How to study imperial and post-imperial polities

• Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies

In this Max Weber Programme master class, Professors Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper deliver the lecture 'How to study imperial and post-imperial polities'.

Participants are welcome to ask questions on the general subjects of how to study imperial and post-imperial polities and on their books, Empires in World History (2010), and Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia.

About the speakers:

Jane Burbank is Professor Emerita of History and Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. She is a historian of Russia and, more generally, of law and empire. She is the author of Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922; Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917; and, with Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. She was awarded the 2023 Toynbee Prize for her contributions to global history.

Frederick Cooper is Professor Emeritus of History at New York University. He is the author of a trilogy of books on labour and society in East Africa and of Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (1996), Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002), and Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005). He is also co-author with Thomas Holt and Rebecca Scott of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labour, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies (2000) and with Jane Burbank of Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (2010). He is co-editor with Ann Stoler of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997) and with Randall Packard of International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (1997).