Dr J-P Rubies, E500, and Dr Sujit Sivasundaram, E602

For MA/MSc History of International Relations, MSc Theory and History of International Relations, MSc History of Nationalism, MSc History of Empires, MSc Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies and LSE-Columbia University Double Degree in International and World History. Students taking other taught Master’s programmes may take this course where appropriate.

The aim of this seminar-course is to address from a historical perspective fundamental questions about European imperialism, colonial contexts for cross-cultural interaction, the role of perceptions of the other, issues of gender and religion in situations of cultural conflict, and the role of non-Europeans in the making of the West.

Through a series of well-defined case-studies, the course will seek to offer a coherent historical perspective on a legacy of cross-cultural encounters over more than five-hundred years, from the late Middle Ages up to the 20th century.

Each seminar will address specific questions about a key, well-defined scenario, combining two kinds of issues: power struggles and perceptions of 'the other'. Case studies will be evenly spread to include examples from Africa, Asia, America, the Pacific and the Mediterranean. Topics will include: Medieval ethnography, Christian and Muslim; Europe's inner enemies: Jews and moriscos; First encounters with American Indians; American civilizations: Spanish and Peruvians; The debate on the nature of the American Indians; Jesuit accommodation and the rites controversy in China; Independent travellers as observers in India; The debate on Oriental despotism; Captain Cook and the Pacific islands; The depiction of Pacific islanders in the early nineteenth century; Indigenous responses to British expansion; The European view of "ancient" India; Christian evangelism in India and the sati debate; The ‘invention’ of caste; The display of foreign peoples in Europe; The fears of ‘going native’ in the tropics; The notion of race and racism in empire; Orientalism and Islam 1800-1860; European ideas about "tribes"; Missionaries and the clitoridectomy debate;. Whenever possible, both Western and non-Western sources will be considered. The discussion in each seminar will draw on a combination of secondary sources and primary material.

20 two-hour seminars and two revision classes.

Students will be required to write three essays and a timed essay.

A full Reading list will be issued at the start of the course. Besides primary texts, key readings include: S Schwartz, Implicit understandings. Observing, reporting and reflecting on the encounters between Europeans and other peoples in the Early-Modern era (1994) ;J Larner, Marco Polo and his description of the world (1999); D Brading, The first America (1991); A Pagden, The fall of natural man (2nd edn, 1986); L Hanke, All mankind is one (1974); A Gerbi, The dispute of the New World (1973); J Spence, The memory palace of Matteo Ricci (1985, rep. 1999); J Rubiés, Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000); P Marshall & G Williams, The great map of mankind: British perceptions of the world in the age of the Enlightenment (London, 1982); A Grossrichard, The sultan’s court. European fantasies of the East (London, 1998); B Smith, European vision and the South Pacific (1985); M Sahlins, How ‘natives’ think. About captain Cook, for example (1995); R Inden, Imagining India (1990); Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions. The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998; B Cohn, An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays (Oxford and Delhi, 1988); Aziz-al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities; Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler eds. Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world (California, 1997); Nicholas Dirks ed. Colonialism and culture (Ann Arbor, 1992); R Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience (Manchester, 1991); M Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1968).

One three-hour unseen examination (100%).