Contenu pour l'année 2023-24:
Voyages of discovery in the age of Enlightenment: exploration, representation, appropriation

In the age of Enlightenment, Britain’s commercial and colonial expansion was closely intertwined with the acquisition of knowledge. The securing of trade routes and territorial conquest were facilitated by scientific advances and an unprecedented increase in representations of the non-European world, in the form of travel accounts, maps, drawings and paintings, produced by naval officers and the natural philosophers and artist travellers who accompanied them on their voyages. This seminar will focus on travel accounts and artworks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the strategies through which they represented the wider world, at a time when dominant imperial discourses were not yet established but the increase in knowledge paved the way for further expansion. Students will be expected to improve their analytical skills by studying and commenting on a selection of primary sources. They will also be encouraged to become familiar with scholarly publications, through regular reading assignments.

Moodle link: https://moodle.unistra.fr/course/view.php?id=1848#section-0
(the page will be regularly updated)

 

The objectives of the course are:

• To improve the students’ understanding of a foundational moment in the history of the English-speaking world
• To allow the students to become acquainted with important historiographic developments, and changing approaches to the question of British imperialism.
• To continue developing methods of analysis when working with both visual and textual primary sources.

Bibliography:
Philip Edwards, James Cook: The Journals, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, Empire and Others: British encounters with indigenous peoples 1600-1850, Routledge, 2003.
Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return to the Pacific, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook, Penguin, 2018.
Bernard Smith, European vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.
Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books, 1978.