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Empires have been common over several millennia and part of the lived experience of people around the globe. Understanding their history is more important than ever as societies grapple with imperial legacies, ongoing imperialisms and decolonizing processes. These different empires had their own temporalities, modalities, dynamics and contexts, but comparative study facilitates understanding and can open up new fruitful lines of enquiry.

King’s College London has long been a centre for the study of empires. Classical Greek and Roman history has been taught at King’s ever since the College opened in 1831. In the twentieth century its staff played a seminal part in the development of British imperial history after the College became only the second place in the world to have a chair in the subject with the foundation of the Rhodes Professorship of Imperial History (now the Professorship of Imperial and Global History). Unusually among British universities, the College has long established expertise in Portuguese and Brazilian studies. In 1947 Charles Ralph Boxer (1904-2000) a historian of Dutch and Portuguese colonialism was appointed Camões Chair of Portuguese, a chair founded and part funded by Portuguese institutions, and at the time the only chair of its kind in the English-speaking world. In 1997 a new chair named the Charles Boxer Chair dedicated to the history of the Portuguese speaking world was created in his honour.

Today’s generation of King’s historians begin from very different perspectives to their early twentieth-century forbears, who were invested in empire and in various ways participants in Britain’s imperial project. But while our approach may be very different, the College maintains exceptional expertise in the study of empires, ancient and modern. Our interests extend from the ancient Roman empire via the early modern European empires to modern European overseas and continental empires. We have concentrations of expertise in the history of decolonization. The College has large numbers of PhD students working on the history of empires, and regularly hosts visiting scholars from other institutions also engaged in forms of colonial and imperial history. In coming together in this research hub, we aim to facilitate exchanges across empires and periods through regular lunchtime meetings. At the same time, the hub will be hosting more focused, period-specific workshops and reading groups.

Our aim is to serve both the King’s community and the wider national and international one by initiating conversations around the history of empires.

People

Francisco Bethencourt

Charles Boxer Professor of History

Jim Bjork

Professor of Modern European History

Ruth Craggs

Professor of Political and Historical Geography

Richard Drayton

Professor of Imperial and Global History

David Edgerton

Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History

Professor of Early American History

Publications

Books written or edited by Hub members:

Richard Drayton

  • Ed. with Saul Dubow, Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2020)
  • Whose Constitution? Law, Justice and History in the Caribbean (Port of Spain, 2016)
  • Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the 'Improvement' World (London and New Haven, 2000)

Max Edling

  • Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2021 [Audiobook Tantor Media, 2021]).
  • Co-edited with Peter Kastor, Washington’s Government: Charting the Origins of the Federal Administration (University of Virginia Press, 2021).
  • The Creation of the Constitution (American Historical Association and the Institute for Constitutional Studies, 2018)
  • .A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State 1783-1867 (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
  • A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford University Press, 2003 [pbk 2008]).

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

  • Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-62 (Cambridge, 2016)
  • Ed. With Elisabeth Leake, South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent (Leiden, forthcoming)

Peter Heather

  • The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Orion, 2005).
  • Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development, and State Formation in the First Millennium (Orion, 2009).
  • Rome Resurgent: War & Empire in the Age of Justinian (OUP, 2018)
  • Christendom: Triumph of a Religion (Penguin, 2022 forthcoming).
  • With John Rapley, WHY EMPIRES FALL: America, Rome and the Decline of the West (Penguin, in press).

Jean Smith

  • Settlers at the End of Empire: Race and the Politics of Migration in South Africa, Rhodesia and the United Kingdom (Manchester, 2022)

Sarah Stockwell

  • Co-edited with Véronique Dimier, The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (Palgrave, 2021)
  • The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
  • Co-edited with L.J. Butler, The Wind of Change. Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
  • Ed., The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires, Volume III: Economics and Politics
  • Co-edited with Robert Holland, Ambiguities of Empire. Essays in Honour of Andrew Porter (Routledge, 2009).
  • Ed., The British Empire. Themes and Perspectives (Blackwell, 2008)
  • The Business of Decolonisation. British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast (Oxford University Press, 2000)
  • Co-edited with S.R. Ashton, Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925-45 (British Documents on the End of Empire, Series A, Volume 1, HMSO, 1996).

