Tutor: Anna Ross (A.Ross.2@warwick.ac.uk)

This seminar will give students a broad introduction to the place of cities in global history. It will focus on what has come to be termed 'global urban history', and in particular, those historians writing on the role of cities in making worlds of global-political solidarity.

Questions:

• Do cities have a place in global history?
• How and why did new visions of world order emerge in particular cities?
• What role did individuals, associations, and states play in facilitating or shutting down urban spaces with globalist inflections?
• Why do we see some such projects succeed and others fail?
• How do the pluralised origins of such activities bring into question potentially teleological narratives?

Key Readings:

• Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), introduction, chapter 4, and chapter 5. (library has an ebook)
• Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press: California, 2015), introduction and chapter 3. (library has an ebook)
• David Motadel, ‘The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire.’ American Historical Review 124 (2019): 843-77. (see JSTOR)

Further Readings:

• Michael Goebel, 'Spokesmen, Spies, and Spouses: Anticolonialism, Surveillance, and Intimacy in Interwar France.'Journal of Modern History 91, no. 2 (2019).
• Michael Goebel,'"The Capital of the Men Without a Country": Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris.' The American Historical Review 121, no. 5 (2016): 1444–1467.
• Michael Goebel, 'Geopolitics, Transnational Solidarity, or Diaspora Nationalism? The Global Career of M.N. Roy, 1915–1930.' European Review of History 21, no. 4 (2015): 485–499.
• Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press: California, 2015).
• https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-spaces-black-modernism-london-1919-39 
• Gemma Romain, 'Ronald Moody: Archival explorations of a Black Jamaican artist in interwar London.' Media Diversified (2015).
• Gemma Romain, 'Back Modernisms: queer black lives between the wars.' Diva Magazine (2015)
• Jeffry James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford: OUP, 2016)