Emigrants into settlers? Benjamin Coleman Van Zee, The Underdog Imperialists: Poles, Germans, and Interwar Emigrant Colonialism, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Emigrants into settlers? Benjamin Coleman Van Zee, The Underdog Imperialists: Poles, Germans, and Interwar Emigrant Colonialism, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2024

20Jun24

Abstract: This dissertation traces the evolution of “emigrant colonialism” from the late nineteenth century through the interwar years. During this period, several traditionally emigrant-sending nations, including Poland, Germany, Italy, and Japan, developed similar strategies for channeling their outflows of migrants into projects for overseas expansion. What they called “emigrant colonialism” involved forming private companies to purchase large tracts of isolated territory abroad. By settling their compatriots in linguistically homogeneous company towns on the frontiers of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, they sought to simulate a national settler colonial experience while expanding economic and political influence overseas. Although some aimed to use these demographic enclaves as foreign extensions of their domestic economies, others aspired to transform their settlement colonies into fully independent “daughter states” in South America. While the specifics of their respective agendas varied, German, Polish, Italian, and Japanese emigrant colonialists all developed analogous geopolitical imaginaries and approaches to managing migration. This dissertation explains how and why they developed such a simultaneously idiosyncratic yet similar expansionist strategy. By reconstructing the perspectives of German and Polish emigrant colonial activists from the 1880s through the 1930s and situating them within the secondary scholarship on Japan and Italy, this study argues that emigrant colonialism was not nationally unique to any one of these nations, as previous historians have held. Rather, emigrant colonialism was a subgenre of imperialism that all four collaboratively pioneered through their rivalry and mimesis. In addition to pinpointing the unique spin each nation gave to the practice, this dissertation highlights the cross-pollination and convergent evolution of the German, Polish, Italian, and Japanese emigrant colonial projects over the interwar years. This study advances two major claims to explain this entangled history. First, it contends that the transnational flows of influence between their expansionist projects were facilitated by a shared “underdog imperialist mentality,” defined as a specific way of viewing the world and their nations’ place within it. Second, it argues that the international system of the interwar world played a crucial role in fostering the growth and development of emigrant colonialism during this period.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed