Capitalism and Empire in the "American Century"

Catalog description

This course examines how capitalism at home has remade U.S. power abroad across the 20th century. Rather than thinking about foreign policy purely as a matter of grand strategy at a distance from the everyday lives of workers and citizens, it will explore the connections that bind domestic and international together. Questions the course will address include: How does class conflict at home shape techniques of power abroad? Has growth transformed the U.S.'s understanding of its international role? How is the struggle for economic and racial justice in the U.S. linked to decolonization abroad? In what ways have economic crises changed technologies of global governance? Incorporating perspectives from political science, history, economics, sociology, and philosophy, students will explore how forms of knowledge and expertise have shaped this evolving relationship between domestic political economy and foreign policy. Alongside secondary sources, the course will place special emphasis on primary sources, encouraging students to inhabit the perspectives, anxieties, and hopes of the many individuals and groups that contested this dynamic history. Readings will therefore include the speeches of social movement leaders, the analysis of business lobbyists, the letters of trade unionists, national security documents, and the musings of ordinary citizens, among other texts.