Reinventing International Colonialism during a Crisis of Empire

Belgian-British Colonial Exchanges between Inter-Imperialism and Inter-Colonial Technical Cooperation, 1920s–1930s

Bibliographic Data

ID11944201
AuthorsGeert Castryck (0000-0002-2999-004X, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume48
Issue5
Pages846-865
Publication date2020-09-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-6534 • E-ISSN: 1743-9329
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/03086534.2020.1816618
OpenAlexW3112745382
LanguageEN
References cited27

Assessing attempts to revive Belgian-British colonial exchanges in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this paper suggests a refined understanding of the crisis of empire, not so much as a crisis of individual empires (as was the case in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe), but as a crisis of inter-imperial relations and of an underlying imperial order. This becomes apparent when contrasting developments in and between colonies with inter-imperial initiatives in the metropole, thus giving more prominence to the colonial perspective than has hitherto been done in the historiography on the link between imperialism and internationalisation. Although the colonial administration was actually strengthened in the 1920s, marking this period as the heyday of colonialism, and even though the new international order was still heavily influenced by imperial member-states, we observe a growing disconnect between empire and colonies, which becomes manifest in direct inter-colonial exchanges, bypassing imperial channels, and increasingly based on topical issues tackled by experts. In other words, we see a shift from an imperial order to inter-colonial technical cooperation, largely in line with the development of transnational expertise on the international level in the same period

Ancient history · Archaeology · British Empire · Colonialism · Economic history · Economics · Empire · Historiography · Imperial unit system · Order (exchange · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Australian History and Society · History · Scottish History and National Identity · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

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