Decolonizing Colonial Heritage

New Agendas, Actors and Practices in and beyond Europe

Britta Timm Knudsen, John Oldfield, Elizabeth Buettner, Elvan Zabunyan, Britta Timm Knudsen, John Oldfield, Elizabeth Buettner, Elvan Zabunyan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367569600
• eBook ISBN: 9781000473605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Decolonizing Colonial Heritage explores how different agents practice the decolonization of European colonial heritage at European and extra-European locations. Assessing the impact of these practices, the book also explores what a new vision of Europe in the postcolonial present could look like.

Including contributions from academics, artists and heritage practitioners, the volume explores decolonial heritage practices in politics, contemporary history, diplomacy, museum practice, the visual arts and self-generated memorial expressions in public spaces. The comparative focus of the chapters includes examples of internal colonization in Europe and extends to former European colonies, among them Shanghai, Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro. Examining practices in a range of different contexts, the book pays particular attention to sub-national actors whose work is opening up new futures through their engagement with decolonial heritage practices in the present. The volume also considers the challenges posed by applying decolonial thinking to existing understandings of colonial heritage.

Decolonizing Colonial Heritage examines the role of colonial heritage in European memory politics and heritage diplomacy. It will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of heritage and memory studies, colonial and imperial history, European studies, sociology, cultural studies, development studies, museum studies, and contemporary art.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylor francis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I Haunted worlds: ghosts of the colonial past

Chapter 1 Europe and its entangled colonial pasts Europeanizing the ‘imperial turn’ ¹

Elizabeth Buettner

DOI: 10.4324/9781003100102-3

Coming to terms with the long-term impact of empires and decolonizations and selectively (however reluctantly) grappling with their diverse histories and legacies count as widely shared experiences in many European countries in recent decades. Since the 1990s, a growing number of historians and academics in related disciplines have illuminated the wide variety of ways Europe and other parts of the world have ‘entangled histories’, or histoires croisées (Werner and Zimmermann 2006). From the early modern era onwards and gathering particular momentum in the late nineteenth century, Europe’s evolution became increasingly intertwined with far-flung transoceanic regions as maritime empires expanded and transformed. ‘Home’ and ‘away’ were mutually constituted arenas, scholars insisted, not hermetically sealed separate spheres; Europe itself thereby became transformed through unequal geopolitical power relations, an increasingly globalized economy, and mobile peoples and cultures (Stoler and Cooper 1997). Global flows of people (whether enslaved, indentured, or voluntary), goods, capital, and ideologies linked European colonizing countries with overseas possessions and spheres of influence during an extended age of empire. Today, these complex colonial legacies and heritage remain central not only to postcolonial societies overseas but also still echo resoundingly across Europe itself.

Britain, France, Portugal, and other Western and Southern European examples remain the most familiar cases within the ‘imperial turn’ now taken by many scholars (Buettner 2016), but this chapter insists on positioning empires and colonialism as defining characteristics of a far wider European history, not simply that of a series of individual nations. Albeit in very different and inevitably uneven ways, Europe’s centuries-long history of empires extended to Scandinavia together with Central and Eastern Europe, including during and after the state-socialist era. Europe has been historically forged by maritime as well as continental land empires (including the Habsburg empire, imperial and then Nazi Germany, and Tsarist Russia followed by the Soviet Union). As such, forms of colonialism not only extended outwards to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australasia but also across the Global North and inwards in the form of ‘internal colonialisms’. Seas and oceans separating imperial centres from far-off colonies, in sum, were not an inevitable requirement, either for empire or for colonial-style practices and relationships (Etkind 2011, 5).

Whether maritime, terrestrial, or indeed both, empires remained the dominant form many European polities took until well into the twentieth century—in Jürgen Osterhammel’s words, well past the ‘so-called age of nation-states’ that has conventionally described the nineteenth century (Osterhammel 2014, 88–9). ‘Empires can be nations writ large’, as Krishan Kumar has put it, and ‘nations empires under another name’ (Kumar 2017, 23). Benedict Anderson’s account of ‘official nationalisms’ similarly stresses how these could involve ‘stretching the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’ (as exemplified by the British empire or the Portuguese empire) (Anderson 2006, 86, 140).

