Settler Colonialism and Informal Empire in the German-speaking Diaspora, Early Modern to Modern Period

GSA 2023 Panel Call for Papers

Claudia Roesch, GHI Washington
Roii Ball, University of Münster

German-speaking settlers and merchants were involved in colonial practices in the Americas, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, and elsewhere long before a German colonial empire was established. Spaces of European imperial expansion and frontiers of European settlement seemed to many German-speakers to offer opportunities that were not available at home, centuries before Germans started to think about a nation-state and its importance for a global empire. Religious separatists envisioned such regions as empty spaces to create autonomous communities and practice freedom of religion. Utopian engineers envisioned lands of natural abundance and spaces for experimentation. Banking and merchant families sought new business opportunities. All these groups used the political might and expansive infrastructures of formal empires to set up trade routes, win concessions, receive land, secure labor, and establish missionary outposts. They enjoyed a privileged position in the shifting political economies of race and labor that were set up and negotiated across European, but their hold on such privileges and their adherence to racial hierarchies could also be challenged and contested. At the same time, these “global Germans” maintained connections with German-speaking central Europe through trade, circulation of news, and the maintenance of extended family and kinship networks.

The proposed GSA panel investigates the intersection of ideas, epistemologies, and practices of utopian, millenarian, and commercial settlement with settler colonialism before the onset of a formal German colonialism in the last two decades of the ninetieth century. We are particularly interested in so-called utopian settlement because the research on them has been traditionally decoupled from settler colonialism. While utopian settlements, for example, were studied from the perspectives of migration history, religion studies, history of ideas, and the social history of community making, scholars of settler colonialism focused on imperial frontiers of settlement, land appropriation and the configuration of race and labor. Scholars have been offering readings of Thomas More’s Utopia through a settler colonial lens for some time, but historical research of actual utopian settler communities started to integrate settler colonial perspectives only in the last decade. Nevertheless, some scholars maintain that the very category of Utopia is Eurocentric and rooted in Western perspectives and ideas, and we would like to critically engage this question from multiple perspectives. What are the stakes of labeling communal or commercial projects as utopian? Is there a relationship between settler colonialism and communal utopias that goes deep into a partially shared social logic? Or do such settlement initiatives take on or repurpose utopian ideologies not only to create community but to justify colonization? Did such schemes amounted to a German colonialism before the formation of the Wilhelmine Empire, or is this a teleological fallacy only? What approaches and methodologies would be helpful for weaving together relational and polycentric stories of “Germans in the world,” as Glenn Penny called them, while provincializing German-speaking central Europe and integrating imperial, colonial, and settler colonial structures that shaped hopes and lives?

The proposed panel seeks to bring these different strands together and explore the entangled histories, methodological quandaries, and analytical dilemmas brought up by the study of German utopian, millenarian, and commercial settlement and settler colonialism, highlighting postcolonial approaches, relational histories, and innovative contextualizations, conceptualizations, and methodologies.

If you are interested in presenting a paper in the panel, please send a short abstract (350-500 words) and bio to the organizers by March 10, 2023.