Maker of the Modern World? Britain since 1750

4 credits · Undergraduate

Was Britain the maker of the modern world? This small, cold, and wet island was the first to develop representative politics, to industrialize, to urbanize, and to infamously build a global empire. And yet it was unable to rid itself of ancient institutions like the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the established church. The class explores this paradox by tracing the rise, fall and reinvention of a ‘liberal’ political economy that laid out how markets, governments, empires, and even people, should work. It shows how people of color, as subjects of slavery and imperialism, as well as residents of Britain, were integral to this story. It concludes Britain did not make the modern world, the world helped make Britain modern.