Book Spotlight: “After Barbary: Algeria’s Roles in the French and American Empires, Ithaca 2025”
American Imperialism in Conversation with Other Empires My book explores how Algeria played an important role in French-American relations from 1830, when France first occupied Algeria, through the early 1970s, in the first years of Algerian independence from French colonial authority.[1] The book studies American imperialism in a novel way by placing the origins and evolution of American imperialism in … Read More
Colonial Visualities and Their Influences Across Empires from the Late 19th to the 21st Century
Intricately linked to postcolonial realities, this essay delves into the visual-cultural connections between the establishment and challenging of white-centric perspectives, with a special focus on resistance to, as well as (re-)appropriations of, visual coloniality by non-white communities.[1] As I show, these (re-)appropriations were partly ambiguous, and cannot be fully explained by exclusively applying Eurocentric theories of collective memory. Instead, I … Read More
Book Spotlight “Prisms of Work: Labour, Recruitment and Command in German East Africa, Berlin 2024”
Global Labour History My book examines labour regimes in the colony of German East Africa (GEA) before World War I.[1] It uses three case studies: the construction of the Central Railway (1905–1916), the Otto Plantation in Kilossa (1907–1916), and the paleontological Tendaguru Expedition in the colony’s southern Lindi district (1909–1911). Combining global labour history with colonial and business history, the … Read More
The Anti-Imperialism of Economic Nationalism: Transimperial Protectionist Networks in Anticolonial Ireland, India, and China
Beginning around 1870, the protectionist US Empire sparked a global economic nationalist movement that spread like wildfire across the imperial world order. Late-nineteenth-century expansionists within the Republican Party got things started in the 1860s when they enshrined what was then known as the “American System” of protectionism – high protective tariffs coupled with subsidies for domestic industries and internal improvements … Read More
World Expositions as Transimperial Nodal Points and/or Dead Ends: Bogdanov in Paris (1878) and Rostock´s Anatomy in Chicago (1893)
Introduction In 1893, the Anatomical Institute of the University of Rostock, by the German Baltic Sea Coast, participated in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and was awarded a bronze medal, as well as a certificate for its exhibition of “preparations of the human skeletal elements”.[1] The certificate has recently been rediscovered in the collection of that very institute and … Read More