Description: This course offers a broad historical survey which aims at introducing students to the major developments in world history, in a period from the late eighteenth century to the present during which the world became increasingly interdependent. The course will adopt a comparative approach where possible and will be particularly concerned with the theme of globalisation. This course does not aim to be a comprehensive survey of all aspects of the history of the modern world, but its range allows students to acquaint themselves with important developments in the areas of culture, religion, politics, society and the world economy.
Description: This course explores the history of Hong Kong since the early 1800s from several angles: British imperial history, Chinese history, world history, and as a place with its own identity. Topics include: the opium wars, law and the administration of justice, gender and colonialism, Hong Kong and Chinese nationalism, the Japanese occupation, the 1967 disturbances, Hong Kong identity, the fight against corruption, the Sino-British negotiations and the retrocession to Chinese sovereignty, and developments since 1997. The goals of the course are to familiarize students with the history of Hong Kong, introduce the ways in which historians have approached this history, explore how Hong Kong’s past has shaped its present, and help students learn to read and write analytically. No previous knowledge of history or Hong Kong is required.
Description: In recent years legal history has emerged as a thriving field, drawing on ideas from across disciplines to better understand the relationship between legal institutions and practices and historical change over time. Exploring the ways in which the development of law shaped societies across the world in the early-modern and modern period, this course will offer students a broad introduction into this history. We will examine a wide range of questions that touch on law’s relationship to topics of fundamental historical importance, including political movements, gender and race relations, economic change, colonialism and imperialism, and religion and tradition. Taking a global and comparative approach to these themes the course will take case-studies from across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. No previous knowledge of legal history is required.
Description: In this course, we will explore the history of modern East Asia, with a particular focus on China, Japan and Korea, from around 1800 to the present. We will not simply study the histories of individual countries but also pay attention to how countries and regions within East Asia interacted and influenced each other. This course will take students from the turn of the 19th century through the arrival of Western imperialism, and from the establishment of the treaty port system to the Japanese occupation of much of East Asia during World War II and the historical development of the region during the Cold War. The course aims to provide students with a solid understanding of the historical development of modern East Asia, which, in turn, will allow students to better comprehend current developments, interactions and conflicts in the region.
Description: This course continues the survey of United States history begun in The United States before 1900, though it can be taken separately. It traces the United States’ response to its adjustment from an agrarian, small-scale society to a large-scale, urban, industrialized nation, characterized by large organizations. Concurrently, it covers the development into a global power with interests throughout the world.
Description: This course looks at the manner in which film has portrayed events in history, considering the degree to which film can enhance or be detrimental to our understanding of history. Students may expect to gain some appreciation, not just of the films themselves, but of the degree to which any movie is the product of a certain historical period and reflect its values and preoccupations. This course should be particularly enlightening to students who are taking other United States history courses and American Studies majors.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2070: Stories of Self: History through Autobiography
Description: Who has felt authorised to narrate their life history and what has compelled them to tell explanatory stories that make sense of their lives? How accurate is it to call autobiography the history of the self? Do we encounter other histories or selves in autobiography? What is the history of autobiography and how do we read it? Historians reading autobiography for documentary evidence of the past and endeavouring to write about it objectively will find that their task is complicated by the autobiographer’s subjective and often highly creative engagement with memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency. This course is intended for students who wish to explore the interdisciplinary links between autobiography, history, literature, and personal narrative, and to acquire strategic theories and cultural understanding for reading these texts.
Description: This course examines the history of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. The British Empire once spanned so much of the globe that it is impossible to understand the history of the modern world (including Hong Kong) without considering the role of British colonialism and imperialism. Topics include: the cultural and material foundations and the economic, political, and social consequences of empire; the relationship between metropole and periphery; collaboration and resistance; the dynamics of race, gender, and class; the relationship between empire and art; new national and local identities; decolonization, and independence; and the legacies of empire. The goals of the course are to familiarize students with the history of the British Empire; introduce them to the ways in which historians have approached this history; and help them learn to read and write analytically.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2107: The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1931–1952
Description: Few events in the modern history of Asia and the Pacific have been as important or as transformative as the Second World War. This course explores the far-reaching effects that this conflict had on the state, society, and individuals in, and between Japan, China, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British and French Empires. Importantly, this course will examine how this conflict helped change war—conceptually and in real terms—from a narrowly defined engagement between military forces to one that encompassed a ‘total experience’ involving the mobilization of virtually all segments of society. In this course we will also trace the interconnectedness between the transformation of war and the development of new technology, changed concepts of morality, ‘just war,’ and altered perceptions concerning the relationship between the state and society, the soldier and the civilian. Finally, this course will help students understand more fully how and why this war, and the numerous acts of barbarism that defined it, still influence relations today on personal, national, and international levels in Asia and the Pacific.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2118: Chinese and Americans: A Cultural and International History
Description: China and the United States are two very important nations in the world today. Their interactions and relations have had deep impact on both Chinese and American lives and the rest of the world. This course will explore Sino-American relations in the last several hundred years with special focus on their shared values and experiences and emphasize both diplomatic and people-people relations from cultural and international history perspectives.
