Comparativ (E-Journal)

Unger, Corinna R.

Inhaltsverzeichnis | Contents
Editorial 673
Aufsätze | Articles
Corinna R. Unger 
Nature, Resources, and Development: Historical Perspectives  
on the Global Environment 675
Rohan D’Souza 
Nostalgia to Melancholy: Towards a History of the Environmental  
History of South Asia in the Anthropocene 691
Tomás Bartoletti 
The Transimperial Emergence of Pest Control Research: Economic  
Entomology between Europe and the Tropical World, c. 1890–1930 704
Giovanni Tonolo 
An Environmental History of Palm Oil Development in Dahomey  
in the Twentieth Century 726
Amalia Ribi Forclaz / Corinna R. Unger 
Progress versus Precaution: International Organizations and the Use of  
Pesticides, 1940s to 1970s 750
Rezensionen | Reviews
John T. Ducker: Beyond Empire: The End of Britain’s Colonial Encounter,  
London 2020 
Jochen Lingelbach  769
Janne Lahti (ed.): German and United States Colonialism in a Connected  
World: Entangled Empires, London 2021 
Julius Wilm 773
672 | Inhalt | Contents
Abigail Green / Simon Levis Sullam (eds.): Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism:  
A Global History, Cham 2020 
Ludwig Decke 775
Stephan B. Riegg: Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the  
Armenians, 1801–1914, New York 2020 
Gözde Yazıcı Cörüt 777
Karl D. Qualls: Stalin’s Niños. Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children  
in the Soviet Union, 1937–1951, Toronto 2020 
José M. Faraldo  781
Christy Thornton: Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance  
of the Global Economy, Oakland 2021 
Clara Ruvituso 783
Lucy Delap: Feminisms: A Global History, Chicago 2020 
Bonnie S. Anderson 785
Marian Burchardt: Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood  
in the Secular West, New Brunswick 2020 
Pier-Luc Dupont 788
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson / John Brewer / Neil Fromer / Frank Trentmann (eds.):  
Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability,  
1800–2075, London 2020 (2019) 
Corinna R. Unger 790
Grzegorz Gorzelak (ed.): Social and Economic Development in Central and  
Eastern Europe: Stability and Change after 1990, London/New York 2020 
Uwe Müller 792
Annotationen | Annotations
Corona and Work Around the Globe, ed. by Andreas Eckert and Felicitas  
Hentschke, Berlin/Boston 2021 
Matthias Middell 797
Inhaltsverzeichnis des 32. Jahrgangs 2022 | Contents of Vol. 32, 2022 798
Autorinnen und Autoren | Authors  808


