Module description
The history of tolerance and human rights has recently attracted considerable attention from historians. This module will explore the changes in attitudes toward minorities in Europe since 1600, with particular attention to the development of ideas and practices of toleration, and of political and legal structures designed to enshrine these ideas and practices. We will look at the impact of the religious conflicts in the wake of the Reformation on changing approaches to religious difference, and at the arguments over toleration and political inclusion in the Enlightenment period. We will explore the place of the idea of human rights in the American and French Revolutions, in the nineteenth-century struggles over slavery and labour conditions, and in the early twentieth-century international order, culminating with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. We will also look at the postwar history of human rights, focusing particularly on the 1970s and the 1990s. Our primary attention will be on Europe, but for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we will consider the global development of these ideas. Changing attitudes and approaches to religious minorities, including Jews and Muslims, will be a central theme, but other aspects of toleration and human rights will also be covered. We will look at arguments and movements for toleration and human rights as well as critiques of them. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between these political ideals and actual practices of coexistence, or their failure, on the ground.
Assessment details
1 x 1,500-word formative essay & 1 x 3,000-word essay (100%)
Teaching pattern
10 x 2 hour seminar (weekly)