Description: This course examines Qing China’s frontier and foreign relations from the beginning to the end of the dynasty, addressing specific administrative policies, their ideological and ritual background, and their wider political, military, and economic context. Particular attention is paid to local variations on individual Qing frontiers in response to differences in economic and trade conditions, terrain, and prevailing religious and cultural norms.
Description: This course traces the rise and fall of the German Empire from its inception after the Franco-German War of 1870/71 to its demise, in defeat and revolution, in 1918. It examines crucial moments in the evolution of high politics, economy and society, and the actors explaining their meaning and significance for Germany, Europe, and the world. Figures such as the Empire’s founder Bismarck, the three emperors Wilhelm I, Friedrich III, and Wilhelm II, the imperial chancellors, and the militaries will be studied, and major ideologies such as conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and imperialism will be examined. A global and transnational perspective will be employed when studying the forces of unification, industrialisation, colonisation, and militarisation as they combined to propel the German Empire from new nation to European major power which found itself militarily defeated at the end of the First World War.
Description: This course will examine the Second World War in Europe and the Mediterranean. In exploring its significance the focus will be on international relations and military affairs.
Description: The course surveys the history of Germany’s first republic named after the national assembly that convened in Weimar in 1919 and drew up a new constitution after the German Empire had been defeated at the end of the First World War. The Weimar Republic was influenced by changing parliamentary majorities but democracy was working. Ensuing economic recovery led to political pacification. With regard to the arts, science and culture some sections of the German people were for a short time able to refer to the “golden Twenties”. It was a period characterised by an intense but brief flowering, since the fall of the Republic could already be foreseen in the great global economic crisis of 1929. As a result of the crisis, Hitler’s national-socialist movement became the strongest political force in Germany. However, the turbulent fourteen years of the Weimar Republic were not only a desperate and grudging experiment in democracy but also offered a panoply of world-wide recognised political, economic, social, and cultural models, some of which blended imperceptibly into the Nazi ideology while others survived until nowadays.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2154: American Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth Century
Instructor: Otis Edwards
Description: This course will examine the development of American capitalism, with a particular focus on the period from American independence in the 1780s until the First World War. In this period, the United States grew from an Atlantic outpost to a major figure in a globalizing economy. This period saw the rise of wage labor, the development of a market society, the emergence of corporations, the construction of railroad networks, and the innovation of new financial and legal instruments. We will examine the reasons for and effects of these developments, examining the culture as well as the economy of capitalism. Writers ranging from popular pamphleteers to prominent novelists registered and commented on these changes, and we will look at how the development of capitalism changed family structures and ideas about the self. Finally, we will consider capitalism as a historiographical as well as a historical phenomenon, and consider why historians today are drawn to this field.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2158: Women in Hong Kong History: Private Lives and Public Voices
Description: This course revisits Hong Kong’s multifaceted history from a thematic approach with women as the focus of inquiry. Embedded in the very fabric of Hong Kong society, women’s narratives, though often being left out in history writing, have documented the encounters of cultures, the politics of patriarchy and colonial rule, and the construction of class differences, gender inequality and cultural identities in social, political and economic changes. Drawing from a wide range of sources, this course examines women’s lives and experiences in colonial Hong Kong under the themes of sex, marriage and family; female education; women at work; and philanthropy and social activism. The course also discusses the role of narrative in historical understanding, the use of gender as a category of historical analysis, and the link of the personal to social change in writing Hong Kong’s history.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2161: Making Race
Instructor: Matthew Wong Foreman
Description: This course examines the history of race and race-making in a global context. We begin by framing theories of race, examining race as a social construct and understanding how race intersects with other structures of social difference such as gender and class. We then examine histories of race-making at several sites: race and the body (scientific racism, reproduction, and slavery), race and “civilization” (colonialism and orientalism), race and culture (identity and consumables), race and space (borders and segregation), and race and forgetting (privilege and memory). We may consider how race takes root in hair and ramen, soap and tap dancing, sex and policing. By the end of the course, students will understand how race travels across oceans and borders, but also how race is made every day, close to home.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2178: Trials of History: The Courtroom from Historical Perspective