English

Inhaltsverzeichnis | Contents

Müller, Uwe

792 | Rezensionen | Reviews
chapter compares the ways in which en-
ergy shortages were dealt with and experi-
enced by inhabitants of East Germany and 
Japan in the post-war decades, as well as 
how the respective governments tried to 
walk a line between accommodation and 
control. The final chapter is dedicated to 
the famine in Sahel in 2012 and to the 
question of how market forces had an ef-
fect on dissolving the crisis. To do so, the 
chapter studies price adjustment and mar-
ket integration mechanisms in Burkina 
Faso and Mali, arriving at the conclusion 
that markets have the potential to address 
food scarcity but need to be sufficiently ro-
bust to do so, which, in turn, leads to the 
need to strengthen markets. 
As this brief account suggests, the volume 
offers an excellent overview of approaches 
to studying scarcity and of ways of using 
the concept of scarcity to study resource 
dynamics, social relations, and economic 
developments. While predominantly 
based on the English-language literature, 
it will certainly be of interest to a large au-
dience internationally. Furthermore, the 
volume encourages scholars to consider 
what their own experiences with and un-
derstandings of scarcity are and how they 
can help us to make better sense of the dis-
cussions about the looming climate crisis 
by turning to empirical research. 
Grzegorz Gorzelak (ed.): Social and 
Economic Development in Central 
and Eastern Europe: Stability and 
Change after 1990, London/New 
York: Routledge, 2020, 372 pp.
Reviewed by 
Uwe Müller, Leipzig
The book under review has several 
strengths. First, the book provides a com-
bination of two thematic foci. It takes 
stock of the transformation process to 
democracy and a market economy in the 
Central and Eastern European states since 
1990, and it combines the lessons learned 
with an analysis of the contemporary de-
velopment problems in the region. Sec-
ond, the volume discusses both the histori-
cal transformation processes and the more 
recent developments in the region almost 
in their entirety and from the perspective 
of different disciplines. Third, and finally, 
the vast majority of the authors succeed 
in balancing the presentation of empiri-
cal data and their own interpretations and 
in formulating the results of their analyses 
clearly and in a manner that is easy to un-
derstand. 
These strengths are certainly also a merit 
of the editor. Gregorz Gorzelak is a Pol-
ish economist who has been working for 
several years on “regional and local eco-
nomics, regional development strategies, 
cohesion policy, [and] evaluation of EU 
programs”. Consequently, issues of region-
al development receive a lot of attention 
in the book.
Rezensionen | Reviews | 793
The region “Central and Eastern Europe” 
(hereafter CEE-11) in this book consists 
mostly of the eight countries that joined 
the European Union (EU) in 2004 plus 
Romania and Bulgaria (accession in 2007) 
and sometimes Croatia. The post-Soviet 
region (with the exception of the Baltic 
states), parts of Southeastern Europe that 
are not (yet) members of the EU, and the 
territory of the former German Democrat-
ic Republic (GDR) are rarely considered.
The book is divided into four parts: “Sys-
temic Foundations of Transformation”; 
“Reforms and Challenges”; “Regions, 
Space, Territory”; and “The Future Chal-
lenges”.
In the first part, there are two more general 
chapters dealing with economic (Witold 
M. Orłowski) and political (Radosław 
Markowski) transformation followed by 
one contribution on local government 
(Paweł Swianiewicz) and the other on 
“regionalism” (Roman Szul). Swianiewicz 
emphasizes the often overlooked posi-
tive influence that the strengthening of 
local self-government had on the success 
of transformation. In all eastern EU ac-
cession candidates, “the transformation 
after 1990 has resulted in a major shift 
toward more decentralized systems” (p. 
72). Unfortunately, there have been vari-
ous efforts at recentralization in recent 
years, which have already been put into 
practice in Hungary. Szul takes a much 
more critical view of the phenomenon of 
“regionalism”. He justifies this primarily 
with an excursus into the history of the 
twentieth century, in which ethnic mi-
norities and the separatism that emanated 
from them often destabilized the nation-
states of East-Central Europe. Poland had 
been nationally homogenized primarily as 
a result of the Second World War. After 
1990, all other multiethnic states still in 
existence, such as Czechoslovakia, Yugo-
slavia, and the Soviet Union, disintegrated 
into several parts. Therefore, almost only 
“grass-roots regionalism based on cultural-
linguistic and historical factors” (p. 81) 
exist in the CEE-11 today without major 
political ambitions. The author sees these 
forms of regionalism rather positively, as 
they are able to support national identities 
and are economically useful (i.e. tourism). 
On the other hand, Szul is critical of “top-
down, induced (pseudo-) regionalism”, 
for which he holds the EU responsible. It 
is also striking that in an otherwise very 
informative and balanced overview of the 
activities of “national minorities”, the Pol-
ish author characterizes only the Silesians 
as “militant” and criticizes them for alleged 
“anti-Polish rhetoric” (p. 85).
Orłowski notes in his chapter, “Trajecto-
ries of the Economic Transition in Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe”, considerable 
differences in growth rates between the 
countries. To mention only the leader 
and the laggard among the CEE-11: The 
gross domestic product (GDP) per capita 
of Poland, measured in purchasing power 
standard (PPS), increased from 78 per cent 
of the Bulgarian level in 1989 to 136 per 
cent in 2017 (p. 12). The differences are 
even more serious when Eastern European 
countries that do not belong to the EU 
are included. Ukraine’s GDP per capita 
was about the same as Poland’s in 1989; in 
2017, it was less than a third of Poland’s. 
Ukraine, as well as Croatia and Bulgaria, 
have not been able to close the gap in their 
prosperity relative to Western Europe over 
the past three decades. The other coun-
tries, however, have been able to narrow 
794 | Rezensionen | Reviews
the gap in prosperity. This is especially 
true for Poland and Slovakia. In his chap-
ter, Orłowski seeks explanations for these 
enormous differences between the CEE-
11, looking at historical roots of underde-
velopment since the sixteenth century up 
to the period of socialism and the “starting 
point of economic transition”. He then 
forms four subregions: Visegrad-4, Bal-
tic-3, East Balkan-2, and West Balkan-2 
and analyses the economic development of 
these subregions during the respective six 
phases of economic transition. Thus, it is 
shown that the growth and decline phases 
in the individual subregions had different 
lengths and intensities. This also applies to 
the impact of the global finance crisis from 
2008/09 to 2009–2013.
Finally, Orłowski discusses the structural 
