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• 15 nov 2020

  Cologne

  Call for papers - History

  Rethinking tobacco history: Commodities, empire and agency in global perspective, 1780–1960

  Tobacco was one of the most important globally traded commodities from the 17th century through to the present day, and yet it has received relatively little attention in the historiography of modern empires in comparison to other commodities, such as sugar or cotton. As a result, recent approaches to rewriting the history of European imperialism from a more global perspective have hardly been problematized with regard to the peculiarities of tobacco history. Nowadays, studies no longer understand empire as a rigid relationship between metropole and colonies, but take the dynamics of actors within an empire as seriously as the networks and global processes that crossed imperial borders, or indeed lay beyond them. The conference starts from this assumption.

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• 17 jan 2015

  18 jan 2015

  Cologne

  Study days - History

  Foreign Rule in Western Europe

  Towards a Comparative History of Military Occupations, 1940-1949

  Military occupations were a crucial part of the collective experience of Western European societies during the mid-20th century. Occupations conducted by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Western Allies varied in terms of their goals, methods, and most significantly in their use of violence. In many respects, however, these ideologically different regimes of occupation also shared a range of common features. In contrast to the ruthless occupation policies in the East, these regimes sought to find a viable mode of interaction with both local social intermediaries and the broader population, and thus generally attempted to stabilize their rule by pacifying occupied societies. Many of the quotidian ruling techniques and practices deployed for this purpose produced a set of related socio-political legacies across Western European societies which found their distinctive expression during the subsequent decades.

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