Summer school, Herder Institute Marburg, September 26-29, 2022
Colonial cities, especially port cities, as well as border regions between empires have historically played a decisive role in the perception of colonial rule. They formed key transitional spaces in political, social, cultural, economic, administrative, military and religious conflicts and can be regarded as having held particularly prominent hinge positions with respect to the mobility — in some cases the limited mobility — of people, animals, goods, ideas, epidemics and much more. Hence as kinds of “crossroad regions”, they have been places where questions of the imperial states’ and societies’ security/insecurity have been addressed very differently.
The summer school will focus on colonial cities and imperial border regions as spaces that deve loped representative positions of respective colonialisms and imperialisms, also as a way to re-center colonial political and economic power. Moreover, they can be seen as part of a network that existed beyond a single colonial point of reference, for example in the relationship between Shanghai and Singapore and Jakarta, or in the connections between Riga and the Russian Empire. In the long 19th century (1780-1920), and thus in an intermediate phase between two decolonization processes, colonial cities and border regions formed spaces of intensive inter-imperial inter actions (as well as rivalries), as “crossroad regions” so to speak, where dynamics of intertwinement developed through transnational interrelationships. The research interests of the summer school will draw on these ideas by recognizing colonial cities and border regions as instruments of various forms and mechanisms of expansion, in which conflicts (around mobility) were carried out just as opportunities for cooperation were sought. Not infrequently, these places reflected experimental phases — concerning the conceptualization of laboratories between colonial and transnational interrelationships, as well as the securitization, and, not least, on the re-centering of the “peripheries”.
Program
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
3.00 pm Benedikt Stuchtey (Marburg) / Heidi Hein-Kircher (Marburg): Welcome and Introduction of all Participants
3.15 pm Benedikt Stuchtey (Marburg): Some Brief Introductory Remarks of on Empire Studies
4.30 pm KEYNOTE (online) Frank Sterkenbergh (Utrecht): Modernizing the unmodern: Europe’s continental imperial monarchies and their pathways to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth century
Registration for guests: sfbevent@uni-marburg.de (you will get an automatic reply with login information)
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27
10.45 pm PANEL I: Acquiring and Developing Imperial Peripheries
4.00 pm KEYNOTE Inessa Kouteiniova (Amsterdam): Divisions, Domination and Coexistence: Geography and Imagery in Central Asian Photography during the Russian Rule
WEDNESAY, SEPTEMBER 28
9.00 am PANEL II: Creating Identities under Imperial Rule
11.30 am GUIDED TOUR through Herder-Institute and Hands-on Work
4.00 pm KEYNOTE (online) John Connelly (Berkely): Was the Habsburg Empire an Empire?
Registration for guests: sfbevent@uni-marburg.de (you will get an automatic reply with login information)
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29
9.00 am PANEL III: Imperial Port Cities as Points of Contact and Transfer
12.00 am FINAL DISCUSSION
The summer school is organized by Dr. Heidi Hein-Kircher (Herder Institute Marburg) and Prof. Dr. Benedikt Stuchtey (Chair of Modern History at Philipps University in Marburg)
