This class will approach the concepts of empire through the figure of the “conscript.” The figure of the conscripted soldier, fighting not-quite-voluntarily, in the service of imperial wars, will provide for us a window to enter into global histories from the perspective of subaltern subjects. While we often speak of postcolonial agency, conscription affords a way of understanding how that agency is constrained by structural conditions. Extending the idea of conscription from armies to indentured laborers, workers, revolutionaries, spies, fundamentalists, and financial analysts (all "conscripts of modernity," in the historian David Scott's phrase), in texts by South Asian, African, Caribbean and their diasporic authors, we will consider how imperial world-making registers at the level of individuals and how these individuals negotiate the demands of modernity. FULFILLS HUMANITIES AND GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING REQUIREMENTS.