causes of acceleration and impediment 
of economic development in the transi-
tion period and in the present. Two find-
ings deserve to be highlighted. First, it 
becomes again clear that the EU played a 
very significant role in the overall success-
ful economic development of the CEE-11. 
The opportunity of accession accelerated 
institutional change. Integration into the 
European single market shifted part of Eu-
ropean industrial production to the East. 
However, both these effects lost their im-
pact a few years after accession to the EU. 
Second, the extent of foreign direct invest-
ment (FDI) differs considerably between 
countries. However, no influence of this 
difference on economic developments can 
be detected, neither in a positive nor in a 
negative way. Regardless of this, the FDI-
driven growth model, as it has mostly been 
practised so far, is no longer sustainable: 
“It is obvious that further convergence 
will be possible only if the growth model 
is adapted to the new conditions: sticking 
to the competitive costs of labor will bring 
about a repetition of the 16th-century ex-
perience of the region being trapped in the 
role of the European periphery” (p. 32).
If you want to know more about potential 
new growth models and the possibilities 
and difficulties of implementing them, you 
should consult other chapters of the book. 
Slavo Radosevic, Deniz E. Yoruk, and Esin 
Yoruk – in their chapter on “Technology 
Upgrading and Growth in Central and 
Eastern Europe” – show very impressively 
in the CEE-11 countries that companies 
in almost all sectors are exclusively “tech-
nology users” (only in Estonia and Slo-
venia is a significant part of the growth 
“innovation driven”, p. 180). The spread 
and breadth of technology, the diversity of 
technological knowledge, the types of sup-
porting infrastructure, and the structure of 
firms that carry out technology upgrading 
are insufficient. Furthermore, the knowl-
edge inflows into the economy through 
trade, FDI, and knowledge exchange do 
not work well. In any case, spending on 
research and development by both the 
public and private sectors is far too low.
In addition to Radosevic et al., John 
Bachtler and Martin Ferry in their chapter 
“Cohesion Policy in Central and Eastern 
Europe: Is It Fit for Purpose?” also deal 
with the difficulties of the transition to a 
knowledge-based economy, albeit from a 
different perspective and with a different 
approach. It is noteworthy that both chap-
ters are critical of the weight and conse-
quently the results of the EU’s technology 
and innovation policy in the CEE-11. Ra-
dosevic et al. state: “From the I[ndexes of ] 
T[echnology] U[pgrading] perspective, we 
can observe an increased technology gap 
Rezensionen | Reviews | 795
rather than technology convergence. It 
seems that increasing technology gap is not 
driven by R[esearch] & D[evelopment] 
policies, but by the disconnection be-
tween EU R&D and other policies such 
as F[oreign] D[irect] I[nvestment] and 
G[lobal] V[alue] C[hains] policies” (p. 
198). Bachtler and Ferry show a very 
positive impact of EU cohesion policy 
on growth, convergence to the West, and 
overcoming the consequences of crises. 
However, funds and consequently trans-
fers to the East have declined since 2013. 
More importantly, the use of EU funds is 
apparently not sustainable enough: “in-
novation support […] was largely related 
to ‘hard’ capital investments (the purchase 
of technology, new machines, new infra-
structure, etc.) rather than investment in 
the development of indigenous innovation 
capacities” (p. 332). The general deficits of 
EU technology and innovation policy in 
global competition thus have a particularly 
serious impact in thr CEE-11.
Undoubtedly, the slowdown, halt, or even 
complete absence of the convergence pro-
cess is a socioeconomic cause of the in-
creasing political influence of populism 
in the CEE-11, which has already led to a 
massive crisis of democracy in some coun-
tries. The book focuses less on the analysis 
of the political processes themselves. One 
does, however, find some social science re-
search that could help explain the strength 
of right-wing populism in Eastern Eu-
rope. In this context, the book sometimes 
points to differences between the Western 
and Eastern EU member states that lie be-
yond the economic wealth gap. Moreover, 
there are pan-European problems that are 
(already) particularly pronounced in the 
East.
For lack of space, only the most interesting 
observations and theses from my point of 
view can be mentioned here: 
1. Gorzelak argues in his introduction that 
the relatively easy and rapid dismantling 
of democratic and liberal achievements 
observed in recent years suggests that these 
institutions had been still unstable, based 
on a superficial transfer from outside (p. 
3). This corresponds with Markowski’s 
thesis that, unlike Western Europe, “in 
CEE […] the widespread blow to demo-
cratic principles came from the well-estab-
lished part of the incumbent elite” (p. 50).
2. Agnieszka Fihel and Marek Okólski as 
well as Joanna Tyrowicz and Peter Szewc-
zyk show in their chapters on demograph-
ic change and the development of labour 
markets that many CEE-11 countries have 
to pursue a much more active labour mar-
ket policy due to the age structure of their 
population and emigration.
3. The chapter by Zbigniew M. Karaczun 
and Andrzej Kassenberg, dealing with en-
vironmental protection issues, quotes sur-
veys according to which pollution of air 
and soil is considered a more serious en-
vironmental problem than climate change 
in the CEE-11. This “may explain the low 
priority given to climate protection in 
some CEE countries” (p. 304).
4. Tomasz Komornicki’s contribution on 
the transport sector shows that transport 
policy until today has focused on the func-
tioning of the major transport arteries. 
In CEE-11 countries, transport policy is 
not yet part of a regional policy aimed at 
balancing regional divergences. In general, 
national governments have been rather 
inactive in dealing with the problem of 
growing regional divergences between 
western and eastern parts of the country 
796 | Rezensionen | Reviews
and between metropolitan regions and ru-
ral areas, especially along the EU’s external 
borders. However, in view of the experi-
ence with regional structural policy in the 
“old” EU member states (e.g. Italy), it is 
doubtful whether EU cohesion policy can 
achieve a significant reduction in regional 
divergences in the CEE-11.
This is just a selection of interesting and 
certainly debatable observations and the-
ses. If there is anything to criticize about 
the book, it is that the illustrations are 
sometimes too small. In addition, from 
the perspective of a historian, one or the 
other historical digressions of the social 
science colleagues is a bit too rough. But 
these criticisms are ultimately trifles. Not 
only historians will appreciate the book as 
there are many contributions from differ-
ent disciplines that are worth reading be-
cause they often complement each other.


