Dr Christian Mueller's (UNNC) talk on the 21st October

13 May 2020

The Dream of a Prussian Empire in the East: Imperialism, Nation-Building and Transnational Agency in South East and East Asia, 1860-1873


German Imperialism is commonly seen as a series of belated and rather less successful efforts to catch up with the Great Powers in Africa and Asia starting in the late 1880s.
Yet, the dimensions of imperialism as a concerted effort of the Hohenzollern dynasty,
German liberalism and the wider Prussian public to stage its own model of a German Empire against both a Habsburg alternative and a British concept of overseas dominance in Asia has been overlooked so far. The talk addresses the Prussian efforts of establishing and building an Empire in the Far East between 1860 and 1873 in the broader context of a global history of German unification under Prussian dominance to evaluate the ways in which informal imperialism and the European politics of nation-building were intertwined. A closer examination of the different expeditions to East and South East Asia in that period and the independent agency of colonialist actors in Asia shall reveal the ways in which the Prussian voyages to Asia between 1860 and 1873 forge the idea of a new nation abroad that would fulfil the liberal imperial dream of public largely critical to German unification from above under Prussian auspices. The talk will thus query the relations between European domestic politics, overseas expansion, and individual imperial and transnational agency in Asia.

Details

Date: 21 October 2019, Monday   
Time:
 11:00 to 12:30 
Venue:
  F1A09
            University of Nottingham Malaysia
            Jalan Broga 43500 Semenyih Selangor Darul Ehsan

For more information on the event, kindly e-mail Dr Benjamin Barton at benjamin.barton@nottingham.edu.my         

  

Dr Christian Mueller

Dr Christian Mueller, FRHistS is Associate Professor of Modern European and International History at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC). His expertise is on modern internationalism, comparative imperialism and global/transnational history between 1800 and 1940. He studied History, Politics, Germanic Languages, Law and Historical Basic Sciences at Oxford (M.Stud.) and Heidelberg (M.A., Dr. phil.). After an Andrew Mellon Post-Doc Fellowship at Cambridge, Christian was a Lecturer in History at the Universities of Muenster, Ghent and Goettingen before joining UNNC in 2015. Christian has held Visiting Research Fellowships at the Rothermere American Institute and St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and at the University of Ghent, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (London) in 2018. His most recent publications focus on Empire, humanitarianism and labour regimes under the League of Nations, and on the relations between the International Labour Office and China in the 1920s.