Imperial Afterlives: Life in the Wake of the German Empire, 1918-34

What happens to imperial institutions with the collapse of empire? How are bureaucracies, properties, and technologies repurposed? How does this process shape subsequent political, social, and economic developments in successor states and territories? And how do international institutions seek to manage this process/become impacted by it?

This project directs attention to the collapse of the German empire, both in Europe and across its colonies after the First World War. A PI and CI with wide-ranging expertise in modern German history will trace the reworking of imperial infrastructures, whose purposes were transformed by the defeat of the Central Powers. The project extends recent lines of socio-political research, which bring to life local experiences and agency in the wake of empire. We delve into a whole range of areas of everyday life, ranging from the dismantling of institutions to the use of railways, telegraph lines, currencies, and property purchases to show how populations engaged with infrastructures of empire, and in doing so often pushed and pulled the new international order in different directions. The project thus yields general methodological insights into the myriad links between local, place-specific events and wider historical trends, as well as shining new light on the impact of Germany's imperial legacies and the development of direct international territorial administration.

The project will bring its findings into dynamic collaboration with museum curators and volunteers in Berlin, who in lack of museums dedicated to colonialism in Germany, are seeking to turn city boroughs into museums in and of themselves. In addition, the project will bring our collaborations in Berlin into formal conversation with similar curatorial/civil-society initiatives across Europe and Africa at the Africa Centre in London (Project Partner), to think internationally about how we address colonial legacies in the cityscape.