Grzegorz Gorzelak (ed.): Social and Economic Development in Central and Eastern Europe: Stability and Change after 1990, London/New York: Routledge, 2020, 372 pp.

Flade, Falk

Rezensionen | Reviews | 247
xenophobia are significant. Weiss does not 
mention, however, that other socialist or-
ganizations and unions also advocated such 
ideals. For instance, the Industrial Workers 
of the World (IWW) did so since its incep-
tion in 1905.
Only after the Soviets realized the mortal 
threat of Nazi Germany and fascism did 
they pivot to the Popular Front. But that 
made the ISH and RILU obsolete, though 
they were already “dead”, as Weiss demon-
strates. 
For (maritime transport) workers, the 
Popular Front meant that the communists 
should shift (back) to mainstream unions. 
Subsequently, as is widely known, unions 
and other social movements around the 
world benefited from the energy and com-
mitment of communist activists. In turn, 
communist parties experienced far greater 
growth and influence during the Popular 
Front era. But that is another book.
People interested in communist, labour, 
and maritime history – before the Popular 
Front – will appreciate this book. So will 
those who read global and transnational 
history.
Jeronim Perović: Rohstoffmacht  
Russland. Eine globale Energiege-
schichte, Köln: Böhlau, 2022, 260 S.
Rezensiert von  
Falk Flade, Frankfurt/Oder
In seiner Monografie „Rohstoffmacht 
Russland“ beschäftigt sich Jeronim 
Perović, Leiter des Center for Eastern Eu-
ropean Studies sowie Titularprofessor für 
Osteuropäische Geschichte an der Uni-
versität Zürich, mit einem Thema, das 
aufgrund aktueller Ereignisse auf großes 
Interesse stoßen dürfte. Der Autor möchte 
die langfristigen Entwicklungslinien der 
russischen Energiegeschichte nachzeich-
nen und so zu einem besseren Verständnis 
der heutigen Situation beitragen. Aller-
dings endet der Betrachtungszeitraum im 
Herbst 2021, weshalb die jüngsten Ent-
wicklungen seit dem russischen Überfall 
auf die Ukraine im Februar 2022 nicht 
berücksichtigt werden. Obwohl dies mög-
licherweise für eine gewisse Enttäuschung 
bei einigen Lesern führen wird, bietet das 
Buch doch einen konzisen Überblick über 
die Rolle Russlands als Exportmacht und 
erklärt, weshalb es gerade im Kalten Krieg 
trotz ideologischer und politischer Ge-
gensätze zu jenen weitreichenden energe-
tischen Verflechtungen kommen konnte, 
die die Beziehungen zwischen Russland 
und Europa noch bis vor Kurzem prägten.
Besondere Aufmerksamkeit widmet der 
Autor der russischen Wahrnehmung des 
eigenen Landes als Rohstoffmacht. Er geht 
der Frage nach, wie relevante Entschei-
248 | Rezensionen | Reviews
dungsträger den Reichtum an natürlichen 
Ressourcen als Handlungsoptionen wahr-
nahmen und umsetzten. Jeronim Perović 
zeigt auf, dass das Denken darüber, wie 
Rohstoffe verwendet werden sollten, das 
Verhalten Russlands gegenüber seiner Au-
ßenwelt weit stärker beeinflusst hat, als 
die Geschichtsschreibung dies gemeinhin 
vermuten lässt. Er macht deutlich, dass 
gerade mit Blick auf die Energieträger Öl 
und Gas die russische Geschichte des 20. 
und frühen 21. Jh.s nur dann verstanden 
werden kann, wenn sie in ihre vielfältigen 
Bezüge zur Außenwelt gesetzt und damit 
als Teil einer größeren, internationalen 
und globalen Geschichte verstanden wird. 
Mit diesem Ansatz möchte Jeronim Pero-
vic eine unter westlichen Beobachtern 
verbreitete Sichtweise korrigieren und er-
gänzen, die im sowjetischen Rohstoffpo-
tential und der Ausweitung der Energielie-
ferungen ein Streben nach wirtschaftlicher 
Macht und Ausdehnung des sowjetischen 
Einflussbereichs erkennen. Er vertritt die 
These, dass „[i]m Fall der sowjetisch-west-
europäischen Beziehungen […] Energie 
aber trotz wiederholter Spannungen und 
Sanktionen das Schmiermittel dar[stellte], 
das gegenseitige Annäherung begünstig-
te und Verbindungen schuf, die über das 
Ende des Kalten Kriegs hinaus bestehen 
blieben. Handel war nicht nur materiell 
bedeutend, er eröffnete auch Kanäle für 
Dialoge unter Politikern, Wirtschaftsleu-
ten und Wissenschaftlern. Dies trug zur 
Vertrauensbildung auf beiden Seiten des 
Eisernen Vorhangs bei und wirkte sich 
insgesamt stabilisierend auf die politischen 
Beziehungen aus“ (S. 20). Mit dem Buch 
möchte der Autor eine Forschungslücke 
schließen. Die russische Energiegeschich-
te sowie die Geschichte des sowjetischen 
Außenhandels werde in den gängigen Dar-
stellungen zur Geschichte des Landes, zur 
Geschichte des Kalten Krieges, aber auch 
zur globalen Energiegeschichte erstaunli-
cherweise nur am Rande erwähnt. 
Jeronim Perović stellt die Rolle der Sowjet-
union und Russlands für die globale Ener-
giegeschichte in einem Längsschnitt dar, 
der von Lenin bis Putin reicht. Das Buch 
entstand im Kontext eines zwischen 2011 
und 2017 durchgeführten Forschungs-
projektes unter dem Titel „Energie und 
Macht. Eine kulturgeschichtliche Betrach-
tung von der frühen Sowjetzeit bis zum 
Russland der Gegenwart“. Es gliedert sich 
in fünf Kapitel, die überwiegend chrono-
logisch von der frühen Sowjetzeit bis zur 
jüngsten Vergangenheit reichen. Dabei 
erkennt der Autor interessante histori-
sche Parallelen, aber auch Unterschiede. 
So nutzte die Sowjetunion bereits in den 
1920er Jahren ihr „schwarzes Gold“, um 
Investitionen und technische Expertise aus 
dem Westen zu gewinnen, auch wenn die 
Bedeutung dieses Energieträgers in dieser 
Zeit noch deutlich hinter anderen Ener-
gieträgern wie Kohle zurückblieb. Erst der 
Überfall Nazi-Deutschlands und die so 
erzwungene Verlagerung der sowjetischen 
Fördertätigkeit vom Nordkaukasus Rich-
tung Wolga und Ural ließ sowjetisches 
Öl ab den 1950er Jahren zu einem inter-
nationalen Wirtschafts- und Machtfaktor 
werden. 
Insbesondere seit den 1970er Jahren stieg 
die Sowjetunion dann mit seinen Öl- und 
Gasfeldern zum wichtigsten externen 
Energieversorger Westeuropas auf, wäh-
rend die Versorgung der „sozialistischen 
Bruderstaaten“ aufgrund des dort prakti-
zierten Barterhandels immer weniger ein-
träglich war. Damals wie heute stützt sich 
Rezensionen | Reviews | 249
das Land auf umfangreiche Einnahmen 
aus dem Rohstoffhandel, um die eigene 
Volkswirtshaft zu modernisieren. Aller-
dings werden wie bereits in den 1980er 
