Inventing the World: Exploration, Empires, and Encounters (1400-1800)

What did the "world" mean before the modern age, and who got to imagine it? This course explores how people across empires - from the Ottoman and Mughal courts to Iberian colonies, African kingdoms, and Chinese and Japanese polities - envisioned and represented the globe between 1400 and 1800. We will examine how exploration, conquest, trade, and migration connected distant societies and how those encounters inspired new ways of seeing and mapping the world. Rather than treating globalization as a modern or Western invention, we will trace its deeper roots in the early modern era, a time when goods, ideas, and beliefs moved faster and farther than ever before. Through travel accounts, maps, cosmologies, artworks, and literary texts, we will compare how different cultures understood the planet and their place within it. Along the way, we will also explore how these connections brought about colonization, displacement, disease, and environmental change, as well as creativity, adaptation, and resistance.