This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

The modern world of nation-states has to a great extent been created by processes associated with European imperialism. Yet European imperialism encountered and eventually brought about the collapse of numerous non-European, once powerful empires - among them the Ottoman Empire, the Mughals in India, and the Qing Dynasty in China. In the twentieth century new empires like Imperial Japan and America challenged the former global dominance of Europe. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as Western imperialism appears to have exhausted itself, some nation-states in the economically dynamic "emerging markets" draw inspiration from their former imperial greatness. This course will examine how empires have shaped the modern world. It will focus on a number of European and non-European empires roughly from the beginning of the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Among the issues that will be explored are theories of imperialism, the reasons for the rise, expansion, and decline of empires, and the tension between empire and the aspirations of national and ethnic groups.