Jahren auch heute die Renditen dafür ein-
gesetzt, die Mängel des bestehenden öko-
nomischen bzw. gesellschaftspolitischen 
Modells auszugleichen. 
Der Autor kommt schließlich zu der Fest-
stellung, dass in den 1990er Jahren ein 
alternativer Entwicklungspfad weg von 
einem nach Autarkie strebenden zentra-
listischen Staat möglich gewesen wäre. 
Allerdings begünstigten die sozialen, wirt-
schaftlichen und politischen Turbulenzen 
dieser Zeit einen Rückfall in alte Muster. 
Dies führe allerdings erneut zu einer po-
litischen Erstarrung und abnehmender 
ökonomischer Leistungsfähigkeit. Das 
„System Putin“ verpasse es wieder, sich 
auf eine Zukunft vorzubereiten, die nicht 
erneut überwiegend auf Exportrenditen 
fossiler Energieträger basiere. Allerdings 
benötige das derzeitige System keine Al-
ternativen, um weiter zu funktionieren, 
da diese vielmehr als Unsicherheitsfakto-
ren zunehmend kontrolliert und bekämpft 
würden (S. 185–186).
Gerade aus aktueller Sicht stellt sich heute 
die Frage, ob der Einsatz russischer Ener-
gie als Waffe nicht früher hätte erkannt 
werden können. Hier vertritt der Autor 
die bis zum russischen Überfall auf die 
Ukraine am 24. Februar 2022 insbeson-
dere im deutschsprachigen Raum weit-
verbreitete Ansicht, dass eine Unterbre-
chung der russischen Energielieferungen 
aufgrund langfristig gewachsener tiefgrei-
fender ökonomischer Abhängigkeiten un-
wahrscheinlich sei. Auch lehnt Perović die 
Vermutung ab, dass Putin bereits Mitte 
der 1990er Jahre noch als Mitarbeiter des 
Bürgermeisters von St. Petersburg bereits 
einen Masterplan für den russischen Ener-
giesektor gehabt habe (S. 174). Dagegen 
kann der Autor belegen, dass insbesondere 
der Kontakt zu Igor Setschin wichtige Im-
pulse für die Entwicklung einer nationalen 
Energie- und Wirtschaftsstrategie brach-
ten, die Putin und seine Mitstreiter seit 
dessen Amtsantritt als Präsident der Rus-
sischen Föderation Ende 1999 strategisch 
verfolgten. 
Das Jahr 2022 hat allerdings schmerzlich 
gezeigt, dass sich die Hoffnungen und Er-
wartungen des Autors sowie vieler Men-
schen insbesondere im deutschsprachigen 
Raum, die wirtschaftlichen Verbindungen 
zwischen Russland und Europa könnten 
eine beruhigende Wirkung in einer Zeit 
geopolitischer Verwerfungen entfalten, 
als falsch erwiesen haben. Welche Konse-
quenzen der Einsatz der russischen Ener-
giewaffe hat, wird sich in absehbarer Zu-
kunft zeigen. Sicher ist allerdings bereits 
jetzt, dass „es diese toxische Verbindung 
zwischen Energie und Macht [ist], die ge-
sellschaftliche Dynamik [in Russland] ver-
hindert und damit die dringend nötigen 
Veränderungen des wirtschaftlichen und 
politischen Systems so schwierig macht“ 
(S. 198).
Das Buch wendet sich an eine breitere 
Leserschaft. Davon zeugen abgesehen von 
der breiten Themenwahl die Entscheidung 
des Autors für End- anstatt Fußnoten so-
wie Transkription anstatt Transliteration. 
Darüber hinaus werden die aktuellen Er-
eignisse in der Ukraine zu Neuinterpreta-
tionen historischer Ereignisse führen. So 
finden die Besetzung der Krim und des 
Donbass im Jahr 2014 in „Rohstoffmacht 
Russland“ kaum Erwähnung, obwohl die-
se aus heutiger Sicht eine wichtige Zäsur 
250 | Rezensionen | Reviews
darstellen. Darüber hinaus stellt sich die 
Frage, wie global eine Energiegeschichte 
der Rohstoffmacht Russland sein kann. 
Eine globale Energiegeschichte würde die 
Berücksichtigung aller Kontinente erfor-
dern, während russische Energieexporte 
fast ausschließlich für den eurasischen 
Raum relevant sind. Obwohl auch „Roh-
stoffmacht Russland“ von den aktuellen 
Ereignissen überholt wurde, erreicht das 
Buch doch sein Ziel, einer breiten Leser-
schaft einen spannenden Überblick über 
die russische Energiegeschichte des 20. 
und frühen 21. Jh.s zu geben.
Isabella Weber: How China Escaped 
Shock Therapy: The Market Reform 
Debate (= Routledge Studies on the 
Chinese Economy), London/New 
York: Routledge, 2021, 320 pp. 
Reviewed by 
Alice Trinkle, Berlin
Isabella Weber’s award-winning book How 
China Escaped Shock Therapy was one of 
the key publications of 2021 in the fields 
of political economy, China studies, con-
temporary history, and beyond. The book 
received praise widely beyond the expert 
circles of sinologists, contemporary his-
torians, social scientist, and (political) 
economists. With an interdisciplinary – 
but at the same time distinctively histo-
riographical – approach, Weber analyses 
the debate over price reform in China in 
the 1980s. The book provides new insights 
into China’s economic reforms and the 
development of the Chinese government’s 
strategy of gradualism, as opposed to over-
night economic liberalization. On a meta-
level, Weber raises the question of what 
constitutes good economic policy-making 
and challenges the “neoliberal” zeitgeist of 
the 1990s and 2000s, which led to shock 
therapy economic reforms in some East-
ern European post-socialist countries in 
the early 1990s. 
China’s re-emergence as a global player 
and economic powerhouse today is rooted 
in the policy of “reform and opening up” 
of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 
implemented under Deng Xiaoping since 
1978. In the aftermath of the Cultural 
Revolution, China was among the poorest 
countries of the world. Reform of a strictly 
planned economy meant the reintroduc-
tion of market principles in many sectors 
and the opening of the Chinese market to 
the world. Without exaggeration, one can 
state that the Chinese reform process was 
crucial in constituting our global econom-
ic system today. 
To date, scholars have mostly analysed the 
reform process from economists’ or social 
scientists’ perspectives.[1] Others centred 
their narrative around the life of the CCP’s 
principal leader in the 1980s: Deng Xiaop-
ing.[2] In recent years, younger scholars 
have started to approach the topic from a 
(global) historian’s angle, shifting the focus 
to the minds and ideas behind reform and 
analysing intellectual exchange processes 
between Chinese, Western European, and 
Eastern European economists.[3] Weber 
can be regarded as a member of this new 
cohort of researchers: she understands 
China’s economic transformation as a 
global process driven by intellectuals and 
their ideas. 


