HIST 2742: European Empires and Post-Imperial Spaces, 1848 to the Present, Prof. Gregor Thum
This course is designed to complement Pernille Røge's Seas, Peoples, and Empires seminar (taught in the fall) both chronologically and geographically. If Professor Røge's course explores the maritime empires of the 17th to the early 19th centuries, this course explores the land empires of Central and Eastern Europe and their successor states from the March Revolution of 1848 to Russia's war against Ukraine. This course goes partly beyond the established canon of imperial history by also looking at the legacy of imperialism in unexpected places. The topics explored in this course include the German liberal imperialism of the 19th century, as expressed by the economist Friedrich List and his followers in the German National Assembly in Frankfurt in 1848/1849; Russia's expansion to the Caucasus, Siberia and Central Asia and the question of how colonialism is defined when no ocean separated Metropole and colony; imperial responses to the rise of national movements in Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on the Habsburg Monarchy; modern population and settlement policies in ethnically mixed border regions, pioneered by Prussia in the late 19th century (with the United States as model) and exported to East Central Europe and Palestine/Israel after World War I; the Soviet Union as an empire of a new kind, oscillating between Marxist-inspired anticolonialism and the continuation of Russian imperial traditions; the hidden and not so hidden imperialism of imperial successor states, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania; Nazi Germany's war in eastern Europe as neo-colonial war; and the European Union as possibly new kind of empire, created in response not only to the Cold War, but also the decolonization of the 1950s. A discussion about Russia's war in Ukraine in the context of neo-imperialism will conclude the course.