1. What do you think about the new curriculum?
Google form:

2. Slicing up space and time
Making of the Modern World
Anne Gerritsen

3. Lecture outline Fit with lectures before and after? Carving up space
Slicing up time
James Gillray, famous British caricaturist. The world (1805) being carved up into spheres of influence between British PM, William Pitt the Younger and French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

4. Arguments of the lecture
Space ≠ natural environment Time ≠ chronology Time and space are concepts Time and space are constructions The way time and space are sliced up forms part of a specific discourse

5. Carving up space How do historians carve up space?
What geographical units form the basis for how we interpret the past – and where do these come from?
Are there natural containers for the past, such as nation-states, regions and continents?
Where is ‘the West’ and why?
What changes to those ‘containers’ when we ‘do’ Global History?

6. How many continents do you see?

7. Seven continents

8. Six continents

9. Six continents

10. Five continents

11. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E
Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen (eds), The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (1997).

12. What is metageography?
Every global consideration of human affairs deploys a metageography, whether acknowledged or not. By metageography we mean the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world: the often unconscious frameworks that organize studies of history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, or even natural history.
Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen (eds), The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. ix.

13. There are few, if any, ‘natural’ geographical divisions or units

14. Classical Greek divisions of space
Asia
Europe
Libya/Africa

15. Medieval European divisions of space
A T and O map or O-T or T-O map (orbis terrarum, orb or circle of the lands; with the letter T inside an O).

16. Arab divisions of space (12th century)

17. Chinese divisions of space (Ming)
Asia
Europe

18. Voyages of Christopher Columbus

19. ‘Discovering a New World’

21. World map - after Ptolemy, 1513
Claudius Ptolemy (87-150) was an Egyptian astronomer and geographer living and studying in the 1st and 2nd century CE.

22. Seven continents

23. Europe/Asia boundary

24. Ural Mountains

25. Europe/Asia boundary

26. Six continents

27. Seven continents

28. Europe’s status as a continent is linked to the history of European expansion

31. Definition of “Eurocentrism”
“I use the term ‘Eurocentrism,’ then, to indicate false claims by Europeans that their society or region is, or was in the past, or always has been and always will be, superior to other societies or regions…It is Eurocentric to make the claim that Europeans are more inventive, innovative, progressive, noble, courageous, and so on, than every other group of people; or that Europe as a place has a more healthy, productive, stimulating environment than other places”.
Jim Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), p. 4.

32. Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (1981, 1987, 2003).

33. David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are so Rich and some so Poor (1998).

34. Jim Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (2000).

35. Histories based on oceans provide an alternative to continental (or national) frameworks

36. The Indian Ocean world

37. The Atlantic world

38. Slicing up time (periodization)
Like the carving up of space, the slicing up of time into specific periods reveals an underlying agenda: the idea of ‘progress’
Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
Medieval world
Making of the Modern World
Europe in the Making
Marxist periodization

39. Marxist periodization
Historical period determined by who owns the means of production:
Slave society
Feudalism
Capitalist revolution and the emergence of the bourgeoisie
Workers’ revolution and the emergence of socialism
Similarly, a progress narrative

40. Chinese periodization
Time is cyclical
New period is heralded by a new, legitimate ruler
Mandate of heaven
Time = units of time shapes by Confucian ideology

41. Take home question:
Can you think of an alternative way of organizing the past into meaningful units?

42. Arguments of the lecture
Space ≠ natural environment Time ≠ chronology Time and space are concepts Time and space are constructions The way time and space are sliced up forms part of a specific discourse