do right here.
It's to give you lectures that will last
for approximately an hour.
These lectures are interpretive.
There will be lots of facts and dates and
names and places and so forth, but my goal
in the lectures is to give you
over-arching fanatic ways of pulling the
variety of details about the world
together.
Emphasizing the themes of this particular
lecture.
And it maybe helpful for you, as I pass
very quickly over the Russian Revolution,
or the role of the Spanish in the conquest
of the Americas, or the ways in which the
British colonize India, I will be, I have
to be, very synoptic.
It, it's just going to be impossible to do
700 years of planetary history in 24 hours
without glossing over a lot of detail.
And for that reason,
I'm going to urge you to do some reading
on the sides and I'll talk about the
readings in a moment.
But the lectures are interpretive and
analytical.
Inside them, we've broken the lectures up
an actual we've broken the lectures up
into variety of segments which have
themselves titles which indicate key
themes of those segments often four or
five.
I'm going to bring Valeria Lopes Faduel
who is helping in the design of this
course into the picture here because
Valeria has been working hard at breaking
the course into, breaking the lectures
into different segments and, and composing
something that is going to punctuate each
one of the segments, which are these
quizzes.
Could you describe those quizzes?
The quizzes are a mixture of remember
facts and also of analyzing the materials
in the lectures.
So, they will ask you think about these
about these themes more deeply.
Yeah.
It, it's, it really, in a sense to help
the people who are watching the lectures
to pause after say, fifteen minutes and
apply what they've learned.
That will help you make sense of the
material, so there are these imbedded
quizzes throughout.
And our goal is to post the week's
lectures.
There will be two lectures per week, each
one of an hour and then there are quizzes
Some, some of you make take longer on the
quizzes so it may take longer than an hour
to watch each lecture.
Those will be posted as of 600 p.m.
On Sunday evening,
And you can watch the lectures anytime
that week until we post the next two
lectures the following Sunday evening.
Along with the lectures then, are
readings.
I've recommended that you turn to a book
that was the book that I've mentioned to
you that, that I co-authored with
colleagues in the history department here,
Worlds Together, Worlds Apart.
That will give you much more information
than I can possibly offer in this course.
And it's a, it's a book that we wrote for
this course many years ago.
And of course, you're more than welcome to
go beyond that book, and to read more.
There's actual, there, each chapter of the
book has a very good bibliography as well,
very up to date on what further readings
you might want to pursue.
A third component of the course is what we
are going to call global dialogues.
That is once a week,
We will hold conversation among Princeton
students with a guest, to cover a variety
of themes.
We're doing one conversation on the
history of photo-journalism with a
colleague of mine in the, our history
department, Anne McCauley.
We're doing another one on contemporary
global politics with one of the most
distinguished international relations
experts, a man called John Ikenberry.
Two colleagues of mine, an Autonomist and
a Renaissance scholar, Molly Greene and,
And Anthony Grafton will be with us to
talk about the Renaissance in global
history.
We're going to meet once a week here at
Princeton and have a conversation with
Princeton students about global history
which we will record and then post up on
to the Coursera platform for you to see.
There will be in addition global
discussion forums for, for you to engage
and apply and discuss the material that we
were talking about.
And finally, we have designed six
assignments.
Every fortnight, every two weeks, we will
post a set of essay questions, and you
will be expected to choose one of three
essay questions and write a short essay,
750 words apiece, that will be due the
following week.
The instructions for how to write these
papers and some guidelines I will be
posting for you to read.
If this course is successful, one of my
aspirations is for you to be able to track
yourself through those six exercises.
By the end, when you write the final essay
for this course, it should be very
different from your first essay.
And that would be an index of how much
you've learned to think like a global
historian.
This is an experiment.
And I appreciate your patience and
understanding as we pull together the
component parts of the course.
I am not here, Valeria is not here, none
of us are here to grade you.
We're not offering certificates that you
can complete.
We're here to learn together.
And as you end this course, if you can
look back then and think about the
knowledge that you've gained.
When you read the world's news and think
about the global implications of what's
happening in far away places.
And you compare the papers that you've
written over the course of this semester
and see that you're looking at the globe
in a new way,
We will have achieved, our own
aspirations.
If you see a difference, then, I will have
done my small part in making world
history.