Although the pages that follow can only scratch the surface of what is, by now, an immense and ever-evolving research field, they chart the inseparability of countless national/imperial and continental/global dynamics, briefly noting some better-known examples as well as pausing to take account of cases that remain less commonly viewed through imperial lenses outside specialist academic circles. Viewing forms of empire and colonialism located within and beyond Europe as candidates for comparative treatment and potential cross-fertilization rather than splendid isolation allows empire to be examined as a common European heritage, defining the continent and the wider world (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Leonhard 2016). If ‘Europeanization’ can be understood as ‘a variety of political, social, economic and cultural processes that promote (or modify) a sustainable strengthening of intra-European connections and similarities through acts of emulation, exchange and entanglement and that have been experienced and labelled as “European”’, to adopt Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran Klaus Patel’s encapsulation, then colonialism demands to be placed far more firmly within this rubric than has typically been the case (Von Hirschhausen and Patel 2010, 2). ‘Europeanizing’ colonialism, and ultimately decolonization, as both a transnational European (indeed, pan-European) and global heritage, moreover, also extends to recognizing their place in Europe’s integration process since the late 1950s, a theme this chapter broaches in its conclusion.

Paving the way: approaching Western and Southern Europe’s overseas histories

Since ‘discovering’ the New World across the Atlantic and ultimately circumnavigating the globe from the end of the fifteenth century, European states built upon pre-existing trans-Mediterranean engagements and nascent links with the west coast of Africa to carve out increasingly global forms of presence and power. Ocean-spanning realms presided over by Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, and France expanded, contracted, changed hands, and increased once more across the Americas, Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific region, and along Africa’s coasts before moving ever further inland as more and more European countries competed in their ‘Scramble for Africa’ as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Imperial expansionism became integral to the very fabric of nation-states and to dominant conceptions of their identity and heritage. The pioneering roles of Spain and Portugal in the ‘Age of Discoveries’ featuring renowned seafarers like Columbus, Da Gama, and Magellan took their place alongside the Netherlands’ global engagements integral to the Dutch seventeenth-century ‘Golden Age’ (Bethencourt and Curto 2007; Subrahmanyam 2007; Weststeijn 2014). Britain’s and France’s expansionism also gained momentum, ultimately rendering theirs the world’s two largest empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Influenced by postcolonial studies (much of it spearheaded by literary scholars) and anthropology, historians gradually united what had long been distinct fields of academic work, bringing overseas empires within the fold of domestic European histories. Just as Anglophone scholars were long at the vanguard of postcolonial studies, so too were historians of Britain and the British empire prominent in the early stages of mapping what ultimately became widely known as the ‘new imperial history’ (Burton 2003; Hall and Rose 2006; Kennedy 2018; MacKenzie 1986; Ward 2001; Wilson 2004). Britain-focused work long remained strongly represented (particularly focused on its ‘jewel in the crown’ in India, settler colonies, and the West Indies), even as Portugal’s entanglements with Brazil and Africa, France’s with its vast empire, and the Dutch presence in and beyond the East and West Indies became the subjects of new research approaches (Koekkoek et al. 2017; Raben 2013). Not only was Britain’s history explored as inseparable from that of its empire (and later the Commonwealth) and France’s from la plus grande France (‘Greater France’) beyond the seas: empires were equally important (and perhaps more so) to smaller and less powerful nations on the international stage (Blanchard et al. 2008; Conklin et al. 2011; Stovall 2015; Wilder 2003). By virtue of overseas possessions, Portugal could claim to be much more than a diminutive, poor, and peripheral European country, while possessing Congo allowed Belgium the pretensions of being la plus grande Belgique (Goddeeris 2015; Goddeeris et al. 2020; Sanches 2006; Santos 2002; Sidaway and Power 2005; Viaene et al. 2009).

