Preliminary Programme

In 1967 chief Paul Buluk, frustrated by the intransigence of British and French officials in the New Hebrides, sent a petition to the British High Commissioner and to the United Nations. The land question on the island of Santo—the largest and most economically-important of the 83 islands that composed the New Hebridean archipelago—could no longer be deferred. Continued encroachment by French colons into the ‘dark bush’ and repeated refusal by colonial officials to address illegal land occupations and theft compelled Buluk and his ally Jimmy Stephens to petition directly to the UN for relief and to invoke UN Resolution 1514. It is also compelled them to create a new organization, Nagriamel, to fight for the rights of Santo bush people.
Simultaneous with the activities of Buluk and Stephens, an ocean away, a contingent of wealthy, largely US-based libertarians pursued a very different form of self-determination: the creation of a new country governed entirely through contractual, capitalist relations. Inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and the myth of Robinson Crusoe, these individuals (including Nevada land developer Michael Oliver, philosophy professor John Hospers, Rand’s former acolyte and paramour Nathaniel Branden, and international finance guru Harry Schultz) hoped to forge their own private archipelago. In an implicit perversion of Resolution 1514, they sought individual self-determination in the very places undergoing decolonization struggles, believing that in such locales there would be, as Oliver wrote, “little problem in purchasing the land, or in having the opportunity to conduct affairs on a free enterprise basis from the very beginning.”
That turned out to be an optimistic assessment. An effort to build an island in the southwest Pacific encountered fierce resistance from nearby island communities who saw the ocean and its atolls and seamounts as part of their historical and territorial rights. Efforts to colonize an island--first on Abaco in the Bahamas and then subsequently on Santo in the New Hebrides--were similarly complicated, not least of all by concerted local resistance. And yet, both in the Bahamas and the New Hebrides, libertarian colonizers also found local allies. On Santo, for example, Nagriamel allied itself with Oliver and against another anticolonial movement, the Vanua’aku Pati [VP], which formed in the early 1970s and drew inspiration from the examples of Ghana, Tanzania and the Black Power movement. With Oliver’s financial and logistical support, Nagriamel launched a failed rebellion to secede from the new state of Vanuatu in 1980.
Why and how did anti-colonial movements ally themselves with a group of hyper-capitalist investors and speculators? What understandings of self-determination drove such alliances? What do they tell us about understandings of self-determination and sovereignty in the high era of decolonization in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Oceania? It was more than just coincidence that market libertarians based in the US, Australia, and the UK, sought to create new, private countries in the Caribbean and southwest Pacific during those regions’ most intense periods of anti-colonial agitation—so how did these adventure capitalists shape processes of decolonization and how, in turn, did anti-colonial movements use these financiers and interlopers to their own ends? (Show less)

Located at the intersection of fields of global history, cultural history and microhistory, my talk at the ESSHC will introduce my doctoral research project where I study the practices of comparing in Pakistan’s nationalist historiography between 1850 and 1980. Informed by practice-theoretical approaches (conceptualised and operationalised within the CRC 1288 framework at Bielefeld), I observe at the micro- and mezzo-scales the actors who participated in the construction of “master narratives” in colonial north-western India (now Pakistan) which rest within the archetype of nationalist historiography of Pakistan. The project sets out by constructing an archetype of nationalist historiography in Pakistan by studying a) practice-formations of nationalist thinkers between 1850 and c.1920, b) comparing-practices among them, focusing on various comparata and tertia, and c) communities of practices where nationalist narratives are rooted. Furthermore, the spatial and temporal continuity of these practices are related with comparing-practices and comparing-formations in Pakistan after independence from colonial rule in 1947 until c.1980. The project attempts to bring global historical approaches in Pakistan, where current theoretical and methodological approaches are rooted in postmodernism and, recently, postcolonialism. De-embedding postmodernist and postcolonial approaches of historical research in Pakistan conceptualises a shift from theoretical approaches such as dependence theory and modernisation theory; instead, re-embedding relational, entangled, and transcultural approaches of (micro-)global history. This project employs a mix of historical research methodologies such as archival research, semi-impromptu narrative interviews with experts as well as oral historical surveys to construct micro-scale heuristic embedded within mezzo level typology of nationalist historiography in Pakistan. The aim is to extend and deepen theoretical and methodological application of relational historiographical studies within the interdisciplinary field of micro-global history using practice-theoretical approaches currently in the framework of the CRC 1288.

At ESSHC, I would like to give a presentation focusing on the methodological aspects of the dissertation. Particularly, sources of archival research and data collection methods will be discussed as well as specificities of organising research stays in Pakistan. As expert interviews are also planned for my project, this presentation will also dive into the organisation of these, such as the thematic scope as well as various methods and techniques of interview analysis will be explored, including narrative construction, heuristic, and oral historical analysis. Keeping in view the theoretical scope of the project, methodological challenges concerning data analysis such as preferences of comparata and tertia as well as construction of research categories and typologies will be discussed in the presentation. As the conference is in spring 2023 and my doctoral project is currently in its initial phase, I expect to have finished the first of my two planned research stays in Pakistan giving me opportunity to share my experience with data collection and analysis with participants. The goal of this presentation will be to collect peer-feedback on methodological limitations and/or rigour in view of the project’s theoretical contours. (Show less)

Scientific knowledge production is influenced by the political and social contexts in which it takes place. This is particularly true for the research fields of Area Studies which the study examines for the German case. Disciplines such as African studies, Oriental studies or Eastern European studies emerged in Western Europe since the late 18th century mostly out of imperial or colonial interests and were supposed to become obsolete at the latest after the end of the Cold War in an increasingly interconnected world. But the last 30 years have proven quite the opposite. In addition to that, the nature of scientific production in general has been changing, due to a number of factors such as increased academic mobility and international cooperation, but also the ever growing capacity of digital technologies with publication databases, rankings and indicators for the (seemingly objective) comparability.
The study examines the production of world knowledge within the Area studies in Germany against this background. After a structural crisis in the mid-2000s, governmental funding programs were initiated to avoid a lasting loss of expertise and to promote the emergence of interdisciplinary, larger and thus more visible research centers with a regional focus. 15 years later, the question is if the desired have been achieved. Furthermore, we will extend the analysis to include international knowledge production about transregional processes and global challenges.
Our research project aims to provide a comprehensive mapping of Area Studies in Germany. To do this, we are combining quantitative and qualitative methods. We have built a database using Nodegoat, which will enable us to visualize structural changes and content changes over the past 15 years. Moreover, we are also analyzing indexed and non-indexed academic journals as well as monographs and edited volumes with bibliometric tools in order to investigate scientific knowledge production within the Area Studies in Germany. Additionally, our study includes several case studies along with expert interviews that will help us gain further insights. We will present our methodological approach together with preliminary results from the first year of our four-year study. (Show less)