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

Category: Essay 0

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

Together against the “Winds of Change”: Cooperation between South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal during the Decolonization of Southern Africa

Category: Essay 0

With the end of the Second World War began the final stage of formal European colonialism – the age of decolonization. In the 1950s and 1960s, several states in Asia and Africa gained independence and European colonial empires began to crumble. By the mid-1960s, only Southern Africa seemed to have been forgotten by this development. In the Portuguese colonies of … Read More

The Dawn of Asian-African Internationalism: India, China, and the 1947 Asian Relations Conference

Category: Essay 0

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 “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

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