Jon Wilson

  • The Domination of Strangers. Modern Governance in Eastern India, c.1785-1830 (2008)
  • India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (2016) (published in North America as The Chaos of Empire. The British Raj and the Conquest of India

Jim Bjork 

  • Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (University of Michigan Press, 2008)
  • Creating Nationality in Central Europe,1880-1950: Modernity, violence, and belonging in Upper Silesia, eds. Tomasz Kamusella, Jim Bjork, Tim Wilson, and Anna Novikov (Routledge, 2016)

Ruth Craggs 

  • Craggs, R. and Neate, H. (forthcoming, 2022) Decolonising geography? Disciplinary histories and the end of the British empire in Africa Under contract with RGS-IBG Wiley-Blackwell series.
  • Craggs, R. and Wintle, C. (2016) eds. Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational productions and practices, 1945-1970 Manchester University Press, Manchester, 274 pp Link

David Edgerton 

  • The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (Penguin, 2019).

Jonathan Fennell

  • Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
  • Combat and Morale in the North African Campaign: Eighth Army and the Path to El Alamein (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Satvinder S. Juss

  • Bhagat Singh: A Life in Revolution (Penguin, July 2022)
  • The Execution of Bhagat : Heresies of the Raj (Harper Collins 2021)

Sundeep Lidher

  • Lidher, S. (2021). British Citizenship and Immigration Policy, 1945 - 1962. (Doctoral thesis). https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.78803.

Mark Lunney 

  • A History of Australian Tort Law 1901-1945: England’s Obedient Servant? (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Javed Majeed 

  • Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (2019)
  • Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (2019)
  • Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (2009)
  • Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal (2007)
  • Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (1992)

Chris Manias

  • Race, Science and the Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany, 1800-1914 (Routledge, 2013).

Justine McConnell 

  • Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (Oxford University Press, 2013)
  • Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023)
  • Co-authored with Fiona Macintosh: Performing Epic or Telling Tales (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Stephen Morgan

  • Book (forthcoming): Ealing Abroad: Post-War British Cinema, Settler Colonialism and Ealing Studios in Australia (BFI/Bloomsbury, 2023)

Michael Rowe

  • Michael Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State-Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c. 1800–1815 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
  • Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
  • Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Michael Rowe (eds), War, Demobilization and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Simon Sleight 

Agnieszka Sobocinska 

  • Agnieszka Sobocinska, Saving the World? Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
  • Agnieszka Sobocinska, Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2014.
  • David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (eds.), Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, Crawley WA: UWA Press, 2012.

Christopher Knowles 

Camilo Erlichman and Christopher Knowles (eds)

Theodora Broyd

  • “Self-Identification in French nationals of Algerian descent today”

Jasper Heeks

  • The spread of 'genus larrikin': overseas reaction to deviant and delinquent Australian youth, 1870-1940.

Sheridan Humphreys

  • After The Secret River - Towards a ‘Whether to’, ‘How to’ and ‘Why to’ For ‘Majority’ Screenwriters of ‘Minority’ Leading Roles (Thesis & Screenplay).

Sandip Kana 

  • Voluntary Institution Building in India: Non-state interventions in technical education and training, 1905-1958.

Elanor Kramer-Taylor

  • The Duties of Exile: decolonisation, nationalism and the Caribbean Left in Britain, 1945-1974.

Matthew Kwok

  • Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism, Indigenous Peoples, and the British Empire, 1840-1914.

Jen-Chieh Lin

  • Decolonising “an Empire of the Silent Dead”? The Imperial (Commonwealth) War Graves Commission and the end of the British empire, 1950-1980.

Shankar Nair

  • Small-scale and Unorganised Industries in Late Colonial India, 1900-47.

Martin Pugh

  • A Cuba off the East African coast?: Zanzibar, Britain and the Cold War, 1963-65.

David A. Williams 

  • Britains and the Sea: Maritime Landscape and English Identity in the Long 19th Century.

Williams David

  • 'Victorian Identity and the Sea: Imagining the Nation in Banal Maritime Art’ in Roberts Emma (ed), Art and the Sea (Liverpool University Press, 2022). 

