Britain & Empire, 1914-present
HIST 2512A:
Britain & Empire, 1914-present
Winter 2027
Instructor: Danielle Kinsey
This image is taken from the Empire Marketing Board campaign to promote British consumption of products from the empire during the 1930s.
Description: This lecture-and-discussion course surveys the history of the United Kingdom and its empire after 1914. Material in the course will be organized chronologically (ie/ we’ll start just before the First World War and slowly make our way to the present), discussing key political, social, cultural, military, and economic transformations that occurred along the way. We’ll examine all things “modern Britain”: what, when, where, and why was it, who was thought to be included and excluded from British national belonging, and how imperial and colonial development was mutually constitutive with British “domestic” development. Themes in the course will be: the rise of modern consumerism; the centrality of empire and colonialism to Britain in the twentieth century; experiences and transformations in the two World Wars; economic depression and deindustrialization; social justice movements; decolonization; tensions between England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; British party politics; neo-liberalism and fascism; the “special relationship” with the United States; the Commonwealth; and the European Union and Brexit. The course will foreground cultural and identarian issues and as such we’ll often discuss the histories of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnic, and religious difference. While this course is meant to continue from where HIST 2502 (Britain & Empire in the 19th Century) leaves off, you do not need to have completed HIST 2502 to take this course.
Format: This is a 0.5 credit course that will meet twice weekly for face-to-face lectures and large group discussion.
Evaluation: Each lecture will contain keywords that students should take notes on. At times the instructor will use lecture time for large group discussions. Exams will be based on information from these lecture sessions. Weekly discussion sections will be used to discuss assignments, weekly readings, and/or short and feature length films. Discussions sections will be evaluated on attendance and participation, short worksheet assignments, and one summative written assignment that will be no more than 10 pages (double-spaced) of writing.
The weekly reading load in the course will not exceed 30 pages. Readings and other primary sources for the course will be made available online; if a textbook is required, it will be no more than $50.
