Encountering Empire

Empires were the standard form of global geo-political organisation up until the mid-twentieth century. In this unit you will explore how and why the tentative early encounters between medieval or early modern travellers and traders developed into the self-confident imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. You will analyse the cross-cultural encounters between people, institutions and forms of knowledge that were at the heart of empires’ formation, expansion, consolidation, and collapse. You will examine the sites where imperial encounters took place ­– the ports, royal courts, plantations, households, markets, factories, army barracks, places of worship, schools and academies, parliaments, and print media where empires were built and contested, by ordinary people as well as elites, over centuries-long processes. You will also examine encounters at the sites of empires’ contested remembrance, in museums, courts of law, public spaces and discursive ‘history wars’.