Course Description
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.
Athena Title
Food as Power in World History
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in HIST 4395, HIST 6395
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will be able to understand civil logistics, and its relationship to economics through a geographical lens.
- Students will be able to account for the growth and expansion of empires as wars over foodways.
- Students will be able to understand the neuroscience of addiction, and its relationship to the Atlantic Slave Trade.
- Students will be able to examine how food insecurity has contributed to revolution.
Topical Outline
- 1. Kawkaw & the Classic Maya period, 250-900
- 2. Sugar: staple of Persia, the Caliphate & the Serene Republics
- 3. Slavery & shipbuilding: Portugal, the Netherlands, & Britain
- 4. Tropical Drugs & the Birth of Biological Sciences
- 5. Tobacco, slavery, and the American Revolution
- 6. Coffee & Imperial Wars in the Caribbean & Africa
- 7. Phytophthora Infestans & the birth of Free Trade
- 8. Crimean War & American Civil War
- 10. Britain’s Flour Empire: Argentina, Canada, & Australia
- 11. Drugs and the Scramble for Empire post-1865
- 12. World War I: A War over Bread
- 13. Revolutions & Bread: Russian Revolution & Arab Spring
- 14. Applying food and war to contemporary issues