Description: The courtroom is a physical location where judges and juries sit to hear cases and deliver justice. It is also a site of intrigue, drama and controversy, and as this course will examine, a tremendously rich and important source of history. Taking a transnational and comparative perspective, this course will examine how the trial came into being in its modern form. The course will first examine how various components of the trial developed over time. Comparing these developments in different places and at different times, case-studies will include the history of the judge, the jury, the professional lawyer, and the expert witness. The course will then move through a series of courtroom trials that range from everyday cases that received almost no attention in their time, to high-profile cases involving political leaders and internationally famous celebrities. Placing these trials in their wider political, social and cultural context, the course will encourage students to consider the place of law in history, and history in law.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2181: A Sea of Stuff: Commerce and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean, 1500-2000
Description: This course will explore and analyze commercial linkages across the Indian Ocean region from the early modern period to the present day. We will examine the forces shaping commerce in the region and track their fundamental transformations by paying close attention to particular commodities and the networks within which they circulated. Students will be introduced to the field of commodity history and invited to apply its insights to illuminate wider economic processes. Starting with a focus on pepper and other spices that brought European conquerors to Asian shores, we will turn our attention to commodities like tea, opium and cotton that have shaped the modern world before ending with a look at fossil fuels, which power the contemporary world economy on the one hand while simultaneously posing a huge threat to it on the other. Analyzing why trade in each of these commodities became particularly lucrative at different historical moments, will allow us to interrogate and better comprehend economic systems like mercantilism and capitalism and to assess their relationship with colonial expansion.
Description: In 1910, 18% of the world’s Christians were in the Global South. One century later, this number has exploded to 61%, with one fifth in Asia and the Pacific. How and why did this astronomical increase take place? This course surveys the history of Christianity in Asia from the early modern period to the present, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while covering China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and others. Over a broad chronology, this course highlights how Asian Christianities were shaped and reshaped within specific regional contexts and in parallel with changes in Christianity worldwide. Students will explore the interactions between missionaries and indigenous Christians, the various expressions of Christianity, and context-specific constraints such as imperialism, nationalism, and broader interreligious settings. Using both primary and secondary sources, this course illustrates the shape of Asian Christianity from past to present, the thorny nature of religious encounter, and its surprising outcomes in World History.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2203: The Philippines and the Asia-Pacific World
Description: The course examines the development of Philippine society from the precolonial beginnings and the onset of Spanish colonization (mid-1500s) to the second EDSA People Power Revolution in 2002. By situating the Philippines within the connections and movements of Asia and the trans-Pacific world, this course investigates Philippine culture and society as a product of internal and external contexts, contestations, and transformations. Significant topics include: colonization, ilustrado nationalism, modernization and urbanization, reform and resistance, migrant diaspora, neocolonialism, and conjugal dictatorship. The course also seeks to compare and contrast the Philippines with the development of colonial Hong Kong to demonstrate similarities and differences of colonial rule, the connections between them, and the trajectories of these relationships.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2207: Printer, Typesetter, Reader, Scribe: A Global History of Books
Description: Picture a book. Do you think of an e-reader and digital text on a screen? Or do you think of words printed on a physical page? Does a book have to be bound? What about a scroll, a tablet, or a handful of written pages? How about your phone? What makes any of these “a book”? In this class we’ll explore what books are today, and what they have been in the past. We’ll look at how different technologies have shaped the material forms in which texts have been inscribed, considering developments from the papyrus scroll to born-digital books. Above all, we’ll focus on the physical form of the book, paying close attention to what different material forms can tell us about how readers have used books, changing ideas of authorship, the place of books in society, and the impact (or lack thereof) of printing. By examining books in this way, you’ll gain an understanding of how cultures have shaped what we think of when we think of “books” — and how cultures have been shaped in turn. This course includes hands-on examination of books and manuscripts both in HKU’s Special Collections and digitally in other archives. You’ll learn to analyze a book through a semester-long “Pet Book” project and build on our in-class discussions of books as objects, vehicles for text, and social forces through a final digital essay of your design. Though this class will focus on early books in Western Europe and East Asia, we will also consider the textual cultures of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Students who are interested in using books for future research projects will learn new skills through which to approach books as material objects, and all students will gain a deeper appreciation of the textual world around them.
