POLT 238 - Empire and Political Thought

FC SSCI CD

4 credits
How did European thinkers from the sixteenth century onwards interpret, justify, and critique European imperial expansion? How did anticolonial thinkers from across the world theorize the conditions of their subjugation and how did they refute the claims of empire? To answer these questions, we will be reading texts by European thinkers such as Vitoria, Hegel, and Locke, anticolonial thinkers such as Bolívar, Fanon, and Gandhi, before finally turning to a critical assessment of some of the dominant academic frameworks for understanding colonialism, such as postcolonialism, decoloniality, racial capitalism, primitive accumulation and settler colonialism.