Semester:
Offered:
Rosie Bsheer (Department of History)
First-Year Seminar 72Z 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
What is the relationship between oil and empire? How has control over oil—the single most important commodity in the world—shaped the nature of power, politics, and environmental and social life in the twentieth century? How have different disciplines contributed to and at times undermined a critical understanding of oil politics? This interactive seminar will address these and other questions by examining the political, social, material and cultural history of oil. Given the centrality of oil to modern life, control over this prized resource has resulted in a complex and often violent history. We will thus look at the ways in which the political economy of oil has shaped the rise and fall of empires, the fate of nation-states, the making of the economy, the nature of class, gender, and racial discrimination, and the production of historical knowledge and the built urban environment. By moving between primary source documents and films, novels, multi-disciplinary scholarly analyses, in-class discussions, and written assignments, students will learn to be principal investigators and thereby sharpen their own critical interpretive abilities. While this seminar will address global trends and processes, the primary focus will be on the Middle East.