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The British Empire was built on migrations both forced and free, and in this course, students situate particular migration stories in wider imperial and global contexts. The migrant groups examined include settler colonists, enslaved persons, transported radicals, colonial officers, missionaries, and indentured and migrant laborers. The course presents a broad chronological survey of the British imperial world since 1700, paying attention to political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics. The final project for this course is a digital exhibition to which students contribute content and explanatory material.

From the origins of the British Empire in the sixteenth century, the encounter between Britons and colonial subjects demanded explanations of human difference. In this course, students consider race and ethnicity as contingent and contested categories shaped by political and economic circumstances and entangled with other social categories, especially class and gender. Topics include the international slave trade and abolition, caste and community in South Asia, color and class in the twentieth-century Caribbean, and immigration and multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Britain.n text goes here

This course examines how the struggle for decolonization in the British Empire was shaped by the politics of race. How did colonial subjects imagine freedom, and how were those visions of freedom constrained by the racial hierarchies of empire? How did they look to other movements within and without the British imperial world to theorize what political, economic, and intellectual decolonization might be? Topics will include intellectual critiques of empires, transcolonial movements, the transfer of power, the postcolonial nation-state, and the Commonwealth. We will pay attention to gender throughout and consider the legacy of the formal era of decolonization in the present day.

Improvement and welfare have not always been the work of government. This class traces the origins and uneven history of development through the moments when colonial governments in the British Empire became interested in raising the material and social quality of life of colonial subjects. More than a matter of administering policy, attempts to better conditions arose through political circumstances and impacted the lives of colonial subjects in ways that administrators could not have foreseen. In the course, students consider development as a broad category through efforts to manage and improve education, the economy, and maternal health. They pay attention to the importance of colonial ethnography to know populations; the way development emerged as a rationale for empire; the international contexts of development; and continuities of colonial development after formal decolonization through nongovernmental organizations such as the World Bank and Oxfam International. Examples are drawn from metropolitan Britain; subject colonies such as India, Kenya, and the West Indies; and international organizations working with postcolonial nation-states.ription

While for many years the main historiographical question surrounding World War I concerned its origins, recently, scholars have turned to the consequences of the war, particularly the postwar settlements that remade national, imperial, and international politics. The war demanded the mobilization of millions of men and women throughout the world; what was owed to these individuals for their service? In this class, students approach this question in a variety of contexts and braid together the political and social history of the interwar period. Topics include the League of Nations, the Commonwealth, anticolonial nationalist movements, international women's movements, humanitarianism, development programs, and the welfare state.