Macquarie University

MHIS217: Britain, Empire and the Making of a Globalized World, 1688-1914

Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain transformed the world. Beginning with the Glorious Revolution that ensured Protestant Ascendancy in 1688, this period witnessed a series of historical developments that established Britain's place at the head of an empire upon which the sun never set. Was this the first age of modern globalisation? This unit will consider how the British World functioned as a globilising carrier of modernity in the metropole and the colonies, and, the heated political, social and cultural contests that always characterised British imperial expansion and management. This unit will consider a number of important themes: including, how ideas of Britishness were forged by contests over the domestic and the imperial; how the expansion of British rule forged powerful links across the globe: the ways in which this global network of trade, migration and communication impacted on both British and Indigenous people; the changing patterns of British colonisation in the 18th and 19th centuries; the rise of colonial nationalism; and the ways the British World was shaped by both the local and global in this period. This unit will pay close attention to colonisation in Australia in context of the ever-changing British World to consider how our understanding of the colonial might be transformed by a consideration of a wider, globalising history.

Timetable Information

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