Course description
Colonialism is usually conceived in political and economic terms, but it also about the radical, and often irreversible, transformation of whole environments of the social/natural landscape: forms of cultivation and livelihoods, roads and infrastructures, markets and networks, and so forth. The course shall discuss colonial processes, pre-industrial and modern, in a variety of historical and geographical settings. While focusing on case studies, it should introduce students to problems and traditions of research. We shall explore an array of questions: How were landscapes and environments imagined by empires, administrators, entrepreneurs, and indigenous peoples and how were competing vision inscribed in changing landscapes? How do pre-modern processes of colonization differ from modern ones? Can we use a long-term perspective to rethink more recent transformation? A recent surge of research has focused on setter colonialism. Can we pinpoint the connections and differences between the transformations brough about by conquering elites and plantation economies, by large-scale colonization by settlers, and the introduction of novel species of plants and animals? The course should provide students with a set of tools to analyze such processes, and an occasion to rethink seemingly familiar landscapes.

Learning outcomes
The course is not intended to be encyclopedic in scope or to cover the variety of historical experiences. Its focus is on developing critical reflection and research skills: 1) to develop participant's ability to connect case-studies and theoretical concepts and 2) to critically analyze theoretical framings; 3) to defamiliarize current, familiar social and material landscapes and reconsider the role of "deep", less visible histories in their evolution 4) to explore the supralocal contexts in which local environments are shaped; 5) to offer participants ways of moving beyond moralizing discourses of guilt to a reasoned discussion of social responsibility.

Teaching and Evaluation methods
The course is based on (a) intensive class discussions of research literature and different types of evidence. The introductory part should provide a conceptual toolbox and some basic familiarity with the problématique on the basis of class discussion of key texts and one premodern case study. Toward the middle part of the seminar, groups of 2 or 3 participants, depending on the size of the group, would form to work on a case study, and present their project and its presumed specificity in class. The middle part of the course should consider early modern and modern case studies, and toward its end, projects would be discussed in a variety of formats. Special attention should be given to developing forms of visual analysis.

Evaluation will be based on class participation (40%), a short interim written assignment (20%), and a final project (40%).

Bibliography
The bibliography offers a set of thematic clusters approaches, topics and cases, and includes both required and optional readings. In the course of the seminar, we might skip some case- studies and introduce topics that participants wish to engage in (see description). The list only includes research literature and not textual and other evidence for joint analysis.

A. Introductory Readings
1. Nicholas B. Dirks, "Introduction" in Colonialism and Culture, Dirks ed. (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 1 25
Optional: Daiva K. Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds.), Introduction, in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 1 32

B. Colonialism in the Making of Europe
2. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (London: Penguin, 1993), chapter 2, pp. 24 59
3. Ronnie Ellenblum, "Colonial and Anticolonial Interpretation of the Crusades", Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 43 61
Optional The Legacy of an Epoch: A. The Crusades as a Colonial Movement," in The Crusaders' Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (New York & Washington: Praeger, 1972), pp. 469 482

C. Medieval Iberia
4. Elena Lourie, A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain Past and Present 35 (1966), pp. 54 76
Optional: Robert I. Burns Immigrants from Islam: The Crusaders Use of Muslims as Settlers in Thirteenth-Century Spain American Historical Review 80:1 (1975), pp. 21 42

D. Medieval and Premodern Ireland
5. Nicholas P. Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565 76 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976), pp. 66 92
6. Sarah Barber, Settlement, Transplantation and Expulsion: A Comparative study of the Placement of People", Ciaran Brady and Jane H. Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
pp. 280 298

E. From Europe's Western Frontier to the New World
7. Denys Hay, England, Scotland and Europe: The Problem of the Frontier, TRHS 25 5th series (1975), pp. 77 91

F. Imagining the local Landscape and inscribing possession
8. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Ruines of Mankind: The Indian and the Puritan Mind, Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), pp. 200 217
9. Patricia Seed, Ceremony of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1 15
Optional: Seed, "Houses, Gardens, Fences", Ceremony of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World 1492 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

G. Humans and Non-Humans in Colonial Environments
10. Daniel K. Richter, Confronting a Material New World, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 41-68

H. Modern Colonialism and Settler Colonialism
11. Norbert Finzsch, "'[...] Extirpate or Remove that Vermine': Genocide, Biological Warfare, and Settler Imperialism in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century", Journal of Genocide Research 10:2 (2008), pp. 215 232
Optional: Jeffrey K. Wilson Environmental Chauvinism in the Prussian East: Forestry as a Civilizing Mission on the Ethnic Frontier, 1871 1914 Central European History 41 (2008), pp. 27-70

I. Intellectuals and the Colonial Imagination
12. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: Culture as the Ideology of the Intellectuals, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1 25
Optional: D. B. Quinn, "Renaissance Influences in English Colonization," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 5th series (1976), pp. 73-94

Last updated: June 25, 2024