Description: This course applies perspectives from Performance Studies to the study of history. Whether we are looking at historical actors or those who interpret their actions for future generations, performance offers a creative and critical lens through which to engage with the past. Throughout the term we will explore how individuals who live in different times and places can be likened to performers on a stage. Concurrently, we will interrogate how historians can also be likened to performers as they gather evidence and narrate the past. Performance Studies provides a critical lens to explore answers to questions such as: Whose voices are heard and archived? How do ideas of performance illuminate the intersections of history with identities and institutions? What are the racialized, gendered, and cultural performances that shape historical memory, structures, and societies? We will rethink what it means to perform, explore why performative processes matter, question how historical memory connects with performances of power, challenge binary framings, and complicate dominant narratives. With a performance based approach, students will explore a broad range of performances including but not limited to films, social media, dance and theater, visual art, political events, protest, and everyday happenings.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2214: Death and the Dead in Modern History, 1800–2000
Description: This course explores how attitudes towards death and management of the dead transformed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How did scientific-medical development, secularisation, imperial expansion, rise of nationalism and rapid urbanisation affect how societies and individuals viewed death and treated the dead? Have death and the dead become increasingly invisible in the modern age? Do the dead still hold sacred power over us? To study such transformations on a global scale, this course looks into, compares and sees linkages of case studies from Asia, Europe and Latin America. It also guides students to uncover emotions, attitudes and cultural norms of people in the past from source materials.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2215: Global Environmental History: From Columbus to the Climate Crisis
Description: This course will introduce students to the relatively new but increasingly important field of environmental history. After looking at how the field has evolved over the last few decades, during a time of increasing environmental instability, this course will examine the central themes that have dominated this field and track how these have changed over time. In the process, this course will highlight the ways in which environmental historians have transformed the discipline of history and unsettled traditional ideas about our relationship with the world around us. Reading key texts in the field alongside primary documents, we will explore these new approaches pioneered by environmental historians and assess their importance for the contemporary world. At a time when the climate crisis has emerged as one of the most important problems confronting our planet, this course will examine the past, present and future of environmental change and probe the forces shaping them.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2216: History of European Socialism, 1850–2000
Description: This course explores the historical development of socialism in Europe from the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century, examining its origins, evolution, and impact within diverse political, social, and economic contexts. Students will analyze the emergence of socialist ideologies as responses to industrialization and inequality, tracing their transformation across key historical milestones, including the revolutions of 1848, the rise of labor movements, the spread of Marxist theory, and the establishment of socialist states in the 20th century. The course also delves into the diversity of socialist schools of thought, highlighting their philosophical foundations and their practical applications, as well as the challenges they faced in adapting to changing political landscapes. By engaging with primary sources, historiographical debates, and case studies, students will develop an understanding of socialism’s role in shaping modern Europe and its enduring legacy in contemporary political discourse.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST2217: Modern Transformations: Nature and Technology in Asian History
Description: This course will interrogate the role of natural and technological transformations in the making of Modern Asia. How has the environment been understood and transformed in Asia over the past five centuries? And how have these transformations intersected with technological developments during this time? We will address these questions by exploring the complex relationship between the “natural” world and built environments in the region. By bringing new scholarship on the environment in conversation with insights from the emerging field of STS, this course will invite students to consider how even the most pristine landscapes have been transformed by the human hand, and how our grandest infrastructural projects bear the imprint of their physical environment. Through the course we will ask whether Asia’s forests have been shaped any less by human activity than its dams, and whether the region’s biggest cities have really liberated themselves from their environments.
Description: This course offers an overview of the major themes in Korean history from the fall of the first-generation states to the turn of the nineteenth century. Topics include the challenges of establishing centralised rule, the dynamics between the central state and local societies, diplomatic relations, and the role of philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts. Particular emphasis will be given to the ways that Japanese colonialism, Cold War politics, globalisation, the Korean Wave, and South Korea’s transformation into an advanced digital society have shaped, and continue to shape, contemporary understandings of Korea’s medieval and early modern past. All readings are provided in English. In addition, students will learn to navigate the wealth of digitised primary sources available to historians of premodern Korea with the aid of digital and artificial intelligence tools.
Description: The aim of this intensive reading course is to provide an opportunity for students to pursue a specialized topic of study with a faculty member. Throughout the semester, the student and teacher will consult regularly on the direction of the readings and on the paper or papers (not to exceed 5,000 words) that will demonstrate the student’s understanding of the material. This course cannot normally be taken before the fifth semester of candidature and is subject to approval. Students wishing to take this course should consult with a teacher who is willing to supervise the reading project before enrolling.
