Disentangling the Colonial City: Spatial Separations and Entanglements inside Towns and across the Empire in Colonial Africa and Europe

Abstract

By reconstructing (re)constellations of local and global connections inside colonial cities, this chapter offers an essentially spatial analysis of how colonialism worked in towns. The chapter shows that the colonial city was characterized by a high concentration of connections, both in town and across the colonial world. The city, as a whole, was not connected, but different parts of town each had their relations in different directions. The colonial attempt to obtain controlover cities, as shown in numerous projects of colonial urban planning and segregation, was thus at least in part a spatial project, locally disentangling and severing the manifold global connections in the colonial city.

Biographical Note

Geert Castryck (SFB 1199, Leipzig University)

Geert Castryck is a historian specializing in African and global history. He did research on African urban history, remembrance education, and colonial legacies. He earned his PhD in history from Ghent University in 2006 for his dissertation about the colonial Muslim communities of Bujumbura (Burundi). He came to Leipzig University in 2010 to write a global history of the East Central African town of Kigoma-Ujiji. At the Collaborative Research Centre, he analyses the redefinition of political, economic, and religious spaces in East and Central Africa as well as in Europe during and after the Scramble for Africa.