The Structure and Infrastructure of Global Modernity
Judit Bodnar
A History Course Cross-listed with Sociology/Anthropology
4 credits
Modernity has been around for some centuries, admittedly become global, and is here to stay. Such departure calls for a study of how its meaning has varied with time and place. This is a course in the history, sociology and geography of social modernity. It examines the emergence of its infrastructure--market, state, society, nation, city, transportation, etc.--and structure, and relates them to the contemporary transformation of these institutions. A parallel is drawn between early and late modernity. The aim of the course is to produce a historically informed theoretical understanding of social modernity through the examination of difference with an emphasis on transnational connections--the flow of people, commodities, and ideas--and their structure.
This is a seminar with a broad intellectual agenda and diverse readings, so attendance and preparation for classes is essential. The grade is a combination of class participation and the paper.
Part I
Week 1 Introduction—modernity and its meaning(s)
Week 2 The experience of modernity—as seen from Europe
Stephen Kern. 1983. The culture of time and space, 1880-1918 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Ch. 5 “Speed” Pp. 109-30.
Ch. 8 “Distance” Pp. 211-40.
Marshall Berman. 1988 [1982] All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Penguin.
“Preface to the Penguin Edition” Pp. 5-12
Part II The infrastructure of modernity
Week 3 The market
Karl Polanyi. 1957 “The Economy As Instituted Process” in Polanyi, Arensberg and Pearson (eds.) Trade and
Markets in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill. Reprinted in Mark
Granovetter & Richard Swedberg (eds.) The Sociology of Economic Life. Westview. Pp. 29-51.
Karl Polanyi. 1957 [1944] The Great Transformation. Beacon.
I. “Satanic Mill” Pp. 33-76; 111-29.
II. “Self-Protection of Society” Pp. 130-62.
Week 4 Transportation
James E. Vance. 1990. Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation since the Sixteenth
Century. Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Transportation Remakes the European World: The Railroad Era” Pp. 181-263
“The American Railroad: Instrument of National Development” Pp. 265-335.
Eugen Weber. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford.
Ch. 12 “Roads, roads and still more roads” Pp. 195-220.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch. 1978. “Railroad Space and Railroad Time” New German Critique 14, (Spring): 31-40.
Week 5 Language, schooling, military service, bureaucracy, and the state
Eugen Weber. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford.
Ch. 6 “The wealth of tongues” Pp. 67-94
Ch. 7 “France, One and Indivisible” Pp. 95-114
Ch. 16 “Migration: An Industry of the Poor” Pp. 278-291
Ch. 17 “Migration of Another Sort: Military Service” Pp. 292-302.
Ch. 18 “Civilizing in Earnest: Schools and Schooling” Pp. 303-338.
Michael Mann. 1993. The Sources of Social Power. Volume II. The rise of classes and nation-states, 1760-1914.
Cambridge.
13 “The rise of the modern state: III. Bureaucratization” Pp. 444-78.
Week 6 Mapping and counting the nation
Benedict Anderson. 1991. Imagined Communities. (Revised ed.) Verso.
Ch. 10. “Census, Map, Museum” Pp.163-85.

Roger J. P. Kain & Catherine D. Smith. 1999. English maps: a history. Toronto.
Ch. 4. Mapping Property: Private Land and the State. Pp. 112- 41
Ch. 7. “The Spirit of Modernity: Maps in Everyday Life” Pp. 215- 40.
Appadurai. 1993. “Number in the Colonial Imagination” Pp. 314-39. In Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer
(eds.) Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: U Penn Press.
Part III
Week 7 The structure of the modern world
Immanuel Wallerstein. 2000. “World-Systems Analysis” Pp. 129-48 in The Essential Wallerstein, New York.
---1974. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press.
Ch 6 “The European World-Economy: Periphery versus External Arena” Pp.300-44.
Sidney W. Mintz. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin.
Power; 151-86.
Screening: Global Assembly Line (58 min) directed by Lorraine Gray, Los Angeles, 1986.
Week 8 Knowledge, norms, discipline, the welfare of the people and power: The infrastructure of colonial order
Timothy Mitchell. 1988. Colonising Egypt. California.
Ch. 3 “An appearance of order” Pp. 63-94.
Michael Adas. 1989. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance. Cornell.
Ch. 4 “Attributes of the Dominant: Scientific and Technological Foundations of the Civilizing Mission” Pp. 199-
270.
Week 9 Cont.: The making of the modern (colonial) city
Gwendolyn Wright. 1997. “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial
Policy, 1900-1930” Pp. 322-45 in Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper (eds.) Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. California.
Paul Rabinow. 1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago.
“Paris: The City” Pp. 73-81
“Modern French Urbanism” Pp. 211-50
“Techno-Cosmopolitanism: Governing Morocco” Pp. 277-319.
Week 10 Disseminating modernity: the idea of development
Arturo Escobar. 1996. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton. Ch. 2
“The Problematization of Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development” Pp. 21-54.
James Ferguson. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ch 1 “The Copperbelt in Theory” Pp. 1-37.
Ch 2 “Expectations of Permanence” Pp. 38-81.
James Scott. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New
Haven: Yale.
Ch. 6 “Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams” Pp. 193-222.
Ch. 4 “The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and Critique” Pp. 103-46.
Week 11 Disjunctures and the global restructuring of modernity
David Harvey. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell.
“The argument” p. vii
“The passage from modernity to postmodernity in contemporary culture” Pp. 3-65
“ Introduction” Pp. 121-24
“ Theorizing the transition” Pp. 173-88
“ Flexible accumulation—solid transformation or temporary fix?” Pp. 189-97.
Arjun Appadurai. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press.
“ Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” Pp. 27-47
“ Patriotism and Its Future” Pp. 158-77.
Benedict Anderson. 1988. The Spectre of Comparisons. Verso.
“ Long-Distance Nationalism” Pp. 58-74.
Week 12 Alternative modernities

Charles Taylor. 2001. “Two Theories of Modernity” Pp. 172-96 in Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.) Alternative
Modernities. Duke.
Dipesh Chakrabarty. 1997. “The Difference—Deferral of Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in
British Bengal” Pp. 373-405 in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.) Tensions of Empire. California.
Nilüfer Göle. 2000. “Snapshots of Islamic Modernitites” Daedalus “Multiple Modernities” 129, 1 (Winter): 91-118.
Johann P. Arnason. 2000. “Communism and Modernity” Daedalus “Multiple Modernities” 129, 1 (Winter): 61-90.