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Crossing Borders: Passports, Bodies and the State, 1600 to Today

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
  • Convenor: Dr Brodie Waddell
  • Assessment: two 500-word source analyses (17% each) and a 2000-word essay (66%)

Module description

Why do we show documents when we travel abroad? Was this ever not the case? What did migration look like in a world without documents? How did the growth and expansion of States transform borders? What documents and materials travelled alongside people as they crossed old and new borders? In addressing these questions, and by drawing from examples across global history, we consider border crossings as a means of analysing some of the most important phenomena in historical studies, such as:

  • the creation of states and political borders
  • the expansion and collapse of empires
  • environmental consequences of migration
  • forms of population movements
  • the nature of refuge and asylum
  • technologies employed to regulate and track movement.

Indicative syllabus

  • Histories of and ideas about migration and mobility
  • Migration and mobility in ancient Mediterranean worlds
  • Columbian exchange, changing Atlantic and European environments
  • Workers on the move in early modern Europe
  • Empires, race and mobility in in colonial India? Trade and mobility in the Indian Ocean?
  • Imperial borders and movement in Ottoman worlds
  • The rise of the refugee
  • Migration, bodies and health in 20th c Europe
  • War, refuge and its legacies
  • Hard borders, biometrics and the law, before and after 2001

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • display a good knowledge of major themes in the debates about migration and state-citizen identity
  • compare and contrast several narratives of migration with reference to their distinct historical and historiographical contexts
  • handle primary sources with confidence and use them as a means of critiquing current paradigms.