Past to Future: The Temporal Dimensions of Transimperial History

Early modern historians agree the history of empire is global, entangled and interconnected. There work also, however, remains plagued by national perspective. Steps have been taken to resist this century-old tradition. Results remain mixed: National perspectives of empire have been replaced by geographical tropes of analysis that have become self-evident rather than heuristic historiographical tools (examples include Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, or Atlantic History).

To ‘de-Europeanize’ and ‘de-nationalize’ early modern empire studies, some scholars have engaged with writing from the ‘fringes’, focusing on the exchanges between individuals living in different empires. Examples involve the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, or South China Sea. However, these are spaces where the institutional and territorial ‘weaknesses’ of empire were most evident, and where, mostly by lack of resources combined with weak colonial states, transimperial interactions were a necessity rather than a choice. In these spaces, legality and illegality became blurred by autonomy and self-organized deployment of social interests at large.

However, European transimperial exchanges happened not only in peripheries or in gray/illegal zones. They arose since European empires were being negotiated from the 1410s in European (urban) centers. I propose to steer our conversation to those roots. I focus on three developments: 1) transition from societal stakeholdership to shareholdership of empire; 2) re-locate the transition from colonialism to imperialism from the 1880s to the 1720s, a process in which European societies became as much part of empire as all the occupied societies elsewhere in the world; 3) how 1-combined-with-2 caused a shared European culture of colonial and imperial exploitation that partially transmutes in the experiences of 20^th-century empires (especially the US and Japan) and continues in the post-colonial world to today.