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
Routes of Violence: Transimperial Mobility and Colonial War in the British, German, and Dutch Empires, c. 1880–1914
In autumn 1900, the German colonial officer Robert von Krieg was travelling in the deep interior of what was then the colony of German East Africa. At Rubugwa, in the district of Tabora, his expedition of askari soldiers and porters must have been rather astonished to come upon a group of camping uniformed colonial soldiers, so-called “Sudanese,” who declared they … Read More
Indians and Koreans in Crosscolonial Solidarity: Part 1. The Indian Press on Japanese Rule and Korean Independence
Introduction: “Crosscolonial Solidarity?” In a series of essays on this blog, my intention is to explore some aspects of what I will call “crosscolonial solidarity.” It refers to a feeling of solidarity entertained by and among different colonized peoples across different empires. It bears similarities to, but is not identical with, the sense of anti-colonial solidarity circulating within one given … Read More