Global Histories of Colonialism Virtual Workshop

This two-day virtual workshop explores the relationship between colonial, imperial, and global history, through papers from scholars at various career stages from around the world. This event will be held on Zoom on 5-6 November, 2020, and is hosted by the Global History Initiative at Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada.

The starting point for this workshop was a desire to interrogate the potential of global historical approaches to offer bridges between imperial and colonial history and connect forms of colonialism across the world that are increasingly seen as distinct. As global processes, imperialism and colonialism increasingly connected distant parts of the world as they shaped and were shaped by cultural, material, and social hierarchies of power. A global history perspective encourages the adoption of multiple vantage points to understand these power dynamics, unsettling the boundaries between metropoles and their peripheries. Even as imperial expansion and colonial entrenchment unfolded around the world, anticolonial and anti-imperialist activists challenged and disrupted the underpinnings of imperial power through the same, or parallel, global networks that facilitated and sustained the workings of empire.

If the continuing violence of extraction, dispossession, and oppression is rooted in connected historical processes, how might global history as a perspective offer a means of addressing these temporal, geographic, and historiographic divides? By privileging the global conditions that spread, upheld, and overturned regimes of colonial control, the papers in this workshop explore the causes and consequences of colonialism across multiple scales of time and space.

In addition to the workshop panels, we are extremely privileged to have two exciting keynote speakers for this event:

Tony Ballantyne (University of Otago) Scale and Connection: Thinking about the Global History of Empires and Colonialism in the Pacific (Thursday, November 5th @ 4:00 pm EST)

Kris Manjapra (Tufts University) Colonialism in Global Perspective (Friday, November 6th @ 4:00 pm EST)

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Registration

Attendance is free, but we ask that attendees register for the specific panel(s) and keynote(s) they would like to attend (see the program for details). Panels will consist of short presentations and commentary from co-panelists and chairs, and then open up for wider discussion. The conference will be held over Zoom, and attendees will receive further details and a link closer to the event. Register at EventBrite.