Colonial latecomers included Germany and Italy, which looked overseas as a means of consolidating their standing as newly unified nation-states by adopting behaviours characteristic of Great Powers. For state- and private-sector imperial enthusiasts, gaining footholds in Asia and particularly Africa meant winning their rightful ‘place in the sun’, whether in Germany’s African or Pacific territories or the northern African lands claimed by Italy that led Mussolini to fantasize about the Mediterranean’s possibilities as an ‘Italian lake’. Overseas empires were thus explored as constitutive features of the political, economic, social, and cultural orders of European countries, whether they counted as long-established leading players or more recent arrivals on the international scene (Borutta and Gekas 2012; MacKenzie 2011; Pergher 2017; for introductions to a now-voluminous and ever-expanding body of work, see Buettner 2016, 1–19; Lombardi-Diop and Romeo 2015a, 2015b; Schilling 2015; Thomas and Thompson 2018).

So integral was empire-building that the distinction between national and imperial territories and histories often proved difficult to draw. Scholars have long debated whether Ireland was subjected to England’s internal colonialism that preceded and continued alongside Britain’s expansionism across the globe (Hechter 1978; Howe 2000; Kenny 2004; McDonough 2005). Viewing Ireland’s past—as well as Northern Ireland’s experiences after it stayed part of the United Kingdom after Ireland’s 1921 partition—through the lens of postcolonial studies has generated accounts of its subjugation through settler colonialism and heavy-handed rule from London, with Catholic Irish seen as racially inferior and undeserving of sovereignty in a manner that bore resemblance to Britain’s (and other Western countries’) stance towards Africans, Asians, and other colonial subjects (Bruendel 2017; Laird 2015). By the same token, however, many Irish (alongside Scots) had long featured prominently in Britain’s collective imperial activities further afield, rendering Ireland simultaneously colonized at home yet colonizing overseas (MacKenzie and Devine 2011). Algeria under French rule provides a different example. Until forced out in 1962, France insisted that Algeria was not a colony but rather three départements of the nation itself, despite being situated across the Mediterranean as opposed to directly adjacent within Europe (Shepard 2006; Stora 1991). Portugal adopted a similar stance, with its dictatorship ultimately redefining colonies in Africa and Asia as ‘overseas provinces’ in 1951 (Jerónimo and Pinto 2013).

These cases illustrate the durability of European imperial agendas emphasizing bonds with overseas possessions well after the Second World War, a watershed conventionally understood as heralding the onset of widescale global decolonization. Some European overseas empires like Germany’s had already ended, while the 1940s did indeed bring independence to India, Indonesia, and a handful of other territories. In countless settings, however, Western and Southern European powers sought to hold tightly onto their remaining empires in a Cold War world dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, fighting anti-colonial insurgencies and other proliferating nationalist movements by insisting on national–imperial connectedness. Britain’s persistent attachment to the Commonwealth that evolved out of empire, France’s post-war relabelling of its empire as the French Union (and, like Portugal, designating many colonies as ‘overseas departments and territories’), and the Dutch 1954 statute redefining Suriname and the Dutch Antillean islands as part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands all demonstrate the tenacity of imperial priorities and mentalities (Aldrich and Connell 1992; Murphy 2018; Oostindie and Klinkers 2003; Thompson 2012; Ward, forthcoming). Post-war European empires’ survival into and often beyond the 1970s despite the intervening spate of decolonizations culminating in the early 1960s, moreover, renders Europe’s global imperial histories not simply durable national ones that, in their waning years, extended national citizenship to many colonized peoples across racial and geographical lines (Cooper 2014). As this chapter revisits in its conclusion, they also rendered the post-war European integration process as inseparable from empire, decolonization, and postcolonial dynamics as was the case for many individual member states in the future European Union.

Yet being part of imperial (and ultimately postcolonial) Europe did not require having held territory on other continents. Alongside Britain’s informal empire comprised of vast regions across the globe that fell under its tremendous economic, political, and military sway can be placed imperial Germany’s web of intercontinental engagements in Latin America, China, and other regions that greatly exceeded its 30-year era of formal colonialism in Africa and the Pacific between the mid-1880s and the First World War (Conrad 2010; Naranch and Eley 2014). Relatedly, scholars now frame Switzerland—long all but excluded from the ‘imperial turn’—as a country that engaged in ‘colonialism without colonies’. It counted among the societies that ‘had an explicit self-understanding as being outside the realm of colonialism, but nevertheless engaged in the colonial project in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Haunted worlds: ghosts of the colonial past
• Part II Contemporary heritage practices: new agents, urban space events and intercultural encounters
• Part III Imagining decolonial futures
• Index