| Unit name | Community, Nation and Empire (Level H Reflective History Unit) |
|---|---|
| Unit code | HIST30009 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Professor. Potter |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of History (Historical Studies) |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
The ability to reflect about the nature of History as a discipline and the ability to reflect on one’s own academic development are important attributes of the historian. This unit will offer students the opportunity to engage in this reflective practice by studying how historians have written about the formation of human communities. We will analyse some pioneering historical studies and influential theoretical writings about identity, and explore communities whose members mostly knew one another, but also less intimate, national communities. Are nations a relatively new phenomenon, emerging in the eighteenth century at the earliest, and involving only an ‘imagined’, or hegemonic, sense of community? Or do they have deeper historical roots? Were empires actually better at building communities from diverse groups of peoples than nation-states have been? Was it really possible for people to feel themselves to be members of imperial communities? Finally, we will ask whether there are historical precedents for transnational communities, a pressing contemporary concern in today’s ‘globalising’ world.
By the end of the unit students should have:
One 1-hour introductory session followed by five 2-hour classes.
24-hour seen written examination (summative, 100%)
The examination will assess the student’s ability to reflect on the particular and unique skills that historians acquire, to reflect on the way in which they apply those skills to a specific task, to convey that understanding to others in their writing, to demonstrate an awareness of how those skills might be applied more generally, and to demonstrate their knowledge of the formation of local, national and imperial communities in the past.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (London, 1983)
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983)
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294-1324 (London, 1978)
David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: popular culture and village discourse in early modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984)
Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: empire and the question of belonging (Manchester, 2006)
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton NJ, 1993)
