Imperial Afterlives: Life in the Wake of the German Empire, 1918-34

随着帝国的崩溃，帝国机构会发生什么？官僚机构、财产和技术是如何被重新利用的？这一进程如何影响后续国家和地区的政治、社会和经济发展？国际机构如何设法管理这一进程/受其影响？该项目关注第一次世界大战后德意志帝国在欧洲及其殖民地的崩溃。一个在现代德国历史上拥有广泛专业知识的PI和CI将追溯帝国基础设施的改造，其目的因同盟国的失败而改变。该项目扩展了社会政治研究的最新路线，使帝国之后的地方经验和机构变得生动起来。我们深入研究了日常生活的各个领域，从机构的解体到铁路、电报线、货币和财产的使用，以展示人民如何参与帝国的基础设施，并在此过程中经常推动和拉动新的国际秩序向不同的方向发展。因此，该项目在方法论上对地方性、特定地点的事件和更广泛的历史趋势之间的无数联系产生了一般性的见解，并对德国帝国遗产的影响和直接国际领土管理的发展产生了新的影响。该项目将把其研究结果与柏林的博物馆馆长和志愿者进行积极的合作，他们在德国缺乏专门研究殖民主义的博物馆，正在寻求将城市自治区本身变成博物馆。此外，该项目将把我们在柏林的合作与伦敦非洲中心（项目合作伙伴）的欧洲和非洲类似策展/民间社会倡议进行正式对话，以国际化地思考我们如何解决城市景观中的殖民遗产。

What happens to imperial institutions with the collapse of empire? How are bureaucracies, properties, and technologies repurposed? How does this process shape subsequent political, social, and economic developments in successor states and territories? And how do international institutions seek to manage this process/become impacted by it?This project directs attention to the collapse of the German empire, both in Europe and across its colonies after the First World War. A PI and CI with wide-ranging expertise in modern German history will trace the reworking of imperial infrastructures, whose purposes were transformed by the defeat of the Central Powers. The project extends recent lines of socio-political research, which bring to life local experiences and agency in the wake of empire. We delve into a whole range of areas of everyday life, ranging from the dismantling of institutions to the use of railways, telegraph lines, currencies, and property purchases to show how populations engaged with infrastructures of empire, and in doing so often pushed and pulled the new international order in different directions. The project thus yields general methodological insights into the myriad links between local, place-specific events and wider historical trends, as well as shining new light on the impact of Germany's imperial legacies and the development of direct international territorial administration.The project will bring its findings into dynamic collaboration with museum curators and volunteers in Berlin, who in lack of museums dedicated to colonialism in Germany, are seeking to turn city boroughs into museums in and of themselves. In addition, the project will bring our collaborations in Berlin into formal conversation with similar curatorial/civil-society initiatives across Europe and Africa at the Africa Centre in London (Project Partner), to think internationally about how we address colonial legacies in the cityscape.