Contemporary Social and Political History (20086)
Degree/study: Grade in Humanites
Year: 3rd.
Term: 3rd
Number of ECTS credits: 5 credits
Hours of studi dedication: 125 hours
Teaching language or languages: catalan
Teaching Staff: Santiago Izquierdo Ballester
1. Presentation of the subject
During the last third of the 18th century the West experienced a series of changes which radically transformed its political bases (revolutions in America and France) as well as economic bases (industrial revolution). We are talking about the origins of political liberalism and capitalism, which were progressively consolidated throughout the 19th century and at the same time gave rise to the major European expansion in history.
Very often the chronological limits do not match with the frameworks which define a historical scenario. It is often said that the 20th century is a short century which starts in 1914 and ends in 1990, with the fall of the Berlin wall. However, the 19th century is said to be a long century, since it would start with the French Revolution (1789-1799) and end with the First World War (1914-1918); so it would start with a political change that would cause the society of the Ancien Régime to disappear and it would end with a bloody and violent war, which would bear witness to the dramatic contradictions and features of contemporaneous society
The 19th century was the time of full consolidation of economic capitalism and was also the protagonist of the extension of industrialisation. There were changes on agricultural structure, a consolidation of industrial transformations, which range from spinning machines or from weaving to the most advanced iron and steel industry or to the chemical industry, a revolution in transport, a complete internationalisation of the commercial exchanges, and so on.
Furthermore, all these transformations have had a great impact on social changes: the loss of power of nobility, the rise of the middle class as the ruling class and the appearance of the proletariat as the most dynamic agent in the new economic and social regime.
The political changes throughout the 19th century were also noteworthy. The French Revolution has been considered as the emblem of the fight against a political regime which was already outdated. In spite of everything, after the Napoleonic defeats, those who favoured the Restoration wanted society to go back to its prerevolutionary situation. However, it was obvious that nothing would be the same, and, with time and because of the transformations that were taking place in society, the liberal revolutions put the archaic structures to the test. It was easy to see that those structures wouldn't last. From the revolutions of 1848 onwards, once people had realised that popular uprising could have an important influence on changes, the ruling classes started to consolidate nation-states in a more conservative sense, which was more favourable for their positions. It was the moment of Italian and German unifications, the Victorian splendour in England, the consolidation of the French state and the emergence of the United States as the future world's greatest superpower.
The economic transformations and the complete consolidation of the nation-states led to imperialism and colonialism. The world started being an object which had to be distributed among the most powerful countries, which acted as if they could submit the majority of humanity to their authority just because of economic, strategic, political, racial and cultural matters.
Yet this aggressiveness turned against those who practiced it, and the assassination that took place in Sarajevo in 1914 led to an absurd rise of violence which originated the First World War. And, during the war, in an unfathomable country like Russia the tsar monarchy fell and the first socialist revolution started to be considered. The true 20th century was about to begin.
This century is defined by three major events: two World Wars of intensity and consequences that had never been seen until then; unprecedented scientific and technological improvements; and fast and profound social transformations which include the appearance of services, the loss of importance on a worldwide scale of peasantry as the most numerous social class, as well as the extension of benefits of the social welfare state to a wide strata of society, at least in the West countries.
This document aims to design and put into practice the adaptation of the subject "Contemporary Social and Political History" to the "Bolonya" study plan, which entails a new teaching paradigm in which dynamic participation among professor and students is encouraged. It should also be noted that this plan is based on continuous assessment, individual work (guided by the professor). As a desirable consequence, it is expected that both professor and students learn.
"Contemporary Social and Political History" is a subject which aims to provide students of Humanities (as well as those from other studies who take it as a non-obligatory course) with capacities in knowledge and analysis of the main social and political episodes of contemporary times (19th and 20th centuries). The study of the different units which constitute the program of the subject will enable the assimilation of great cultural, political, social and economic changes in the contemporary world, specially focused on European Western world, yet without forgetting the approximation of the main realities outside Europe.
We aim to provide students with an analytical vision of the contemporary world. This approximation is presented actively, which means that the student is not expected to summarise and repeat a historiographical discourse, but to establish connections between different aspects and work with original materials, such as texts written in the studied period.
The subject is based on the development of the general competences (which tend to potentiate the optimisation of the capacities and qualities of students) and the specific competences (knowledge on the contemporary period), through plenary sessions (in which basic knowledge is introduced), seminars focused on concrete aspects of the syllabus (in which student work is fundamental) and tutor sessions.