Jeronim Perović: Rohstoffmacht Russland. Eine globale Energiegeschichte, Köln: Böhlau, 2022, 260 S.

Lingelbach, Jochen

Rezensionen | Reviews | 259
in the post-war period. The value of the 
book lies in these rightful criticisms and 
the call for an interdisciplinary debate on 
socioeconomic change in the 1970s and 
thereafter. 
Notes:
1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/
oct/13/putins-war-on-ukraine-part-of-crusade-
against-liberal-democracy-says-scholz (accessed 
11 May 2023).
2 See, e.g., N. Ferguson (ed.), The Shock of the 
Global: The 1970s in Perspective, Cambridge, 
MA 2010. Outside the USA and UK, the 1970s 
were not necessarily perceived as crisis driven, 
and also within the USA and UK, the view 
differs depending on the social group that one 
looks at.
Pamela Ballinger: The World  
Refugees Made: Decolonization and 
the Foundation of Postwar Italy, 
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020, 
305 pp.
Reviewed by
Jochen Lingelbach, Bayreuth
From 1943 to 1947, the Italian city of 
Syracuse was a well-known departure 
point for “small-boat operators smuggling 
migrants” to Libya (p. 114). The illegal 
migrants were Italian settlers clandestine-
ly returning to the former Italian colony 
they had left during the war. The British 
military government ruling Libya at that 
time was unwilling to let them return and 
eventually deported most of them back to 
Italy. This small anecdote may illustrate 
the complex history of forced migration 
at the end of World War II, mainly from 
the lost empire to Italy. Apart from Italians 
from the colonies in Libya, Eritrea, Ethio-
pia, and Somalia, large groups of Italians 
came from former Italian-ruled territories 
ceded to Albania, Yugoslavia, and Greece 
(the Dodecanese islands). These transfers 
were not fast and direct “return” move-
ments home but long and complex migra-
tions of people who did not all regard Italy 
as “home”. Pamela Ballinger succeeds in 
bringing all this together and embedding 
it in the post-war history of refugees and 
decolonization in a rich and dense mono-
graph.
Bringing the often separated movements 
of Italian migrants into one frame, Ball-
inger’s argument addresses, firstly, Italian 
historiography: post-war Italy was made 
by the post-war refugee situation and the 
long and complicated decolonization (p. 
18). Italian decolonization was not abrupt 
and uneventful but rather a complex, en-
tangled, uneven, and ongoing process. De-
colonization is a crucial aspect in post-war 
Italy for issues of citizenship, the position 
of foreign refugees, and even the built en-
vironment (p. 20). Ballinger’s innovation is 
to bring all the Italian “national refugees” 
into one narrative, including those from 
the adjacent territories ceded to Yugoslavia 
and Albania as well as the returning colo-
nists from Lybia and “Italian East Africa”. 
While not claiming their sameness, she 
convincingly shows that the different refu-
gees “rubbed elbows” (p. 212) in the same 
institutions and struggled for support and 
recognition. As in national historiography, 
lasting hierarchies developed between the 
different groups.
The second contribution of Ballinger’s 
book is towards the history of post-war 
international refugees: “Italy served as a 
260 | Rezensionen | Reviews
crucial laboratory in which categorizations 
differentiating international refugees from 
national refugees were worked out in prac-
tice” (p. 3). While international refugees 
became the concern of intergovernmen-
tal organizations like the United Nations 
Relief and Rehabilitation Administration 
(UNRRA), the International Refugee 
Organization (IRO), and subsequently 
the United Nations High Commissioner 
for Refugees (UNHCR), the Italian “na-
tional refugees” (the book’s focus) became 
the concern of the consolidating post-war 
state. The exclusion of national refugees 
from the United Nations (UN) institu-
tions went together with the exclusion of 
non-Italian displaced persons (DPs) and 
refugees from the Italian nation-state. This 
process reminds us of Aristide Zolberg’s 
(1983) classic observation that refugee 
generation is a by-product of the transfor-
mation of empires into nation-states.
The book starts, in chapter 1, with Italy’s 
imperial past and shows how entwined 
Italian colonialism was with broader emi-
gration policies. Colonization was a way 
to channel Italian emigration to territories 
under Italian rule, thus solving the prob-
lem of “overpopulation” while keeping the 
migrants in the service of the motherland. 
After the fascist party came to power in 
1922, the Italian empire gradually ex-
panded. Subsequently, emigration to plac-
es like Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Albania, 
and the Dodecanese islands was a means 
to establish a new type of “fascist empire” 
signified by the ideal of the Italian agri-
cultural settler. Chapter 2 then tackles the 
beginnings of the Italian return from the 
empire, starting with the evacuation of ci-
vilians from Libya in 1940. Italian officials 
and humanitarian organizations brought 
Italians from the colonies to the metropole 
throughout the war.
While the first two chapters form the prel-
ude, chapter 3 focuses on the time from 
the war’s end to the 1947 Treaty of Paris, 
which restored Italian sovereignty and 
sealed the loss of territory (with a few ex-
ceptions). Ballinger situates this period in 
the broader literature on international co-
operation and national reconstruction in 
Europe after the war. Following Jessica Rei-
nisch’s work on UNRRA, she argues that 
the nascent UN organizations were less 
an expression of international governance 
and more a safeguard of national sover-
eignty. Ballinger understands the post-war 
UN institutions as projects of “intergov-
ernmentalism” that were only overseeing 
national governments rather than attempts 
at internationalist rule (p. 80). In the post-
war era, UN missions visited the former 
Italian colonies of Libya, Eritrea, and 
Somalia to assess the situation and local 
opinion. Eventually, Somalia came under 
Italian rule again in 1950, albeit limited by 
a UN mandate and with a fixed end date 
of 1960 (p. 129). In the chapter, Ballinger 
also introduces the intriguing term “nest-
ing refugeeism” (p. 132) to describe the hi-
erarchies between different refugee groups 
and their treatment by the Italian state. 
More elaboration would have been good 
as it captures a critical process observable 
elsewhere, too: different refugee groups 
are treated differently depending on oth-
er identity aspects. A reference to Milica 
Bakić-Hayden’s “nesting orientalism” – to 
which, I assume, the aforementioned term 
refers – is unfortunately missing.
