GlobeColloquium
Integration and Collaborative Imperialism in Modern Europe: At the Margins of Empire, 1800–1950
Historian Mikko Toivanen (Berlin) discusses, how smaller European powers and regions at the margins of the continent integrated into an imperial, global World, which was strongly influenced by their more powerful neighbours.
A cooperation of ReCentGlobe with the Transimperial History Centre, the Department of East Asian Studies and the Historic Seminar. This event is held in English.
With Mikko Toivanen (Berlin)
How did smaller European powers and regions at the margins of the continent integrated into a globally interconnected world that was heavily shaped by their more powerful European neighbours? A new edited volume by Mikko Toivanen and Bernhard Schär explored case studies on Nordic, Eastern and Central European regions to uncover how countries such as Sweden, Serbia or Switzerland became imperial, despite having no or only short-lived overseas colonies of their own.
In our next session of the GlobeColloquium Mikko Toivanen will discuss the structures and networks that enabled these regions to actively participate in and benefit from the imperial world around them, as well as the fact that 19th-century European imperial subjugation of almost the entire planet was driven not only by undeniable rivalry and competition among the greater European powers, but also necessarily depended on collaboration and exchanges across national and imperial boundaries.
Mikko Toivanen has a background in global and colonial history, with a specific focus on nineteenth-century Southeast Asia as a trans-imperial space. He defended his PhD, on colonial travel and leisure in Java, Ceylon and the Straits Settlements, at the European University Institute in October 2019. Colonial travel in a global cultural context is also the topic of his monograph The Travels of Pieter Albert Bik: Writings from the Dutch Colonial World of the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden University Press, 2017).
Most recently, Toivanen was a visiting scholar at Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute, Free University Berlin, where he worked on his postdoctoral project Staging a Colonial Capital: The Construction of Public Space in Singapore and Batavia through Spectacle and Ceremony, 1845-1870. The project examined the development of urban culture and ceremonial uses of public space in Southeast Asia through a range of case studies from the middle of the nineteenth century, while also seeking to address contemporary debates about imperial legacies in postcolonial cityscapes.