Hirschhausen, Ulrike von/Leonhard, Jörn Empires

Eine globale Geschichte 1780-1920

Empires have returned to our world. Russia's war against Ukraine and China's new power politics are reminiscent of the imperial expansion of great empires in the century of empires between the end of the 18th century and the First World War. But how did the European division of large parts of the world actually take place? And what options did the colonised have in dealing with imperial power? Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard take a close look and reveal the diversity of historical developments. The result is an innovative history of empires as part of a global history at the height of their expansion. In the 19th century, the great European powers divided the world among themselves. The British Empire stretched from Canada across large parts of Africa to India and Australia. The Russian Empire stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific, and Habsburg expanded in the Balkans, while the Ottoman Empire appeared as the sick man on the Bosporus. But what is meant when we talk about empires? This book retells their history by examining the encounters between people under the conditions of colonialism. It focuses on the central challenges of empires: the decline of ethnic diversity. And it explains how colonised peoples dealt with conquest, domination, integration and exploitation. In this way, the logic of imperial action and the dynamics of violence become as clear as the strategies of the colonised, which did not boil down to simple oppositions between rulers and ruled. The result is an innovative and contemporary history of empires in the world of the 19th and early 20th centuries.