ATS2827 · Encountering Empire

Overview

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’.

Offerings

The Handbook publishes no offerings for this unit.

Assessment

The Handbook does not list a final examination among the assessment items. That is not a guarantee there is none.

Within semester assessment: 100%

Assessment details may change. Please refer to the assessment information in Moodle closer to the start of the teaching period.

Requisites

The Handbook lists no prerequisite, corequisite or prohibition for this unit.

Learning outcomes

1. Critically analyse key issues in the changing historical experience and remembrance of empire across diverse places and times;
2. Identify and describe historiographical debates about empire;
3. Critically evaluate historical arguments in different genres;
4. Locate, assess and analyse historical sources;
5. Communicate research effectively through writing.

Workload

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

Student experience, not official rules. Nothing here changes what the Handbook says.