UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

This course considers the ways that disparate parts of the world were interconnected and interdependent before the modern era. Through studies of the growth of civilizations across the continents, the rise of world religions, the development and later transformations of the silk roads, and the early modern colonial projects of Europe, student swill have opportunities to consider how religion, language, empire, and trade created common spaces for peoples from diverse regions of the world. Topics range from early urbanization in Egypt and Mexico, to the Islamic empire, the Asian world system. Europe's shift from periphery to core, the civilizations of the Americas, and the rise of the African slave trade in the trans-Atlantic context.