Activities

‘Revolutions in the History of Empires’, 5 February 2025

Call for papers

    'The World vs the World Bank: Grassroots and Organised Resistance to 20th Century International Development.’ , 2 December 2024

    Speaker: Dr Agnieszka Sobocinska

      ‘The Glass Giant, or How to Write an International History of Modern India’, 6 November 2024

      Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

        King’s and Empire, 2 October 2024

        Contributors include: Erika Delgado (Lecturer in the History of Empire and coordinator of King’s Past project); Sarah Limb (PhD student, Department of History); Jon Wilson (Professor in Modern History, and Head of Department of History); Sarah Stockwell (Professor of the History of Empire and Decolonization).

          ‘Islam’ after Decolonisation: Fazlur Rahman and the limits of sovereignty in Pakistan, 1 May 2024

          Speaker: Dr Taushif Kara

            ‘"Coercive Colonial Legalism & The Law: The Trial of Bhagat Singh"; Respondent Professor Kim Wagner. This is a joint event with the new History and Law Research Hub, 27 March 2024

            Speaker: Professor Satvinder Juss, barrister, professor of law and a human rights expert.

              Empires and Decolonization Research Hub PhD workshop: Decolonization, Race and Education in Britain and France , 28 February 2024

              Elanor Kramer-Taylor (King’s College London) “The Duties of Exile: Nationalism, Decolonisation, and the Caribbean Left in Postwar Britain, 1945-1974” Sarah Limb (King’s College London), “Decolonisation and Student Enrolment at King’s College London, 1920-66” Coffee/ Tea break, c. 3.30 Beth Bhargava (University of Sheffield) “Young People's Histories of Empire and Migration, 1975-1989" Theodora Broyd (King’s College London) “Citizen Building or Citizen Exclusion? Trajectories inside French Education of Female Descendants of Algerian Immigration” Chair/respondents, Professor Susan Pennybacker (UNC), Sarah Stockwell.

                The History of Slavery and Enslaved People, 25 January 2024

                  Imperial Constitutions and their aftermath, 6 December 2023

                  Presentations made by Max Edling, Joanna Innes (Oxford), Stephen Lovell, Michael Rowe and Jon Wilson.

                    Rewriting the History of Decolonisation in France: the Way of Commissions, 16 November 2023

                    Vincent Hiribarren

                      Launch of the Community Bookshelf project with speaker, novelist and King's history graduate Chibundu Onuzo, 18 October 2023

                        ‘First the Empire Went’: Decolonization as prelude to the Break-Up of Britain, 4 October 2023

                        Speaker: Stuart Ward, Professor of Modern British and Imperial History at the University of Copenhagen.

                          ‘Humanitarian intervention and discontinuities between empires’, 3 May 2023

                          Lunchtime discussion led by Hub members Professor Francisco Bethencourt (History) and Dr Maeve Ryan (War Studies)

                            ‘Liberated Africans, Imperial Inquiry and the Problem of Evidence' (Tortola 1822), 27 March 2023

                            Lunchtime seminar with Professor Lisa Ford (Univ. New South Wales, Sydney).

                              ‘Solidarity Struggles: South African Anti-Apartheid Activists and Coalition Building with the Pan-African Women's Organization, 1962-1990.’, 5 December 2022

                              Speaker: Laura Cox (visiting PhD research student from King’s partner university, UNC Chapel Hill)

                                'Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Decline of the West...', 16 November 2022

                                Hub member, Professor Peter Heather.

                                  Workshop exploring the 1940s as a moment of ‘global reset’, 18 October 2022

                                  Speakers included Dr Harshan Kumarasingham, University of Edinburgh, an expert on mid-twentieth century colonial and Commonwealth political history and Professor Robert Bickers, University of Bristol, a specialist on the British empire and modern China, and Susan Pennybacker (University of Nortjh Carolina, UNC).

                                    Institutions and the Colonial Past, 20 May 2022

                                    Bringing together researchers at universities, museums and other heritage organisations, this workshop will focus on the practicalities and challenges of researching and presenting work on the colonial past (broadly defined) of institutions. The aim of the workshop is to learn from one another’s experience and to form an ongoing network.

