March 14-15 2014, Scarman Conference Centre, University of Warwick

PLEASE NOTE REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED.

For the final programme, please follow this link. Abstracts and speakers' biographies can be found here.

For travel advice, please follow this link.

To book accommodation on campus, please follow this link. 

This conference will explore processes of inclusion and exclusion in different imperial settings. It will cover the full sweep of the modern era. Papers discussing imperialism in Asia, North and South America, Africa and Europe will explore the ways in which the boundaries – physical, ideological, constitutional or cultural – of empire provided the space for debates about belonging in imperial history. Such debates were also provoked by another boundary between the imperial age and the post-colonial world. Papers will consider the effect of decolonisation on creating the tensions between imperial cosmopolitanism and nationalist notions of autochthony at the end of empire. But the conference will also contemplate another ephemeral boundary; that between imperial and global history and consider ways that identities commonly associated with the experience of imperial rule were also the product of global forces.

Papers will discuss the ambiguous and marginal agents of imperial expansion and rule; be they marginal in terms of their position within imperial society or in their ability to challenge dominant narratives. These may include settlers who became anti-colonial rebels; members of diasporic communities with origins elsewhere in the same empire or from outside; or colonial subjects who became loyalists. Such studies will reveal individuals and institutions that straddled divides created by notions of citizenship, class, gender, and race.