Renaissance to Revolution: Early Modern Europe

(HISTORY 110B is 5 units; HISTORY 10B is 3 units). Few historical settings offer a more illuminating perspective on our world today than old-regime Europe. Few cast a darker shadow. Science and the enlightened ambition to master nature and society, the emergence of statehood and its grasp for human mobility, bloodshed and coexistence in the face of religious fragmentation, as well as capitalism and the birth of modern finance: this course surveys some of the most consequential developments in European societies between the late fifteenth and the early nineteenth century.