                                      Events

                                      05Mar

                                      Post-Imperial Unions: Federal, Transnational, and Regional Constitutionalism after Empires

                                      Signe Larsen (Copenhagen/Warwick) ' Post-Imperial Unions: Federal, Transnational, and Regional Constitutionalism after Empires.’ With a comment from Richard...

                                      Please note: this event has passed.

                                      Affiliates

                                      PhD students

                                      Visiting academics

                                       

                                      People

                                      Francisco Bethencourt

                                      Charles Boxer Professor of History

                                      Jim Bjork

                                      Professor of Modern European History

                                      Ruth Craggs

                                      Professor of Political and Historical Geography

                                      Richard Drayton

                                      Professor of Imperial and Global History

                                      David Edgerton

                                      Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History

                                      Professor of Early American History

                                      Publications

                                      Books written or edited by Hub members:

                                      Richard Drayton

                                      • Ed. with Saul Dubow, Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2020)
                                      • Whose Constitution? Law, Justice and History in the Caribbean (Port of Spain, 2016)
                                      • Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the 'Improvement' World (London and New Haven, 2000)

                                      Max Edling

                                      • Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2021 [Audiobook Tantor Media, 2021]).
                                      • Co-edited with Peter Kastor, Washington’s Government: Charting the Origins of the Federal Administration (University of Virginia Press, 2021).
                                      • The Creation of the Constitution (American Historical Association and the Institute for Constitutional Studies, 2018)
                                      • .A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State 1783-1867 (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
                                      • A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford University Press, 2003 [pbk 2008]).

                                      Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

                                      • Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-62 (Cambridge, 2016)
                                      • Ed. With Elisabeth Leake, South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent (Leiden, forthcoming)

                                      Peter Heather

                                      • The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Orion, 2005).
                                      • Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development, and State Formation in the First Millennium (Orion, 2009).
                                      • Rome Resurgent: War & Empire in the Age of Justinian (OUP, 2018)
                                      • Christendom: Triumph of a Religion (Penguin, 2022 forthcoming).
                                      • With John Rapley, WHY EMPIRES FALL: America, Rome and the Decline of the West (Penguin, in press).

                                      Jean Smith

                                      • Settlers at the End of Empire: Race and the Politics of Migration in South Africa, Rhodesia and the United Kingdom (Manchester, 2022)

                                      Sarah Stockwell

                                      • Co-edited with Véronique Dimier, The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (Palgrave, 2021)
                                      • The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
                                      • Co-edited with L.J. Butler, The Wind of Change. Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
                                      • Ed., The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires, Volume III: Economics and Politics
                                      • Co-edited with Robert Holland, Ambiguities of Empire. Essays in Honour of Andrew Porter (Routledge, 2009).
                                      • Ed., The British Empire. Themes and Perspectives (Blackwell, 2008)
                                      • The Business of Decolonisation. British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast (Oxford University Press, 2000)
                                      • Co-edited with S.R. Ashton, Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925-45 (British Documents on the End of Empire, Series A, Volume 1, HMSO, 1996).

                                      Jon Wilson

                                      • The Domination of Strangers. Modern Governance in Eastern India, c.1785-1830 (2008)
                                      • India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (2016) (published in North America as The Chaos of Empire. The British Raj and the Conquest of India

                                      Jim Bjork 

                                      • Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (University of Michigan Press, 2008)
                                      • Creating Nationality in Central Europe,1880-1950: Modernity, violence, and belonging in Upper Silesia, eds. Tomasz Kamusella, Jim Bjork, Tim Wilson, and Anna Novikov (Routledge, 2016)

                                      Ruth Craggs 

                                      • Craggs, R. and Neate, H. (forthcoming, 2022) Decolonising geography? Disciplinary histories and the end of the British empire in Africa Under contract with RGS-IBG Wiley-Blackwell series.
                                      • Craggs, R. and Wintle, C. (2016) eds. Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational productions and practices, 1945-1970 Manchester University Press, Manchester, 274 pp Link

                                      David Edgerton 

                                      • The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (Penguin, 2019).

                                      Jonathan Fennell

                                      • Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
                                      • Combat and Morale in the North African Campaign: Eighth Army and the Path to El Alamein (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

                                      Satvinder S. Juss

                                      • Bhagat Singh: A Life in Revolution (Penguin, July 2022)
                                      • The Execution of Bhagat : Heresies of the Raj (Harper Collins 2021)

                                      Sundeep Lidher

                                      • Lidher, S. (2021). British Citizenship and Immigration Policy, 1945 - 1962. (Doctoral thesis). https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.78803.

