Isabell Scheele and Christine de Gemeaux (ICD laboratory, Univ. of Tours), and Karine Ramondy (SIRICE laboratory, Univ. Paris I)

Time: 17.-18.03.2022
Venue: Tours
Proposals by: 01.11.2021

The recent transnational and global turn in social sciences [1] has encouraged experts of colonial and imperial history to explore the history of colonial empires in the light of globalising effects [2]. Thus the notion of ‚trans-imperiality‘, conceptualised by Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé [3], brings a renewal to the study of empires, to the point of imposing itself as a new field of study. The challenge is to go beyond the comparative analysis of imperial formations to focus on population movements, transfers of knowledge and goods between empires [4], but also to highlight the networks and exchanges of ideas between people fighting for the end of imperial dominations [5].

Colloquia on this new approach have increased in number since 2017, and they have revealed that the evolvement of the various empires did not occur in a vacuum, the territorial analysis to have been reductive and there to have been many exchanges, circulations and transfers influencing their construction and evolution [6].

The sine qua non of this method is to compare at least two imperial powers regarding the concomitant phenomena of connectivity, cooperation and competition. To what extent do these different forms of contact between empires generate transfers, changes and modifications? Furthermore, colonial and postcolonial studies seem to focus on male perspectives (reports, memoirs of colonial administrators, military officers, missionaries, etc.) and on reductive territorial analyses, limited to the study of a specific colony, mostly ignoring African/Western women and the trans-imperial context in which the colonising powers compete and – sometimes – collaborate. The approach favoured here integrates the perspectives developed by … read more and source (Web).