Instructors
Yumi Moon - Assistant Professor, Department of History

Collaboration is one of the most important phenomena in the history of empire and crucial in the politics of any occupied regime or colony. This undergraduate seminar will explore cases and themes related to collaboration under colonial rule and will question the roles and problems of collaboration in the rise, sustenance, and fall of empires. Themes will include conceptual definitions of collaboration and empire, collaboration of traditional elites, colonial intermediaries, accommodation of religious communities, assimilation and collaboration, class and empire, and collaborators in the process of decolonization. Regional focus will be given to East Asia, but cases will be taken from various continents during their colonial periods.

The course has two main objectives. The first is to understand various types of local cooperation under military dominance of foreign occupiers or colonizers, and to explain the motives of local cooperators and their historical trajectories. The second is to discuss diverse scholarly definitions of collaboration and its related themes, and to test whether the concept of collaboration provides a useful and relevant framework for understanding the history of colonies. For these objectives, throughout the course, you will create your own definitions of collaboration, find a case of collaboration in one of your regions of interest, and discuss the importance of your case in accordance to your definition.

Level
Undergraduate