HIST 4210 - Global History of Poverty

This course focuses on the global history of poverty from the ancient world to the present. The first half of the course will explore poverty as a concept, focusing on the premodern period. We will compare attitudes toward poverty and the impoverished in different historical and geographic contexts while paying particular attention to how and why these ideas have changed over time. The second half of the course will examine poverty in relation to the making of the modern world. We will study the growing inequality between world regions and discuss topics such as poverty relief efforts, empire and exploitation, and the “slow violence” of contemporary environmental crises.