HIS32920 Britain in the Islamic World: Themes of empire, religion, and resistance 1800-1950

Academic Year 2024/2025

At its height, British imperial authority extended over hundreds of millions of Muslim subjects from the Straits of Malacca to the Niger basin and beyond. While a diverse cadre of British soldiers, policy-makers, census enumerators, intelligence agents, missionaries, writers, scholars, and explorers divided these subjects along lines of sect, race, caste, tribe, and nation, collectively they were conceived of as comprising one coherent civilization, an “Islamic world”. This course will explore the engagement of the British Empire with this world through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine the imperial impulse which drove British expansion into the heartland of territories long held by the great Islamic powers of the early modern age, with a special emphasis on the Indian subcontinent and the Arab Middle East. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which British authorities came to categorize and “know” their Muslim subjects, and the impact that this process of colonial knowledge building had in shaping the modern identities of Muslims across the empire. As the period under review incorporates the birth of a truly global, pan-Islamic Muslim consciousness, we will engage with the efforts of key Muslim thinkers and movements to make sense of their place and prospects in a world dominated by European imperialism. Finally, we will consider the challenge and nuances of nationalism and the formal end of empire, and its legacy in terms of contemporary life in South Asia, the Middle East, and Britain.