Reflections on “From Empire to Europe”

Since April, we were supposed to write both blog posts and comments on the Medium website. This task could easily appear rather annoying when thinking about what one has to do each week for all the other subjects at uni. But the more I wrote on Medium, the more fun I had doing it. I could reflect not only on the topics we discussed in class but also the topics I was interested in. I included personal experiences, photos, YouTube videos and Facebook posts of friends which made this task very easy and fun for me. The fact that everybody could choose what he/she wanted to write about made it very diverse and not tedious at all. I learned a lot about history and how much it is connected to recent events. I enjoyed reading all the different opinions on often discussed topics like the Brexit.

This class has made me realise how complex the British history is as well. I had no idea what happened in Amritsar or how the partition of India and Pakistan happened exactly — the videos we watched were also very helpful! But these cruel aspects also belong to the history of the British Empire. In addition to that, I was surprised how many countries still belong to the Commonwealth — even if the “Empire” is long gone — and how they became members of it.

In conclusion, the experience of reflecting each week on the different topics of the class was a very positive one. I think I will print my posts and put them to my other documents of this class. By doing so, I have a chance to look at them later on (and do not have to go on the Medium website) :-)