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Language of Instruction
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English
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Level of Course Unit
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Bachelor's Degree
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Department / Program
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Political Science and International Relations
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Type of Program
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Formal Education
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Type of Course Unit
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Compulsory
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Course Delivery Method
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Face To Face
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Objectives of the Course
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Humanities are seen through various forms and types by considering the developments within the historical time frame. The course will survey civilizations and cultural landscapes. Most importantly, by the end of the course, it will be expected that students who take this course look at this “world process” critically, especially on the issue of the rise of the West.
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Course Content
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This course aims to introduce the political and cultural dimensions of world history by examining the main events and concepts ranging from the earliest civilizations to the globalized world we live in. Pursuing this aim, homo sapiens will be scrutinised shortly as the first “successful” humankind and their survival with the environment, nature, and animals. After focusing on the agricultural revolutions/riverine cultures, the course will continue with a particular focus on the organization capacity of human beings, which has changed the “fortune” of the world. Afro-Eurasia civilizations founded in the most fertile regions turned this opportunity into good account and established cities and territories, which turned into dynasties, monarchies or empires especially in Iran, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. In this scope, the emergency of ceremonial rituals and religions accompanied human beings’ immense spreading, struggles, and living experiences. At the dawn of the “shrinking” of the Afro-Eurasia world, with his vast military power, Alexander the Great led Hellenistic Culture to sweep the globe approximately between 350-250 BCE. Trade and trade ways opened up new encountering forms, making the world “inside out”. From around 1000 CE, the world was “becoming world”. People from distant regions often borrowed other cultures' ideas, tools, and norms. The era of significant population growth, rising wealth, and social transformation propelled the world’s cultures into heightened cross-cultural contact. But it was equally an age of conflict, carnage, and colonization, in which warfare fractured old states and created militarized new ones. Universal religions such as Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism serviced for the states to maintain their reign over their people. Mongol campaigns and conquests at these times brought Afro-Eurasian worlds together as never before. Mongols’ conquests did not just provide political and geographical change but also opened out diseases. Afro-Eurasian societies and states recovered from the Mongols and the Black Death with greater political and economic powers than before. The Islamic states, the Chinese Ming Empire, and the emerging monarchies in Europe were all founded on military prowess and keen to ensure stable hierarchies and secure borders and, if possible, to expand their domains. The conquest of the Americas in 1492 and the rise of the “gunpowder empires” around the middle of the millennium further deepened the process of “becoming the world”. The dominant political and economic position of the Ming, Qing, Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman Empires was replaced with that of the ‘West’ around the end of the 18th century. Attaining unprecedented degrees of enslavement and colonialism from the 16th century onward, Western colonialism occupies a prominent place in both the history and historiography of the modern world.
within the historical time frame. The course will survey civilizations and cultural landscape.
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Course Methods and Techniques
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- Lecture - Discussion based lecture - Homework - Fieldwork (Visit to Zeugma Mosaic Museum)
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Prerequisites and co-requisities
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None
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Course Coordinator
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None
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Name of Lecturers
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Asist Prof.Dr. Yaman KEPENÇ
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Assistants
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None
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Work Placement(s)
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No
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Recommended or Required Reading
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Resources
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Lerner, Meacham and Burns. (1994). Western Civilizations, Their History and Their Culture, New York: Norton. Kissinger. (2014). World Order, London, Penguin.
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