This course explores through a multi-disciplinary perspective the modernization process of the countryside first begun in Europe in the 1500s and subsequently in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. By the late twentieth century, the modern world order based on the contentious nation-state system and the capitalist mode of production was firmly established, incorporating peripheries and the countryside and reordering the relationship between nature and human beings.

The multi-disciplinary exploration of this process provides us an alternative view of the modern world that the process through which the modern world order was established is by no means inevitable or complete. Our task in this course thus becomes evident—to critically examine how and why the modern world order has come to take the current shape. Only through the critical analysis of agrarian change can we fully understand the complex nature of global challenges including climate change, hunger and poverty, inequality, and peace and conflict.