Call for Papers: The Global History of War and Empire
In collaboration with the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies, the Research School for Political History, the Netherlands Institute for Military History, the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy, and the University of Amsterdam, SHoW invites proposals for a conference on the global history of war and empire.
This will be a face-to-face conference in Amsterdam on the 24-25 November 2022.
This conference seeks to provide a space for a measured and informed analysis of war and empire, taking a global and transnational view of the place of violence in the making and remaking of colonial states and societies.
While war was the pre-eminent force in the making of a truly globalised world, histories of empire and war remain marginal to much of global and world history. At the same time, the role of force in the establishment and defence of imperial rule, the relationship between violence, colonialism and anti-colonialism, as well as the legacies and continuities of colonial violence are the subject of fierce scholarly and societal debate. This conference seeks to provide a space for a measured and informed analysis of war and empire, taking a global and transnational view of the place of violence in the making and remaking of colonial states and societies. In this call for proposals we invite the submission of papers and panels that explore some of the following themes:
– New chronologies, periodisations, framings. How do we get beyond established periodisations and the limits they impose (to connect the colonial and postcolonial, but also transmissions across and along imperial chronologies – i.e. relationship between ‘first’ and ‘second’ British empires; between colonial conquest (pre-1900) and anti-colonial resistance (post-1900); the colonial roots of counter-insurgency, and militarised policing.
– New geographies (and post-geographies). How can we write a truly global history of war and empire, across and between national and imperial frames?
– Culture, conflict, history – How did imperial cultures of race, gender, sexuality inform military praxis from the barracks to the battlefield? What might a cultural history of imperial conflict look like?
– Nations/empires/wars/histories – How did nation states fight imperial wars? How did the fact of empire, and of imperial conflict, shape histories and historiographies of war? When, why and how did war (and its histories) become a national (as opposed to an imperial) enterprise? How did shifts from nations, to empires, and back, work through?
– Political economy & imperial war – How were wars financed, and their costs and benefits calculated? Can we (should we) revisit imperialism and military fiscalism?
– Empire, war, genocide – were imperial wars ‘exterminatory’? Was genocidal violence incubated in the colonies, or do the problems of genocide reflect and sustain the violence of empire?
– Empire, law, war – How was imperial war shaped by imperial law? Did human rights transform imperial war, or was the colonial battlefield a space of exception?
– Emotions, senses and imperial war: how were empire’s wars felt and sensed…?
– The contemporary politics of war and empire, and the relationship between the two – have become central preoccupations of the contemporary culture war.
More details can be found here.
The deadline for submissions is 31st July 2022
Please submit proposals to secretary@show.org.uk