                                      Mark Lunney 

                                      • A History of Australian Tort Law 1901-1945: England’s Obedient Servant? (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

                                      Javed Majeed 

                                      • Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (2019)
                                      • Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (2019)
                                      • Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (2009)
                                      • Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Nehru, Gandhi and Iqbal (2007)
                                      • Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (1992)

                                      Chris Manias

                                      • Race, Science and the Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany, 1800-1914 (Routledge, 2013).

                                      Justine McConnell 

                                      • Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (Oxford University Press, 2013)
                                      • Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023)
                                      • Co-authored with Fiona Macintosh: Performing Epic or Telling Tales (Oxford University Press, 2020)

                                      Stephen Morgan

                                      • Book (forthcoming): Ealing Abroad: Post-War British Cinema, Settler Colonialism and Ealing Studios in Australia (BFI/Bloomsbury, 2023)

                                      Michael Rowe

                                      • Michael Rowe (ed.), Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State-Formation in an Age of Upheaval, c. 1800–1815 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
                                      • Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
                                      • Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Michael Rowe (eds), War, Demobilization and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

                                      Simon Sleight 

                                      Agnieszka Sobocinska 

                                      • Agnieszka Sobocinska, Saving the World? Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
                                      • Agnieszka Sobocinska, Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2014.
                                      • David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (eds.), Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, Crawley WA: UWA Press, 2012.

                                      Christopher Knowles 

                                      Camilo Erlichman and Christopher Knowles (eds)

                                      Theodora Broyd

                                      • “Self-Identification in French nationals of Algerian descent today”

                                      Jasper Heeks

                                      • The spread of 'genus larrikin': overseas reaction to deviant and delinquent Australian youth, 1870-1940.

                                      Sheridan Humphreys

                                      • After The Secret River - Towards a ‘Whether to’, ‘How to’ and ‘Why to’ For ‘Majority’ Screenwriters of ‘Minority’ Leading Roles (Thesis & Screenplay).

                                      Sandip Kana 

                                      • Voluntary Institution Building in India: Non-state interventions in technical education and training, 1905-1958.

                                      Elanor Kramer-Taylor

                                      • The Duties of Exile: decolonisation, nationalism and the Caribbean Left in Britain, 1945-1974.

                                      Matthew Kwok

                                      • Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism, Indigenous Peoples, and the British Empire, 1840-1914.

                                      Jen-Chieh Lin

                                      • Decolonising “an Empire of the Silent Dead”? The Imperial (Commonwealth) War Graves Commission and the end of the British empire, 1950-1980.

                                      Shankar Nair

                                      • Small-scale and Unorganised Industries in Late Colonial India, 1900-47.

                                      Martin Pugh

                                      • A Cuba off the East African coast?: Zanzibar, Britain and the Cold War, 1963-65.

                                      David A. Williams 

                                      • Britains and the Sea: Maritime Landscape and English Identity in the Long 19th Century.

                                      Williams David

                                      • 'Victorian Identity and the Sea: Imagining the Nation in Banal Maritime Art’ in Roberts Emma (ed), Art and the Sea (Liverpool University Press, 2022). 

                                      Activities

                                      ‘Revolutions in the History of Empires’, 5 February 2025

                                      Call for papers

                                        'The World vs the World Bank: Grassroots and Organised Resistance to 20th Century International Development.’ , 2 December 2024

                                        Speaker: Dr Agnieszka Sobocinska

                                          ‘The Glass Giant, or How to Write an International History of Modern India’, 6 November 2024

                                          Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

                                            King’s and Empire, 2 October 2024

                                            Contributors include: Erika Delgado (Lecturer in the History of Empire and coordinator of King’s Past project); Sarah Limb (PhD student, Department of History); Jon Wilson (Professor in Modern History, and Head of Department of History); Sarah Stockwell (Professor of the History of Empire and Decolonization).

