Empire Unbound: Trans-Imperial Politics and the Muslim Mediterranean, 1880–1918
Gavin Murray Miller
The weekly colloquium of the Collaborative Research Centre provides a forum for presentations by external guests as well as by members of the SFB 1199 within a tailored thematic framework. The format helps to create a common ground for discussion between guests, the Collaborative Research Centre, as well as the wider academic public. The complete program can be found here.
This week’s session features guest researcher Gavin Murray Miller (Cardiff University) presenting Empire Unbound: Trans-Imperial Politics and the Muslim Mediterranean, 1880–1918.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a significant portion of the Muslim world was brought under European control as states carved out new empires across Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. These interventions created new imperial spatial formats that would see conflicts between Islamic and colonial spaces. This presentation seeks to explore how process of empire-building transformed North African territories and created new conditions under which people, print, and ideas circulated across imperial borders. Empires may have been imagined as bounded, political entities, but beneath the surface of colonial rule a more nuanced and diverse picture emerged that revealed the porous boundaries that both challenged and shaped modern imperial formations.