Colonialism

Catalog description

The decolonization of the postwar period, often a violent process, defined colonialism primarily in political and economic terms. Recently, the analysis has shifted to understanding empire as a cultural phenomenon-to understanding it, that is, as a system of thought that enabled the political and economic view of colonialism. Recent analysis also stresses that colonialism had cultural repercussions both for the colonial authorities and for the colonized. This course applies these insights as it explores three phases of European imperialism. We begin by looking at the Spanish empire in the New World and at the expansion of trade and the gradual accumulation of outposts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The emphasis then shifts to the study of nineteenth-century colonialism. The first example will be India: how the British came to control and administer this part of the world. Then, we shall examine the transfer of this model of colonial administration to Africa in the late nineteenth-century, examining, at that point, French, German, as well as British versions of empire. EUR, AAL