HIST.SP25

History 286: Themes in British Empire History: Birth of the Nations
TTh 11:40-1 p.m. Dalton 1
Professor Madhavi Kale
OL 136 mkale@brynmawr.edu
Office hours: TWTh 2-4 and by appointment
https://brynmawr-edu.zoom.us/zbook/madhavi-kale/office-hours-fall-2024

With wars raging in Europe, the northern Mediterranean and Africa and conflicts over borders and belonging in every continent populated by humans, the cacophony around nations, national sovereignty and particular nation states is deafening and bewildering – at best, dispossessing and murderous at worst – including in South Asia. “Birth of the Nations” focuses on the crystallization of claims to national sovereignty in the specific context of British colonial empire in those parts of the South Asian subcontinent comprised currently of the nation states of the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, founded in August, 1947 and Bangladesh, which emerged from the latter in 1971. This course explores the politics and genealogies of nations in the Indian subcontinent from the late 19th century through the establishment of sovereign nations in 1947 through the optics of women and gender, considering the implications and legacies of empire, colonial governance and anti-colonialism for the peoples of the subcontinent through the present. We will not take an exclusively chronological approach, but rather start with the present and analyses of historical practices in the frameworks of the nation-state, colonial empire, and gender women and gender in international development discourses, then moving back to historical antecedents and contexts, keeping in mind that what we see now is not the inevitable outcome of the past (and of primordial and atavistic cultural inclinations), but rather a complex kaleidoscope of outcomes and in which some narratives and interests have overshadowed and even eclipsed others, even if they don’t displace them entirely.
Groundwork-laying readings in these domains will be engaged in the 9 weeks of the semester.
Course objectives: Enhancement of your ability to read and analyze wide range of texts (visual and material as well as written) critically and analytically: to identify their arguments and the evidence used to support them, to evaluate that evidence as well as the assumptions underlying/embedded in arguments and their evidentiary frameworks, and to synthesize various and sometimes disparate perspectives and represent them coherently and accessibly both in writing and verbally. Enhancement of your understanding of the complexities of the histories of the Indian subcontinent and the genealogies and effects of August 14-15, 1947.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This is an introductory course to the political and social history of East-Central Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will explore the complicated histories and emergence of the nation states between Germany and the Soviet Union. Beginning with the age of the Habsburg Empire and finishing in the age of the European Union we will examine how societies in East Central Europe struggled to balance nationalism and socialism as competing ways of making sense of their world and as platforms for changing it. From the understanding of the impact of the Communist Manifesto to reading about how the conflict of empires changes the lives of generations of people in The Bridge Over the Drina, along with diverse contemporary accounts, you will get an in-depth look at not only of the history of East-Central Europe but also of the enduring power of socialism and nationalism.