HSTAA 590: IMPERIALISM IN THEORY AND HISTORY

 

This graduate seminar provides an introduction to the theory and history of modern imperialism, through a broad range of primary and secondary readings. The first half of the course examines the conceptual underpinnings of imperial governance, paying particular attention to variations among, and transformations between, imperial social formations rooted in: 1) ideologies of liberalism and free trade, 2) democratic settlement and frontier violence, and 3) administrative rationalities of social welfare and mass politics. The course concludes with a discussion of the current crisis, specifically how imperialism can be a useful category for understanding the United States today.

 

I. Syllabus

 

INTRODUCTION

 

January 4: Overview of the syllabus and assignments

Michael Ignatieff, "The Burden," New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003.

 

January 11: Imperialism and Colonialism: a Singular History

 

Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present, introduction, pp. 1-16

John Lewis Gaddis, Security, Surprise and the American Experience

Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide

 

FORMATIONS AND FOUNDATIONS

 

January 18: Liberalism (1)

 

*G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1821) (excerpt)

*John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” (1859)

 

*Ellen Meiskins Wood, “A New Kind of Empire,” The Empire of Capital

*Thomas Holt, “The Meaning of Freedom,” Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938

*Mike Davis, “Victoria’s Ghosts,” Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World

 

*[Recommended: Amartya Sen, “Poverty and Entitlements,” “The Great Bengal Famine,” Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation]

 

January 25: Liberalism (2)

 

                Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire

 

February 1: Settler Colonialism (1)

 

*Josiah Strong, “The Anglo-Saxon and the World’s Future,” Our Country (1885)

*Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Frontier in American History (1920)

 

*Thomas Hietala, “Continentalism and the Color-Line,” “American Exceptionalism,” Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire

*Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and U.S. Empires, 1880-1910,” in Julian Go, ed., The American Colonial State in the Philippines

 

*[Recommended: Michael Rogin, “Liberal Society and the Indian Question,” Ronald Reagan the Movie: And Other Essays in Political Demonology]

 

February 8: Settler Colonialism (2)

 

                Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic

 

February 15: Marxism (1)

 

*Karl Marx, “Articles on India and China” (1853), Surveys from Exile

*Karl Marx, “On Primitive Accumulation,” Capital, Vol. 1 (1871), (excerpt)

                *Antonio Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” (1926)

 

*Helene Carrere d’Encausse and Stuart Schramm, “Marxist Views of the Non-European World,” “Problems of the Revolution in the East in the Days of the Comintern,” Marxism and Asia

*Edward Said, Orientalism (short excerpt on Marx)

*Aijaz Ahmad, “Marx on India: A Clarification,” In Theory: Class, Nations, Literatures

 

*[Recommended: Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review (March/April) 2002]

 

February 22: Marxism (2)

 

                Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics and Modernity

 

March 1: Fascism (1)

 

*Carl Schmitt, “Definition of Sovereignty,” Political Theology (1922), “Preface to the Second Edition: On the Contradiction between Parliamentarianism and Democracy,” (1926), The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

 

*Hannah Arendt, “Race-Thinking before Racism,” “Race and Bureaucracy,” The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

*Mark Mazower, “Empires, Nations, Minorities,” “Healthy Bodies, Sick Bodies,” Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth-Century

 

*[Recommended: Paul Gilroy, “Modernity and Infrahumanity,” Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color-Line]

 

March 8: Fascism (2)

 

                Enzo Traverso, The Political Origins of Nazi Violence

 

CONCLUSION

 

March 15: The Current Crisis

 

                Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present

 

II. Books, Essays and Assignments

 

Books ordered for the class are available for purchase at the university bookstore. Only the Gaddis, Mehta, Saxton, Mitchell, Traverso and Gregory are required. The rest of the required readings (marked with an asterisk) have been (or will be) collected in one or two packets available for purchase at “the Ave. copy” on University Ave. and 42nd St..

 

Students are required to participate in seminar discussions and will be asked to give short presentations on the readings each week. Monday night, each week students should distribute a one-page response to the readings to the class-list. Students will be also required to write a twenty-page seminar paper, either based upon original historical research, or on an extended analysis of a theoretical or literary text. Papers topics should be mutually agreed upon between student and instructor before the middle of the quarter. Final papers are due at the end of the quarter.

 

III. Further Reading

 

Peter Worsely, The Three Worlds

Peter Worsely, Marx and Marxism

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost

Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars

Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth-Century

Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities

Thomas McKormick, America’s Half-Century

David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick

Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire

Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth-Century

Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes

Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars

Mary Renda, Taking Haiti

Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Causes and Consequences of American Empire

Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity

Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism

J.A. Hobson, Imperialism

V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Michel Foucualt, Society Must Be Defended

Anthony Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora

Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power

Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, Politics and Culture in the Shadow of Capital

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past

Ato, Seki-Out, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience

James Scott, Seeing Like a State

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917

Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism the Last Stage of Imperialism

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power

Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction

Karl Polayni, The Great Transformation

Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth

William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life

Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848

Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism

Samir Amin, Imperialism and Uneven Development

Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship

Michael Lowi, Combined and Uneven Development

D.W. Meinig, Atlantic America, 1492-1800

John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South

Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

The Penguin Dictionary of Third World Terms