General aims of the year:
1. Understanding the relevance of the liberal revolutions in shaping the contemporary world.
2. Recognising the 19th century social transformations which are associated to the industrialisation: the appearance of the workers' movement and the role that every social class played in the historical dynamics of this period.
3. Analysing the role of liberalism and nationalism as a support to many political movements and the formation and consolidation of different nation-states.
4. Deducing the different causes that led to the First World War, during which the Russian Revolution (1917) took place.
5. Distinguishing the main periods and phenomena of the 20th century starting from 1918.
6. Understanding the dynamics of the interwar period, especially European fascism and the economic crisis motivated by the Great Crash of 1929.
7. Analysing the causes that led to the Second World War and being able to understand the importance of this military confrontation.
8. Analysing the Cold War and the political and social division of the world into two contrary blocks.
2. Competences to be attained
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General competences |
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Instrumental competences 1.1. Oral and written communication skills 1 Correction, clarity and precision in oral or written expositions. 2 Synthesis skills: knowing how to extract and communicate the main ideas in a text 3 Being able to justify a position with sound arguments in front of the professor and the classmates. 4 Showing analytical mind skills regarding both the interpretations in written texts and the ones expressed by the professor and the other classmates. 5 Initiative skills: knowing how to interact both in plenary and seminar sessions. 1.2. Investigating skills 6 Skills in dealing with both primary and secondary data. 7 Skills in selecting information and being able to order it. 8 Being able to give clear and ordered results 1.3. Analytical skills: 9 Capacity to interiorise and separate the constitutive elements of texts. 10 Capacity to organise the different elements of a text in a hierarchy
1.4. Initiative and capacity to complement information with basic texts 11 Bibliographic search 12 Informatics skills: internet search skills, among others. 13 Graphic skills: reading and dynamising graphics and other similar data.
Interpersonal competences -2.1.- Teamwork skills -2.2.- Capacity to inform about the development of works -2.3.- Capacity to be receptive with diversity
Systematic competences 3.1.- Learning capacity 3.2.- Capacity to integrate knowledge and methods of different disciplines 3.3.- Autonomous work predisposition 3.4.- Capacity to answer questions related to historical topics, connecting them to cultural, social, economical or political history. 3.5.- Capacity to use common sense with new knowledge. 3.6.- Capacity to put theoretical knowledge into practice |
3. Contents
Unit 1.- The origins of the contemporary world. Economic transformations.
1. The Industrial Revolution in England
Unit 2.- The origins of the contemporary world. Political transformations.
1. Independence and liberal revolution in the United States
2. The French Revolution
Unit 3.- The Restoration and bourgeois revolutions (1815-1848)
1. The Restoration
2. Bourgeois revolutions
Unit 4.- The expansion of capitalism: social and economic transformations. The workers' movement.
1. Demographic changes and the big migrations.
2. The city as the protagonist of a new world.
3. Social changes: the worker's movement.
Unit 5.- Nationalism and consolidation of bourgeois states
1. Great Britain: peak and decadency of Victorian times.
2. France during the Second French Empire and the Third French Republic.
3. Italian unification and creation of the new state.
4. German unification.
5. The United States of America: the birth of a superpower.
Unit 6.- The Great War and the Russian Revolution
1. The origins of World War I
2. The First World War and its consequences
3. The Russian Revolution
Unit 7.- The Interwar World
1. The world after World War I: the peace treaties
2. The twenties: European fascisms.
3. The United States: from the Boom to the Crack and the New Deal (1919-1941)
4. The Soviet state.
Unit 8.- The Second World War
1. Direct causes of World War II
2. The first half: a European war
3. The second half: a World war
4. The new profile of the war.
5. The inter-allied conferences.
Unit 9.- The Cold War
1. The First Cold War (1948-1962) and pacific coexistence (1962-1973)
2. The Second Cold War (1974-1991)
Unit 10.- The Social Welfare State
1. From the liberal state to the social welfare state. The cases of Europe and the United States.
1. Crisis of the social welfare state
*The full version with the sections 4. Assessment, 5. Bibliography and teaching resources, 6. Methodology and 7. Planning of activities is available in the original version.
4. Assessment
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5. Bibliography and teaching resources
5.1. Basic bibliography
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5.2. Complementary bibliography
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5.3. Teaching resources
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6. Metodology
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7. Planning of activities
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