This course explores food and drug delivery systems and the rise of empire. Topics include slave trade goods (cocoa, sugar, coffee, tobacco) and the European scientific renaissance, modern European states, French Revolution, World War I, and the Arab Spring.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will create a Power point presentation of a week’s course readings, which will include discussion of how to apply course materials in either applied history or public history. Graduate students will do additional historiographical readings for each week and attend a separate one-hour graduate discussion every third week. Graduate students will take the midterm and final exams and do a longer graduate research paper and write a ten-page annotated bibliography in a subtopic of their choice.
Athena Title
Food & Power in World History
Undergraduate Pre or Corequisite
One course in HIST or POLS or INTL or SOWK or FDNS or FDST or FISH or INTB or ECON or PADP or WMST or third- or fourth-year student standing
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will have learned to explain how civil logistics help us understand the history of empires.
Students will have learned to understand the role of addiction in the development of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Students will have learned to debate the relationship between Capitalism and Slavery.
Students will have learned to explain causes of the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and World War I.
Students will have learned to understand how food insecurity has contributed to revolution.
Topical Outline
Kawkaw & the Classic Maya period, 250-900
Sugar: staple of Persia, the Caliphate & the Serene Republics
3Slavery & shipbuilding: Portugal, the Netherlands, & Britain
Tropical Drugs & the Birth of Biological Sciences
Tobacco, slavery, and the American Revolution
Coffee & Imperial Wars in the Caribbean & Africa
Phytophthora Infestans & the birth of Free Trade
Crimean War & American Civil War
Food & Logistics in the creation of the Nation-State
Britain’s Flour Empire: Argentina, Canada, & Australia
Drugs and the Scramble for Empire post-1865
World War I: A War over Bread
Revolutions & Bread: Russian Revolution & Arab Spring
Applying food, drugs and war to contemporary issues