Description: This course will focus on the life, ideas and legacies of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. One of the most significant, controversial, and complicated political actors in modern history, the course will give students an opportunity to think critically about his philosophy of non-violence, his critique of modernity, and his opposition to colonial rule. The course will be divided into three modules. The first module will examine Gandhi before his national and international prominence, focusing upon his childhood in India, his legal training in Britain, and his turn towards political activism in South Africa. The second module will examine Gandhian political thought and action in the context of India’s rising nationalist movement and through to his assassination in 1948. The final module will trace the global legacy of Gandhian ideas in non-violent movements across the world, spanning South Africa, Myanmar, the United States of America, and Hong Kong.
Description: This course aims to acquaint students with some of the theoretical and practical considerations which underlie the study and writing of history by considering the development of the discipline of history from its beginnings in the ancient world through to the postmodernist critique. The course is especially recommended to those who wish to pursue history at the postgraduate level. All students taking HIST4017. Dissertation elective (capstone experience) are required to take The theory and practice of history (capstone experience).
Description: This is a research course which requires submission of an extended written dissertation. All students taking the Dissertation elective are required to take HIST4015. The theory and practice of history (capstone experience).
Description: Students who wish to undertake a research project on a specialized historical topic in either semester of their final year of study may enroll in this course with the approval of the Head of the School of Humanities on the recommendation of the departmental Undergraduate Coordinator. The course aims at providing an opportunity for intensive research leading to the production of a long essay (not exceeding 7,000 words) which will be supervised by a faculty member with expertise in the chosen area of study.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST4028: History without Borders: Special Field Project
Description: Enrolment in this special course is extended to students majoring in History by invitation, and on a performance-related basis. For those students invited to apply for enrolment this exclusive capstone course will provide an opportunity to design their own field project in a subject related to the History discipline. It will also provide funding to support field work undertaken across geographical, political and cultural borders, in Hong Kong and/or overseas. The course thus provides History majors with a unique, funded opportunity to design, plan and make their own creative contribution to historical knowledge.
Description: Museums have become one of the most popular ways of telling history. Many scholars argue that museums are not neutral places; rather, they are often used for a wide range of strategic purposes: regulating social behavior, building citizenship and national identity, and expanding state power. But museums also face a variety of constraints and challenges: culture, money, politics, physical space, locating and selecting appropriate artifacts, and forming narratives. This course considers these issues by looking at history museums and heritage preservation in Hong Kong. The goals of the course are to familiarize students with a range of theoretical approaches to museum studies; explore the ways in which museums and heritage preservation can be used to further certain political, cultural, and commercial agendas; and help students learn to write an analytical research essay based on readings and museum fieldwork.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST4035: History Applied: Internship in Historical Studies
Description: This capstone course allows students to apply historical thinking in the community. Under the supervision of the course coordinator students select from among a wide variety of partner institutions, organizations, associations, businesses and others, and embark upon the collaborative challenge of uncovering their past. Instead of simply requiring students to work for specified hours at ‘historical sites’ (museums, archives, etc.) the course requires them to use the research techniques and methodological approaches they have learned in the discipline to construct and present a history of their selected community partners. They build preparatory research into polished consultancy papers detailing key findings about the partner, their development over time, and the passions and preoccupations of the individuals who have played an especially prominent role in their development. The course provides History students’ with a unique opportunity to design, plan and present creative contributions to historical knowledge and to engage with community members in discussions about the value and potential uses of history in the present. During the internship, students prepare and present their research-based consultancy paper. They also write a journal critically detailing their own initial expectations and reflecting upon the actual experience of conducting research, communicating their findings and putting history to use.
Description: In 1949 Albert Einstein told his friend, chemist Alfred Werner, “I don’t know [what weapons will be used in World War III], but I can tell you what they’ll use in the fourth – rocks!” This course explores the weapons that convinced Einstein and others that WWIII would be a civilization-as-we-know-it ending event. What were those weapons and the technologies behind them? How, where and why were they developed, tested, deployed, used, stolen and reproduced? Why were these weapons almost used in 1962 and 1983 and what kept humanity from crossing the Rubicon of annihilation then, and at other times? When has the limitation of such weapons proven effective or failed and why? Seminar participants will explore these questions as well as examine the history of post-nuclear apocalypse imaginary as expressed through film and writings to better understand how technological developments and more accurate assessments of “the end” and “the aftermath” shaped popular culture and society.
Assessment: 100% coursework.
HIST4037: Automating the Past: Artificial Intelligence and the Historian’s Craft
Description: This course offers an accessible introduction to the careful and effective uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in automating parts of a historian’s research workflow. Topics include archival management, semantic search, prompt design, and chain-of-thought reasoning. Students will learn how to pretrain or fine-tune transformer-based language and multimodal models tailored for their individual capstone projects, as well as critically reflect on the role of AI in historical inquiry. No programming experience is required.
