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

Book Spotlight “Transimperial Histories of Knowledge: Exchange and Collaboration from the Margins of Imperial Europe, Comparativ 31/5-6 (2021)”

This thematic issue developed in the midst of the pandemic. We, the co-editors of the issue, embarked on our respective PhD projects at the Chair for Global History at ETH Zurich in the fall of 2019. By summer 2020, we were trying to find ways to do advance in our research and work collaboratively despite Covid restrictions that hindered much … Read More

Afrika erforschen. Kooperation und Konkurrenz zwischen Europäern im 19. Jahrhundert

Category: Essay 0

Die Erzählung des Scramble for Africa, der mit der Berliner Kongokonferenz 1884–85 begann, könnte vermuten lassen, dass auch die Erforschung des afrikanischen Kontinents dem Konkurrenzdenken folgte, welche die Politik der europäischen Nationalstaaten im späten 19. Jahrhundert häufig prägte. In diesem Essay will ich dagegen zeigen, dass die Erforschung Afrikas in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts vielfach in der Form … Read More

Transimperial Guess-Work: British and French Systems of Knowledge Sharing against Transimperial Immigrants

Category: Essay 0

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

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

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