Governing Global Empires

5-6 March 2027 

University of Toronto 

The Department of History at the University of Toronto and the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough invite paper proposals for Governing Global Empires, a two-day conference that will explore ideas and practices of political order within and across multiple sites of empire since the eighteenth century. 

From the late eighteenth through the twentieth century, empires drove political, economic, and social transformations that shaped the modern world. They incorporated distant people and territories into global networks of capital, drove resource extraction, expanded systems of unfree labour, and engendered widespread warfare and colonial violence. ‘Empire’ was a common form of political organization and was applied to a wide range of polities from regional configurations to globe-spanning assemblages. How were these empires governed? How did colonial subjects shape frameworks of governance, and what alternative visions did they articulate? To what extent are contemporary structures of governance a legacy of empire? 

Historians have long recognized the deeply intertwined histories of empire and globalization in the modern period, mapping the movement of people, capital, and commodities, institutions and ideas across multiple sites of empire. Yet there’s a tendency to focus on connections and comparisons within empires, rather than between and among them. By bringing together scholars working on different colonial locales within and across different empires, we hope to better understand how empire and conditions of globality shaped ideas and practices of political order. 

We invite historically-grounded papers across disciplines, including but not limited to Indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, History, Black studies, American studies, settler colonial studies, Art history, Anthropology, Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. 

Contributions might engage how the following phenomena challenged, facilitated or were otherwise implicated in practices and experiences of imperial governance: • Settler colonialism and notions of territorial sovereignty • Reform movements and anticolonial resistance • Indigenous forms of governance • Public opinion, media, institutions, and networks • Liberalism and illiberalism • Gender, colonial violence, and racialization • Constitutions and the law • Eurocentrism, Anglo-centrism and evolving concepts of world order • Capitalism, resource extraction, and competing imperial formations • Decolonization • Evolving technologies (travel, communications, military) 

Submission Instructions: We welcome proposals for individual papers, as well as panels of three to four presenters. Individual paper proposals should be sent by email as one document attachment to governingglobalempires@gmail.com and include: • Paper title and abstract (300 words) • Brief CV (1-2 pages) 

Panel proposals should be sent by email as one document attachment to governingglobalempires@gmail.com and include: • Overview of panel theme (300 words) • Titles and Abstracts of each paper (300 words each) • Brief CV (1-2 pages) of each panelist 

Deadline: 10 July 2026 

Please note that the conference will be wholly in person. The organizers are working to secure funding to help defray the costs of travel expenses for graduate students and precariously employed participants. Details will be circulated as they become available. 

Questions related to the conference can be forwarded to governingglobalempires@gmail.com or directly to the conference organizers: Dr. Paula Hastings paula.hastings@utoronto.ca Dr. Alex Martinborough alex.martinborough@utoronto.ca