Dr Jose Canton-Alvarez

This course is available on the MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation. This course is not available as an outside option.

This course is compulsory. Students must choose either HY484A or HY484W for paper one.

This course covers the comparative history of empires from the fifteenth century to the present day. Students will study the Ottoman, Mughal, Qing, Spanish, and Russian empires in depth. The course also covers Indigenous American and African polities and imperial networks. Students explore the ways in which these empires encountered, understood and governed difference. The course also explores the ways in which the imperial past has helped shape the processes of globalisation.

A number of themes are addressed: exploration and trade; empiricism, science, race and the natural world; encountering and governing indigenous peoples; gender and imperial power; translation, conversion and coexistence in the management of religious relations; slavery, indenture and other forms of unfree labour; race, science and empire; art, artefacts and collecting; museums after empire. Developing with a decolonised approach to knowledge, history and material culture, students are encouraged to think across time and space to make creative connections and comparisons.

20 hours of seminars in the AT.

There will be a reading week in week 6 of the Autumn Term.

Students are expected to submit one essay (4000 words) in the Autumn Term. 

A full reading list will be provided. For general surveys of the subject, students may consult:

• Jane Burbank & Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2010);
• Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge and History (Berkeley, 2005);
• Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004);
• Alejandro Colás, Empire (Cambridge, 2007);
• John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (London, 2007);
• Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY, 1986);
• Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2001);
• Stephen R. Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002);
• Herfried Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States (Cambridge, 2007).

Essay (50%, 4000 words) in January.
Class participation (25%) and group project (25%) in the AT.