Chapter 4 focuses on Italian citizenship 
after the Treaty of Paris. Ballinger shows 
that the boundaries between Italian citi-
Rezensionen | Reviews | 261
zens and others were not as clear-cut as 
assumed. Instead, confusion and negotia-
tions about the categorization of individu-
als abound, and decisions were sometimes 
left to the discretion of individual officers. 
The complexities of differentiated citi-
zenship dated back to the fascist empire, 
which not only distinguished (Italian) citi-
zens from (colonial) subjects but also had 
a complex system where Libyans, Albani-
ans, inhabitants of the Aegean islands, and 
descendants of Italo-African relationships 
had differing and changing in-between 
statuses. The IRO’s post-war label of “un-
determined nationality” (p. 162) for some 
people from the formerly Italian-ruled ter-
ritories, then Greek or Yugoslav, illustrates 
this point nicely. Partly, residence and lan-
guage proficiency were used as criteria, but 
Ballinger shows that vague concepts such 
as the “language of the heart” (p. 152) just 
covered underlying ethnonational assump-
tions. Italian bureaucrats tried to keep out 
Slavs from Yugoslavia even when they op-
posed the new regime and were fluent in 
Italian.
In chapter 5, Ballinger follows the national 
refugees into Italy and examines how they 
were housed and fed and symbolically in-
corporated into the post-war nation. They 
were not only reminders of the fascist em-
pire but became themselves critical agents 
in reconstructing the nation. Some of the 
refugees lived literally on the ruins of fas-
cism and continued into fascist settlement 
projects. Therewith, the refugees often 
finished processes of internal colonization 
started by the fascist regime (p. 204).
Ballinger masters an impressive range of 
archival material from diverse national 
and international organizations and di-
aspora archives as well as additional oral 
history interviews in former refugee set-
tlements in Italy. The only sources – and 
thus perspectives – missing are those from 
the former African colonies. While the ad-
ministrative view dominates, the refugee 
narratives make the book a lively read. The 
in-between cases that were difficult for the 
administration are especially fascinating. 
The complex history of the Italian repatri-
ates shows that the simple idea of a “return 
home” was not the case. Some of the “Ital-
ians” had never lived in Italy before but 
were born into Italian diaspora commu-
nities. Specifically in the territories ceded 
to Yugoslavia, the “repatriation” was part 
of a more extensive process of ethnic “un-
mixing” in Europe’s post-war reordering. 
Ballinger’s fascinating study invites com-
parisons with other contexts as well. For 
example, the extension of the imperial hi-
erarchization into Italy – where southern-
ers and Slavs were regarded as inferior – 
reminds us of the situation in East Central 
Europe. Both regions are peripheral parts 
of the core, and their inhabitants are seen 
as white only in relation to their eastern 
or southern neighbours. Italy’s “Southern 
Question” (that is to say, the orientaliza-
tion of the country’s south) thereby shows 
many parallels with Poland’s “ideologies of 
Eastness” (Zarycki), where the country’s 
east is seen as inferior and more oriental. 
The post-war “un-mixing” of populations 
is another parallel worth exploring in a 
comparison. German history is another 
case showing many fascinating parallels. 
Apart from the apparent reckoning with 
the fascist past, Italy’s post-war movement 
to regain control over its “lost” colonies 
has many commonalities with the colonial 
revisionist movement in interwar Germa-
ny. In addition, the history of Germany’s 
262 | Rezensionen | Reviews
post-war “national refugees” (the expellees 
from the east) mirrors the Italian situa-
tion. Another entanglement with German 
history is the massive labour migration 
of Italians to Germany in the 1950s and 
1960s (the so-called guest workers [Gast-
arbeiter]). Ballinger hints at the economic 
boom in Italy at the same time, implicitly 
arguing that Italy could have been more 
open to immigration (p. 207). I am just 
puzzled why this massive outflow of la-
bour migrants – mainly from the poorer 
south – occurred at the same time. 
Ethiopia is another essential actor through-
out the book but could be dealt with more 
comprehensively. As an internationally 
recognized nation-state and member of 
the League of Nations and during the 
Paris Peace Conference, Ethiopia often ap-
peared to be an antagonist against the Ital-
ians. Ballinger shows, however, the limited 
power Ethiopia could wield there. Ethio-
pian plans to persecute Italian perpetrators 
of war crimes eventually failed (p. 123). 
Moreover, only after the Ethiopian protest 
over UNRRA’s support for Italy did Ethio-
pia receive some limited assistance from 
the organization.
These suggestions for comparisons do not 
present criticism of Ballinger’s book but 
rather attest to its quality and importance 
beyond the Italian context. It is an essen-
tial contribution for years to come and 
rests on a solid empirical foundation. Ball-
inger’s book will be of interest not only to 
historians of the Italian post-war era but 
to historians of refugees, international or-
ganizations, and decolonization in many 
places.
Alexander E. Davis / Vineet Thakur /
Peter Vale: The Imperial Discipline: 
Race and the Founding of  
International Relations, London: 
Pluto Press, 2020, 197 pp.
Reviewed by
Tomoko Akami, Melbourne
A conversion of IR, history, and area stud-
ies is occurring at least among some. In the 
discipline of IR, this is a part of a broader 
response to the criticism of the nature of 
the disciplinary knowledge as being Eu-
rocentric, colonial, masculine, and racist 
(summarized in pp. 7–10). More IR schol-
ars are turning to history to explore a new 
framework and/or to scrutinize the gene-
alogies of the discipline to understand how 
it was shaped and search for its alternative 
paths. Historians and scholars of area 
studies need to be engaged in this devel-
opment in IR because how we understand 
the world order influences how we see in-
terconnected “histories” and “areas” and 
because IR’s disciplinary histories should 
reflect accumulated and new scholarship 
in history and area studies.
The Imperial Discipline: Race and the 
Founding of International Relations is a re-
cent contribution to such critical historical 
works in IR. 
While various genealogies of the disci-
pline of IR have already been identified, 
this book, written by Alexander E. Davis, 
Vineet Thakur, and Peter Vale, sees the or-
ganization, the Round Table (since 1909), 
as the significant institutional and intellec-