                                              ‘Islam’ after Decolonisation: Fazlur Rahman and the limits of sovereignty in Pakistan, 1 May 2024

                                              Speaker: Dr Taushif Kara

                                                ‘"Coercive Colonial Legalism & The Law: The Trial of Bhagat Singh"; Respondent Professor Kim Wagner. This is a joint event with the new History and Law Research Hub, 27 March 2024

                                                Speaker: Professor Satvinder Juss, barrister, professor of law and a human rights expert.

                                                  Empires and Decolonization Research Hub PhD workshop: Decolonization, Race and Education in Britain and France , 28 February 2024

                                                  Elanor Kramer-Taylor (King’s College London) “The Duties of Exile: Nationalism, Decolonisation, and the Caribbean Left in Postwar Britain, 1945-1974” Sarah Limb (King’s College London), “Decolonisation and Student Enrolment at King’s College London, 1920-66” Coffee/ Tea break, c. 3.30 Beth Bhargava (University of Sheffield) “Young People's Histories of Empire and Migration, 1975-1989" Theodora Broyd (King’s College London) “Citizen Building or Citizen Exclusion? Trajectories inside French Education of Female Descendants of Algerian Immigration” Chair/respondents, Professor Susan Pennybacker (UNC), Sarah Stockwell.

                                                    The History of Slavery and Enslaved People, 25 January 2024

                                                      Imperial Constitutions and their aftermath, 6 December 2023

                                                      Presentations made by Max Edling, Joanna Innes (Oxford), Stephen Lovell, Michael Rowe and Jon Wilson.

                                                        Rewriting the History of Decolonisation in France: the Way of Commissions, 16 November 2023

                                                        Vincent Hiribarren

                                                          Launch of the Community Bookshelf project with speaker, novelist and King's history graduate Chibundu Onuzo, 18 October 2023

                                                            ‘First the Empire Went’: Decolonization as prelude to the Break-Up of Britain, 4 October 2023

                                                            Speaker: Stuart Ward, Professor of Modern British and Imperial History at the University of Copenhagen.

                                                              ‘Humanitarian intervention and discontinuities between empires’, 3 May 2023

                                                              Lunchtime discussion led by Hub members Professor Francisco Bethencourt (History) and Dr Maeve Ryan (War Studies)

                                                                ‘Liberated Africans, Imperial Inquiry and the Problem of Evidence' (Tortola 1822), 27 March 2023

                                                                Lunchtime seminar with Professor Lisa Ford (Univ. New South Wales, Sydney).

                                                                  ‘Solidarity Struggles: South African Anti-Apartheid Activists and Coalition Building with the Pan-African Women's Organization, 1962-1990.’, 5 December 2022

                                                                  Speaker: Laura Cox (visiting PhD research student from King’s partner university, UNC Chapel Hill)

                                                                    'Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Decline of the West...', 16 November 2022

                                                                    Hub member, Professor Peter Heather.

                                                                      Workshop exploring the 1940s as a moment of ‘global reset’, 18 October 2022

                                                                      Speakers included Dr Harshan Kumarasingham, University of Edinburgh, an expert on mid-twentieth century colonial and Commonwealth political history and Professor Robert Bickers, University of Bristol, a specialist on the British empire and modern China, and Susan Pennybacker (University of Nortjh Carolina, UNC).

                                                                        Institutions and the Colonial Past, 20 May 2022

                                                                        Bringing together researchers at universities, museums and other heritage organisations, this workshop will focus on the practicalities and challenges of researching and presenting work on the colonial past (broadly defined) of institutions. The aim of the workshop is to learn from one another’s experience and to form an ongoing network.

                                                                          Events

                                                                          05Mar

                                                                          Post-Imperial Unions: Federal, Transnational, and Regional Constitutionalism after Empires

                                                                          Signe Larsen (Copenhagen/Warwick) ' Post-Imperial Unions: Federal, Transnational, and Regional Constitutionalism after Empires.’ With a comment from Richard...

                                                                          Please note: this event has passed.

                                                                          Affiliates

                                                                          PhD students

                                                                          Visiting academics

                                                                           

                                                                          Contact us

                                                                          Professor Sarah Stockwell, Professor of Imperial & Commonwealth History, Empires and Decolonizations Research Hub current lead

                                                                          Email: sarah.stockwell@kcl.ac.uk

                                                                          Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 0065

                                                                          Follow us