The seminar deals with the history of colonial processes. We shall not focus on colonialist attitudes and images but on colonial societies, in particular on frontier societies shaped to a significant extent by the dynamics of frontier spaces. We shall begin with pre-modern colonialism and then move on to examine some more modern examples to test different conceptualization of colonialism. This is, by definition, an experimental seminar; participants would be required to engage in independent work, to acquaint themselves with different approaches and present case studies