Modular value: 20 credits
Duration: Term 1
Teaching: 2 hour seminar
Lecturer: Peter Preston
The module will introduce class participants to the political history of modern East Asia from early European contact to the fall of foreign empires. The course will pay attention to the ways in which this historical trajectory is reflected in contemporary collective memory and related national pasts.
This module will look at the ways in which the past lives on in the present in East Asia. In outline, first, it will deal with arrival of western traders in the region in the early nineteenth century and it will take note of their motivation and the ways in which they understood and legitimated their own activities. Then, second, the module will consider the responses of various local groups. Then, third, the module will detail the novel form of life of peripheral territories within state-empire systems. And, fourthly, then the module will look at the collapse of colonial empires. These episodes put down layers of memory and thus history flows into memory and helps shape contemporary politics.
Assessment
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