Modernity and Backwardness: Late Development in Historical Context

4 credits · Undergraduate

Peoples, nations, and states endow their pasts and futures with significance through comparison. They identify trajectories of development and situate their own historical experience within larger frameworks that make national progress knowable and measurable. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many discovered that they were “late,” “backward,” or at risk of being left behind. This course traces how Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and other nations confronted these dilemmas while exploring theories—from Marxism to modernization theory—that promised to accelerate change and “turn the wheel of history.” We also examine the scholarly debates surrounding the phenomenon of lateness.