HIS Global Britain, Global Empire

“Ogni vera storia è storia contemporanea”. In his anti-fascist manifesto of 1938, Benedetto Croce was among the first to recognize how our “preoccupation with present problems impels us to do research on past problems”. But the reverse is equally true: our present condition is constantly filtered through contested versions of the past that can be mobilized for all manner of political and ideological agendas. Arguably, no historical phenomenon has been more widely debated, dissected and disputed than the four-hundred-year span of the British empire, from the late 16th-century “plantations” in Ireland to the formal handover of Hong Kong in 1997. No other empire has left its mark on such a vast portion of the globe, touching virtually every continent through complex patterns of commercial, social, institutional exchange. As such, contemporary debates about the empire’s present-day legacies also reverberates all over the world.

This course introduces students to the history of the British empire through the prism of its contested present. Each week examines a key juncture in the history of British overseas expansion, from the early incursions of private trading companies to the 18^th-century wars of imperial conquest and the “settler revolution” of the 19^th century. The course also covers the British empire’s spectacular collapse in the 20th century in the shadow of war, decolonization, and economic decline. Though the empire itself has passed into history, it remains a recurring flashpoint, not only in contemporary British public life, but also for the many parts of the world where its unfinished business continues to animate the public sphere – across Asia, Africa, North America and Oceania.