Transimperial Guess-Work: British and French Systems of Knowledge Sharing against Transimperial Immigrants
Consider the following two accounts. Both are separate incidents and refer to different immigrants, but each involves correspondence and intelligence-sharing practices regarding transimperial migrants—individuals who moved across the frontiers of empires—between British and French imperial authorities in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa during the 1930s and 1940s. The first account involves the aftermath of an arrest made by Palestine … Read More
Indians and Koreans in Crosscolonial Solidarity: Part II. Rabindranath Tagore and His Transimperial Encounters
Introduction Part II of my blog series continues to explore Indian feelings of “crosscolonial solidarity” with Korea, focusing on how such feelings are manifested in the emotions, ideals, and deeds of one person, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)―a polymath intellectual most famous for his poetry, which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Tagore visited Japan multiple times, in 1916, … Read More
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