This course engages the core assumptions, systems, and logics that give rise to the global and provides a historically and theoretically informed basis for the further study and practice of international affairs. The terms "global" and "globalization" are relative linguistic newcomers for signifying interrelated processes that span cultures and scales. Though all movement of peoples from the earliest times can be construed as having a global effect in the most literal sense, and empires have spanned distances and brought peoples into contact, the most common referent of the term globalization concerns late 20th and early 21st century socio-economic processes. Our task in this class is to explore the key trajectories of state and market formation from which our present era has emerged, replete with paradoxes and promises. We trace how the global today unfolds from the legacies of colonialism, the nation-state system, and capitalism and manifests itself in our changing relation to space and time. These legacies are our ineluctable inheritance, our daily reality, and the material we must work with and confront, especially for students and practitioners of international affairs.

This course engages the core assumptions, systems, and logics that give rise to the global and provides a historically and theoretically informed basis for the further study and practice of international affairs. The terms "global" and "globalization" are relative linguistic newcomers for signifying interrelated processes that span cultures and scales. Though all movement of peoples from the earliest times can be construed as having a global effect in the most literal sense, and empires have spanned distances and brought peoples into contact, the most common referent of the term globalization concerns late 20th and early 21st century socio-economic processes. Our task in this class is to explore the key trajectories of state and market formation from which our present era has emerged, replete with paradoxes and promises. We trace how the global today unfolds from the legacies of colonialism, the nation-state system, and capitalism and manifests itself in our changing relation to space and time. These legacies are our ineluctable inheritance, our daily reality, and the material we must work with and confront, especially for students and practitioners of international affairs.