This module explores the ways in which law and legal regimes worked to create, regulate, challenge and change British colonial societies. Adopting a thematic...

Law&#039;s Empire: Legal Cultures in the British Colonial World (HIST0272)

This module explores the ways in which law and legal regimes worked to create, regulate, challenge and change British colonial societies. Adopting a thematic and comparative approach, it extends chronologically from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Each seminar is designed to introduce a specific aspect of legal regulation and to examine within a comparative framework the ways in which that phenomenon shaped life across a range of British colonies, using both primary and secondary readings. The first five weeks of the module focus on aspects of law that relate to crimes against property and the person and to regimes of coerced labour; the second half focuses on social and cultural aspects of colonial law, particularly the perceived violation of British behavioural norms. Geographically, the course explores legal developments in colonial contexts that stretched from Canada and the Caribbean to sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and the Indian Ocean world.

History and Representation: The Holocaust as a Case Study

The Holocaust has often been seen as in some sense ‘beyond representation’; yet, at the...

History and Representation: The Holocaust as a Case Study (GERM0022)

History and Representation: The Holocaust as a Case Study

The Holocaust has often been seen as in some sense ‘beyond representation’; yet, at the same time, the sheer enormity of the mass murder of more than six million Jews, along with Roma and Sinti, the mentally and physically disabled, and other victims of Nazi persecution, elicits a widely felt need to explore, and to try to understand and convey a sense of what happened. The very term ‘Holocaust’ – which only came into widespread usage following an influential TV series by that name, first aired in 1978 – itself constructs a unifying concept encompassing quite disparate events at different times: from innumerable killing sites along the eastern front, through the notorious death camps in occupied Poland, to ghettoization, exploitation, brutality and death right across Nazi-dominated Europe; and, on some views, extended back to encompass persecution in the years before the outbreak of war in 1939 or the switch to genocide in 1941.

Those seeking to represent the Holocaust face a variety of choices and challenges: how to evoke and convey almost unimaginable horrors; how to explain violence that may feel beyond understanding; how to combine a broad historical analysis of structures, policies and practices with a wide range of individual experiences. This course will examine some of the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented, focusing on selected works by historians, as well as memoirs, works of creative literature, films, and exhibitions in museums and memorial sites.