The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe's Modern Past

R. Healy, E. Dal Lago, R. Healy, E. Dal Lago, Kenneth A. Loparo, R. Healy, E. Dal Lago, Enrico Dal Lago

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137450753
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Through a range of case studies from eastern and western Europe, this book breaks new ground in investigating the extent to which European peoples living within Europe were also subjected to the ideologies and practices of colonialism.

Part I

Debating Colonialisms

1

Investigating Colonialism within Europe

Róisín Healy and Enrico Dal Lago

With nearly every great European empire today walks its dark colonial shadow … One might indeed read the riddle of Europe by making its present plight a matter of colonial shadows, speculating on what might happen if Europe became suddenly shadowless.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1925)¹

In this quotation, premier African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois described the state of the European-dominated world of the 1920s as haunted by the shadow of colonialism. He could foresee an eventual end to European colonial dominance, but could not imagine how Europe and much of the world would look in the wake of decolonisation, so intrinsic was Europe’s relationship with its colonies to its identity in the early decades of the twentieth century. This volume, The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past, attempts to pursue the field of inquiry that he called for, ‘of likening and contrasting each [European] land and its far-off shadow’.² We intend to explore the reverberations of the colonial experience across the European continent in the modern period. The image of the shadow, so eloquently invoked by Du Bois, highlights the complexity of the relationship between the European metropole and its hinterland. With its connotations of darkness, distortion and elasticity, the shadow functions as a useful metaphor for the negative and variable impact of colonial practices on Europe. The shadow is intrinsic to the object that projects it in the same way that colonial practices are an intrinsic feature of the mind of the coloniser, whether directed overseas or closer to the metropole.

One of the major areas of current scholarly debates among modern Europeanists is the relationship between overseas colonialism and expansion by European states at their frontiers. Traditionally, overseas colonialism has been seen as the logical consequence of the limits of state expansion within Europe and the redirection of expansionist impulses to overseas territories.³ Building on recent interpretations and reassessments of the expansionist ambitions of European states, we believe that it is best to consider these as a single phenomenon peaking in the early twentieth century that, reduced the territorial complexity of the globe and divided it into a handful of spheres of influence ruled largely from Europe. As a result, colonial discourses and ideologies came into broad circulation within Europe and influenced how Europeans came to see their neighbours in frontier regions.

The interconnections between Europe’s frontiers and overseas colonies were the starting point for a conference that took place at NUI Galway in June 2012. The conference was called ‘Colonialism within Europe: Fact or Fancy?’ and was sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It featured papers by a range of historians of Europe who examined this theory in the case of various frontier situations. Scholars working on European overseas colonies provided critical responses that helped to identify similarities and differences between state expansion inside and outside Europe. This volume, The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past, builds on the discussions held at the conference and examines the transfer of colonial discourses to the frontiers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European states. Most of the chapters in the book are revised versions of papers presented at the conference. We also commissioned two additional chapters. The first of these deals with the paradigmatic role of Ireland in debates on colonialism within Europe. The second investigates the notion of ‘classical colonialism’ from the South Asian perspective.

There has been a long tradition of studies of colonialism as a theoretical concept and its significance in the world history of empires. Debates about the relationship between colonialism and imperial expansion date back to the classic works by Hobson and Lenin, which provided opposing views of the origins of European overseas empires rooted in economic analysis of the costs and benefits of colonial acquisition from liberal and Marxist perspectives, respectively.⁴ Subsequently, sociologists such as André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein have elaborated a Marxist theory of European economic expansion on a global scale and the resultant division of the world into cores and peripheries.⁵ In connection with these economic arguments, Michael Hechter and Eugen Weber developed models of state modernisation that focused on the relationship between the administrative centre and the ethnic fringes, as applied to economic and cultural policies, respectively. However, scholars have distanced themselves in recent years from these models in light of criticisms of the teleological basis of modernisation theory.⁶

More recently, postcolonialism, which emerged from the regions of former European influence overseas, has directed attention towards the cultural aspects of colonialism.⁷ This has been particularly significant in explaining the dissemination of colonial categories through discourse and its impact on both the coloniser and the colonised. A good example of this is the 1997 collection edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler.⁸ The most recent global surveys of colonial empires integrate economic and cultural perspectives. Among the best of these are works by Anthony Pagden, H. L. Wesseling, Jürgen Osterhammel, John Darwin, James Belich, and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper.⁹ Studies of the British Empire in particular have incorporated postcolonialism’s insights in relation to specific mechanisms of rule to great effect. For instance, both Chris Bayly and John Darwin have highlighted the importance of information exchange and circulation in the British Empire and have emphasised the crucial role of the colonised in shaping colonial rule.¹⁰ The historiography of the Atlantic world, as pioneered by British and Irish historians, has demonstrated the importance of transfer of colonial ideas from the Old World to the New and back again and structural parallels in practices between metropoles and colonies, whether intended or subconscious. In this respect, particularly innovative has been John Elliott’s comparative examination of British and Spanish expansion in the Americas in the early modern period.¹¹ For a later period, Ulrike Lindner has analysed the transfer of colonial ideas between European colonisers, specifically British and German officials in Africa, in her recent work.¹² Particularly intriguing is the reappearance of practices derived from Germanisation by Polish Jews in Palestine, specifically settlement as a tool of ethnic demography.¹³

An increasingly large body of scholarship has clearly demonstrated the impact of the overseas colonial experience on domestic culture. Practices ranging from urban reform, eugenic planning, political competition to the arts and leisure all bore marks of Europe’s colonial engagement with overseas territories. Specifically for the German case, Birthe Kundrus has edited a collection that documents the influence of German’s brief colonial experience on advertising, gender and foreign policy.¹⁴ For the British case, particularly important is the work of Catherine Hall, who has investigated the impact of colonial discourses of race and slavery on political and cultural debates in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.¹⁵ A recent example that builds on literature on France is Alice Conklin’s study of the influence of the French colonial empire on anthropology and science.¹⁶ An edited collection entitled Russia’s Orient explores how perceptions about the civilised or savage character of non-Russian peoples at the borders of the Russian empire determined the extent of autonomy allowed them within the imperial system.¹⁷ By pointing to the pervasiveness of colonial thinking in these realms, these studies suggest the potential for considering colonial transfer in other contexts.

