In the decades before 1914, colonial propagandists argued that emigration should be directed towards the overseas colonies of the respective “motherland”. Settlement colonies which were firmly integrated into an empire would solve the social and economic problems in the metropolis and would, furthermore, strengthen the international status of a country as a world power. Reality, however, differed remarkably from these ideological visions. Only a very small percentage of those who wanted to leave their home country decided to move to the colonies and protectorates which their countries of origin had established in Africa, Asia and the Pacific world. Despite the efforts of imperial governments to direct their countries’ emigrants into their own colonies, most of the European emigrants chose the USA as a destination, whereas in many European overseas colonies South Asian and Chinese migrants formed large and influential minorities.
In recent years, much has been written on long-distance migration and ethnic minorities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, diaspora studies have received much attention, and a number of important systematic analyses have been produced by sociologists and literary scholars, developing different typologies and categories of diasporas. However, there is as yet very little historical research which makes use of these new methodological developments and, for example, compares diasporas of different ethnic origins or different types of diasporas within a specific time frame. The conference aims to fill this gap for the period under review. We want to provide a forum in which research on different diasporas in the decades between 1870 and 1914 can be related to each other. We seek to compare the inner coherence and relationship with the mother country of different ethnic diasporas with each other. By doing so, we will explore differences and parallels, but also connections and processes of transfer between different ethnic diasporas.
Furthermore, we will discuss, in a comparative perspective, what role diasporas played in the context of the imperial politics of their countries of origin. In the age of high imperialism, when it became increasingly important to demonstrate a strong global presence, many governments took an unprecedented interest in their overseas emigrants. Even those migrants who had moved to non-colonial world regions were now reconceptualised as members of an imaginary “Greater Empire” with persisting cultural, political and economic ties. The discourse on emigration had clearly merged with the discourse on imperialism. We will examine, therefore, in which ways overseas diasporas were instrumentalised by the imperial politics of their home countries, and, the other way round, in which ways developments in the diasporas influenced the politics in the countries of origin. To what extent were diasporas “constructed” by nationalist politics both within the diasporas themselves and in the home country? How closely were diasporas of the same ethnic origin in different geographical regions connected to each other? In this context, we aim to challenge the paradigm that imperialist ideologies always originated in the mother countries of colonial empires. The conference will examine to what extent ideas of “imagined communities” could be produced in overseas diasporas and then transferred back to the home country.
We invite papers which address these problems by dealing with the diasporas of European and Asian colonial powers and with the diasporas of non-colonial countries that developed in the colonies of imperial powers. Please send proposals of no more than 400 words along with your name, affiliation and email address to U.Kirchberger@gmx.de
Deadline: 8 September 2013