Economy and Colonial History: German Togo and the Cotton Project

Dates
Wednesday 5 March 2014 (17:00-19:00)
  • Rebekka Habermas (Universitat Gottingen)
  • Danford Room, second floor of the Arts building (R16 on the campus map)

My investigation of a colonial cotton project undertaken in German Togo around 1900 is due to the observation that the new imperial history as it took shape the last years in Great Britain and the so called entangled colonial history, very popular in German history, is not very much if at all interested in economy, meanwhile global history has a tendency to focus very much and sometimes exclusively on economy. I want to argue that colonial history should be more aware of economical questions, without following the track of global history. Instead a much closer cooperation with area studies is needed, in order to come to new insights not only concerning the cotton project undertaken around 1900 in German Togo, which will be at the center of my paper. This closer cooperation would although promote fresh insights into the early European History of global anxieties and fantasies.