The Dawn of Asian-African Internationalism: India, China, and the 1947 Asian Relations Conference
Between 23 March and 17 April 1947, the Asian Relations Conference was convened in New Delhi. In the aftermath of WWII, a moment in which the declining Western empires and the emerging independent states intersected, entangled, and collided, this Conference arguably sparked the rise of Asian-African Internationalism.[1] The latter movement soon became a distinctive political force during the early Cold … Read More
Book Spotlight “Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola, Cambridge 2022”
From the mid-1890s, a new epidemic of sleeping sickness ravaged the northwestern part of Angola, a colony that had in part been under Portuguese rule since the sixteenth century. Claiming many thousands, probably even tens of thousands, of victims among the African population in the next few decades, the epidemic triggered mounting anxieties of depopulation among colonial officials in Angola. … Read More
Book Spotlight “Kontroverse Gewalt. Die imperiale Expansion in der englischen und deutschen Presse vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg [Contested Violence: The Imperial Expansion in the English and German Press before the First World War], Wien 2019”
In the decades prior to the First World War, as the imperialist powers sought to increase their influence around the world, both Great Britain and Germany frequently employed military force to uphold colonial rule or to expand the territory or influence of their empires. In the colonizing states, newspapers often covered these military actions at length and the imperialist ambitions … Read More
Book Spotlight “Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893-1982, Cambridge 2022”
In 1893, a group of colonial experts from thirteen countries abandoned their imperial rivalry and established the International Colonial Institute (ICI). Active until 1982, the ICI became the world’s most important colonial think tank of the twentieth century. Between 1893 and 1982, more than 700 self-styled colonial reformers joined the ICI, among them authoritative colonial experts such as Frederick Lugard, … Read More
Book Spotlight “Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868–1912, Växjö 2018”
My doctoral dissertation, Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868–1912, was defended at Linnaeus University (Växjö, Sweden) in 2018 and has recently been made available open-access online.[1] It discusses questions that have only become more relevant in the midst of the rapid expansion of transimperial history in the past several years. Initially, I planned to conduct a … Read More