Currently, scholars working on Germany, drawing on the Sonderweg school of continuity and earlier work by Hannah Arendt on the origins of totalitarianism, have posited a connection between colonial practices in Germany’s overseas empire and in European territories under Nazi rule.¹⁸ Specifically, Jürgen Zimmerer’s research has sparked a debate about links between the German genocide of the Herero and the Nama in Southwest Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Holocaust four decades later. In various publications, Zimmerer has consistently argued for a clear causal connection from Windhuk to Auschwitz, both in terms of ideology and practice. He has maintained that know-how moved from Germany’s African colonies to its eastern frontier through inter-generational and institutional continuities.¹⁹ This contention has been addressed in mainstream German historiography, as evidenced in the most recent surveys of German colonialism, such as those by Winfried Speitkamp, Gisela Graichen and Horst Gründer, and Sebastian Conrad.²⁰ Scholars of the Holocaust have also addressed this debate, as have scholars of comparative genocide.²¹ Ben Kiernan and Robert Gellately have built on the continuity debate in order to explore the possibilities of links between genocides committed against indigenous peoples in European colonies and ethnic minorities in Europe in the twentieth century.²² The most recent survey of Germany from unification to the Second World War by Shelley Baranowski has stressed continuities between the colonial activities of the German Empire and the later Nazi regime. Drawing on Zimmerer and American scholar Benjamin Madley, she has argued that ‘the African connection emerged as well through figures important to the early history of the Nazi movement, among them Hermann Göring, whose father was the first colonial governor of Southwest Africa’.²³

The continuity thesis has, however, been hotly contested. Sebastian Conrad pointed out important differences between German colonial genocides and the Holocaust, which undermines Zimmerer’s continuity thesis. He notes specifically the highly industrialised character of the Nazi murder machine and the deliberate attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish population, by contrast with the incidental deaths of large numbers of Herero and Nama women and children.²⁴ Birthe Kundrus has argued that Zimmerer confuses colonial rhetoric with colonial practices, and she emphasises the differences between the racial policies of Imperial and Nazi Germany.²⁵ Robert Gerwarth and Stefan Malinowski point in particular to the tenuous personal links between German officials working in the colonial and Nazi periods, which were separated by several decades. They also note that other colonial empires committed atrocities against indigenous populations. Nonetheless, these practices did not culminate in the mass murder of Europe’s Jewish population.²⁶ In fact, the German mistreatment of the indigenous population of Southwest Africa did not differ substantially from the mistreatment of indigenous peoples throughout the colonial world. One only has to think about the case of the Belgian Congo, where about 10 million Africans died as a result of slave-like labour conditions in the reign of King Leopold II.²⁷

It should be pointed out, however, that the debate about the links between Germany’s colonial past and its ultimate consequence represented by the Holocaust is singular in European historiography. The exceptionality of the Holocaust has led scholars to overlook other possibly long-term and less-lethal legacies of colonial practices, whether in German-occupied territory or other European regions, and to other possible roots of Nazi genocide from other empires’ colonies. The anti-Semitism of the Nazis marks a significant rupture in ideology and policy towards outsider groups in that it constituted a systematic and determined attempt at mass elimination of a single ethnic group as opposed to the pragmatic type of violence involved in removing colonial populations. Yet it is apparent that a similar pragmatic approach to subject populations informed everyday Nazi policy in the East, exemplified by their use of mass reprisals against civilians in order to deter resistance. Despite their scepticism regarding the Windhuk to Auschwitz thesis, Gerwarth and Malinowski believe that ‘it remains plausible to assume that the ideas and practices that characterised Europe’s colonial mastery over the world had some repercussions on inner-European history and that “knowledge transfers” occurred in some areas.’²⁸ Likewise, the authors of a recent article on continuities in German history, Winson Chu, Jesse Kaufman and Michael Meng acknowledge ‘the similarity that existed in German imaginations of the region as an imperial space to be dominated’ and, despite their reservations about the levels of violence and anti-Semitism that separated the wars, therefore allow room for an interpretation of German rule of the East in both world wars as colonial.²⁹ Sebastian Conrad has also emphasised the connections between colony and metropole and has pointed to several publications that have attempted to overcome this conceptual dichotomy.³⁰ He himself has made a case for the colonial character of Prussian rule in Poland.³¹ In addition, David Furber has unearthed examples of everyday practices evident in both the German colonies and Nazi-occupied Poland, such as the prohibition on using footpaths and the obligation to salute Germans they encountered.³²

While the debate on the continuities cannot be settled until a much more thorough investigation of such practices has been conducted, it is very likely that scholars have not yet discovered the full extent of the influence of the colonial experience on the German heartland. In fact, despite Gerwarth and Malinowski’s claims, it is likely that the knowledge of precedents in colonies governed by other European powers informed G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I Debating Colonialisms
• Part II Colonialism as Nationalisation?
• Part III Colonialism under Communism
• Index