Britain 1485-Present: Britain, 1660-1851

4 credits · Undergraduate

This is a course about the history of Britain that asks why this small island nation was so central to how Europeans and others understood world history more generally. It looks at Britain as the paradigmatic venue of industrialization, class conflict or its absence, consumer culture, parliamentary democracy, religious tolerance, imperial expansion, and modernity generally. It begins with the aftermath of Europe's first revolution and ends with the first world's fair, 1851's Great Exhibition.