Lecture | Economic and Social History Brown Bag Seminar
Stations of the Periphery: From Colonial Monocultures to Post-Colonial Economies
- Date
- Monday 16 March 2026
- Time
- Serie
- CMGI Brown Bag Seminars 2025-2026
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- 2.60
Peripheral territories of diverse colonial empires were geographically distant from one another – but financially and developmentally much closer than they seemed. This research project, which is currently in development for an NWO Vidi grant, proposes that by conducting a close comparative history of the financial relations between colonial metropoles and peripheral colonies, we can better understand the ways in which colonial economies were (or were not) developed, their economic relations to the center, and the later breakdown of financial order at the end of the colonial period. Using the three case studies of Suriname (Dutch Empire), The Gambia (British Empire), and Tajikistan (Soviet empire), it argues that we can see across all three financial systems a discursively apparent but factually unsubstantiated ‘subsidization’ of colonial development, which masked the practical and extensive extraction of value from the periphery to the core. This insight has important implications for the study of many 20th-century colonial empires, both from the perspective of their internal finances to the question of their later dismantling.