In Time’s Monster, Priya Satia shows how historians of the British Empire not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed. History emerged as a mode of ethics in the modern period, endowing historians from John Stuart Mill to Winston Churchill with outsized policymaking power. Braided with this story is an account of alternative visions articulated by anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi and E. P. Thompson. By the mid-twentieth century, their approaches had reshaped the discipline of history and the ethics that came with it.

Priya Satia, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Stanford University

Priya Satia specializes in modern British and British empire history, especially in the Middle East and South Asia.

Discussants:

Louiza Odysseos, Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex

Louiza Odysseos's research interests lie at the junctures of international theory, continental philosophy and decolonial thought, with special emphasis on resistance, poetics and ethics. She is author of 'Stolen Life’s Poetic Revolt’ and 'Prolegomena to Any Future Decolonial Ethics: Coloniality, Poetics and "Being Human as Praxis”' both published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

David Andress, Professor of Modern History, University of Portsmouth

David Andress is a historian of the French Revolution, and of the social and cultural history of conflicts in Europe and the Atlantic world more generally in the period between the 1760s and 1840s. He is author of Cultural Dementia: How The West Has Lost Its History, And Risks Losing Everything Else.

Chair:

Gurminder K Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex

Organised by the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Sussex