(Press release of the Herder Institute)
Summer School des Herder-Instituts, 26.-29. September 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.