About this degree

This MA offers advanced-level teaching by leading historians in many historical fields. On the programme, you can follow one of four pathways:

• Modern British History
• Environment, State, and Economy
• Culture, Ideas, and Identities
• Empires and Global History

Each has a compulsory core module that introduces you to the theories, methods, and debates specific to your pathway. Optional modules allow you to explore historical subjects directly related to your pathway. You can also choose elective modules freely from a wide range of options.

Environment, State and Economy

You will explore the connections between environmental, economic, and political change from a long-term perspective. We look at the relationship between humans and their environment and ask what impact this relationship had on the formation of states, the Industrial Revolution, technological development, colonialism and economic inequality. The core module will help you acquire expertise in cutting-edge debates over the Great Divergence, the Anthropocene, ecological imperialism and climate change. 

You will reflect on historical methods and sources and develop your research projects. The weekly topics will explore environmental (such as geography and natural resources), political (such as the formation of states and legal institutions) and economic (such as economic development, inequality and living standards) factors concerning each other from a macrohistorical perspective. Optional modules will allow you to specialise in specific regions, periods and themes.

Empires and Global History

You will examine and interrogate a set of overlapping concerns that have not only shaped global history, imperial history, and histories of empire but also stirred debate about the dividing line between such historiographical approaches. The first is with scale in historical analysis and the effort to move beyond the nation-state to consider empire, region, continent, the terrestrial or terraqueous globe, and even the planet as a unit of inquiry. The second is with connections between historical agents across and between these units. The last is with comparisons across space and time. Rather than being entirely pacific or underpinning ‘progress’, some connections supported the making or deepening of division, inequality, coercion, and violence.

The core module will introduce you to the above concerns, associated concepts and categories, the evolution of each approach to historical production, their application to a range of historical sub-fields, and some of the hallmark or canonical works. The elective/optional modules will allow you to study and apply these ideas to particular historiographies.

Culture, Ideas and Identities

You will examine culturally constructed aspects of historical experience. Its subject matter includes the wide variety of meaning-laden objects and practices produced in the past or engaged in by different segments of society. Thus, it examines the history of what traditionally has been identified as ‘culture’ with a capital ‘C’, including the ideas articulated by intellectual elites.

Since the 1980s, cultural history has paid at least as much attention to everyday attitudes, values, assumptions and prejudices and the rituals and practices that express them, from magical beliefs to gender roles. The pathway pays attention to their location and dynamic vis-à-vis the social, political and other spheres, and identity, which has become a key analytical concept for cultural historians to investigate how characteristics have shaped how people have understood themselves.

Through the pathway-specific core module, you can gain knowledge of a wide range of approaches deployed by cultural historians, an ability to evaluate those approaches, and an understanding of how they can be applied to particular subjects. Through its optional modules spanning all historical periods, you explore certain cultural-historical phenomena in depth.

Modern British History

You will learn about modern British history’s complexity, diversity and vibrancy as a field of study. You will identify key areas of historiographical debate, think critically about where the field’s boundaries lie and question what constitutes modern British history in its temporal and spatial dimensions. The pathway encourages you to problematise the idea of ‘national’ history, providing opportunities to explore the transnational, imperial, global and comparative dimensions of political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual life within a ‘British history’ framework.

Pathway options typically include modules looking at histories of Britain as far back as 1750. The core module focuses on nation and empire; race, class and gender; and individualism and subjectivity. You will examine the theories, concepts, methodologies and source materials that historians use to produce knowledge about these integrated themes. You will learn to identify appropriate archival sources for your research and develop a theoretical, conceptual and methodological framework for your dissertation.

Please note that, depending on student demand and staffing capacities, the department may not run all four pathways in some years.