Roland Cvetkovski

Volker Barth

"Conflict and competition between imperial powers has long been a feature of global history, but their co-operation has largely been a peripheral concern. Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870-1930 redresses this imbalance, providing a coherent conceptual framework for the study of inter-imperial collaboration and arguing that it deserves an equally prominent position in the field. Using a variety of examples from across Asia, Europe and Africa, this book demonstrates the ways in which empires have shared and exchanged their knowledge about imperial governance, including military strategy, religious influence and political surveillance. It asks how, when and where these partnerships took place, and who initiated them. Not only does this book fill an empirical gap in the study of imperial history, it traces ideas of empire from their conception in imperial contact zones to their implementation in specific contexts. As such, this is an important study for imperial and global historians of all specialisms. For several decades empires have been a central topic of international research. The attempts to grasp both the unique character of every single empire and their functional similarities are legion, and most studies are concerned and struggle with a comprehensive definition of exercising imperial power. Yet the term empire does not only refer to the formation of hierarchical global power structures but also comprises the coexistence of different power practices and the manifestation of specific regimes of rule within imperial realms. As the contributions argue, this coexistence of different imperial formations was also significantly characterized by cooperation, inasmuch as, for example, scientific conferences, diplomatic relations or strategic exchange of practices represented fields of mutual willingness to learn from each other. The book and its contributions focus on inter-imperial encounters, highlights the conception of governance that originated.

Empires and Encounters

Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870-1930

Raum und Mobilität im Zarenreich

Modernisierung durch Beschleunigung

Alexis Hofmeister

Ethnographers helped to perceive, to understand and also to shape imperial as well as Soviet Russia's cultural diversity. This volume focuses on the contexts in which ethnographic knowledge was created. Usually, ethnographic findings were superseded by imperial discourse: Defining regions, connecting them with ethnic origins and conceiving national entities necessarily implied the mapping of political and historical hierarchies. But beyond these spatial conceptualizations the essays particularly address the specific conditions in which ethnographic knowledge appeared and changed. On the one hand, they turn to the several fields into which ethnographic knowledge poured and materialized, i.e., history, historiography, anthropology or ideology. On the other, they equally consider the impact of the specific formats, i.e., pictures, maps, atlases, lectures, songs, museums, and exhibitions, on academic as well as non-academic manifestations.

Roland Cvetkovski

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