Colonialism

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This seminar will focus on understanding colonialism descriptively and normatively. The descriptive aim includes questions like: what kind of social organizations are "colonial"? What kinds of colonialism are there, e.g., settler colonialism, neocolonialism, and other sorts, and what are the relationships between them? The normative aim includes questions like: what are the wrongs of colonialism? Which wrongs are constitutive of colonialism as such and which are contingent fellow travelers? We will divide our time roughly between histories of various colonial regimes/periods of colonization, the descriptive aim, and the normative aim.