The course explores the expansion, consolidation, management, disintegration, and impact of early modern and modern European empires, focusing on the ambiguities of identity produced by the encounter between European, American, African, Asian, and Pacific cultures. Through different case-studies and using primary and secondary sources, paintings, photographs, and film, we will explore the meanings of colonialism and its aftermath. Europe's ambivalent conquests - oscillating between attempts to project outward its own ways of understanding the world and efforts to demarcate colonizer from colonized, civilized from primitive, core from periphery- made the space of empire into a terrain where concepts were not only imposed but also engaged and contested.

More specifically, the course will analyse the following subjects:

- The Origins of European Colonialism

- Encounter and Engagement

- Savagery and Cannibalism

- Race and racism

- Violence and exploitation

- Independence and Decolonization

- Postcolonial Europe