Pamela Ballinger: The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020, 305 pp.

Faucquez, Anne-Claire

Confederate Monuments and Historic Markers in the Former Union States of Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio: Does Location Matter?

Schmieder, Ulrike

Monuments and Street Names: Conflicts about the Traces of Enslavers and Defenders of Slavery in French Cities

Controversial Monuments for Enslavers, Enslaved Rebels, and Abolitionists in Martinique and Cuba

Bufanio, Vittoria

Builders’ Wages in Fourteenth-Century Piedmont: The Role of Labour Markets and Seigneurial Dependency

Völker, Tobias

Two Generations of Mordtmanns in Istanbul. Diplomatic and Scholarly Lives in Times of German and Ottoman Transformations

Cazzola, Matilde

Rezensionen | Reviews | 495
Jeremy Adelman (ed.): Empire and 
the Social Sciences: Global Histories 
of Knowledge, London/New York: 
Bloomsbury, 2019, 233 p.
Reviewed by  
Matilde Cazzola, Frankfurt am Main
The collection of essays Empire and the 
Social Sciences, edited by Jeremy Adelman, 
is a pioneering contribution to the intel-
lectual history of social science, which the 
authors investigate from a transnational 
and global standpoint. Theoretically, the 
volume builds on the interpenetration 
between knowledge and power theorized 
by Michel Foucault and Edward Said, 
as well as on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s and 
Bernhard Cohn’s explorations of knowl-
edge accumulation and production as key 
tools of imperial rule. The chapters in this 
book advance these seminal insights into 
new and challenging directions by survey-
ing a select number of Western and non-
Western social theorists, economists, and 
policy-makers who, while putting their so-
cial scientific interests and enquiries at the 
service of different empires, not only re-
formulated the scope and methods of their 
respective disciplines but also contributed 
to redefining the aims and practices of im-
perial domination.
The chapters examine the rise and role 
of social science’s predecessor – political 
economy – in different contexts: from the 
Spanish Empire in its mid-eighteenth-
century transition from conquest to 
profitable commercial governance and 
ex ploitation to the British Empire in the 
early nineteenth century, caught between 
a free labour and abolitionist rhetoric on 
the one hand and new justifications for 
coerced service inspired by the Russian 
Empire and the Mughal Empire on the 
other (chapters 1, 2, and 3). In the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century, on the 
other side of the world, economy would 
become a critical tool for questioning 
imperial legacies of dependency in Latin 
America (chapter 11). The chapters in-
vestigate how geography, by linking men’s 
spatial contexts to issues of ethnicity and 
war, not only connected the history of the 
Qing Empire to that of the People’s Re-
public of China but also was instrumental 
in assigning an unprecedented relevance 
to imperial “margins” and “peripheries”, as 
in the case of British Burma (chapters 4 
and 5). The essays in this book investigate 
the notion of law emerging from impe-
rial contexts, such as the Chinese Empire, 
where legal codification did not imply any 
extirpation of customary practices but was 
instead built upon them (chapter 6). They 
detail the notions of empire and imperial-
ism employed, bent, and reformulated to 
legitimize different Western conceptions 
of world order, from US imperialism to 
the German Third Reich, and incorpo-
rated into the national and international 
ambitions of non-Western polities such as 
the Empire of Japan (chapters 7 and 8). 
The essays also shed light on philanthro-
pies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, 
as productive fields wherein theories of in-
ternational relations harnessed reform as a 
crucial tool to achieve a global hegemony 
(chapters 9 and 10). Overall, the chapters 
stress the transnational persistence of em-
pire as both an aspiration of and a practice 
496 | Rezensionen | Reviews
in international theories from the very be-
ginnings of colonial modernity to the pre-
sent day (chapter 12).
The book is particularly innovative in how 
it collectively investigates major concep-
tual issues through the compelling case 
studies that each chapter illustrates. All 
of the chapters more or less explicitly re-
flect on the theoretical foundations of so-
cial science. It is, in fact, from the plural 
social sciences with which the book deals 
(political economy, law, geography, and 
international relations) that the singular 
“social science” is extracted and distilled, 
understood not only as a collective term 
for a constellation of different disciplines 
but, most importantly, also as a specific 
way of conceptualizing the role of knowl-
edge. From this perspective, social science’s 
most important feature appears to be its 
“worldly” scope: the extraction of infor-
mation and the production of learning 
become relevant only when bent to the 
practical project of “servicing” nations and 
empires (pp. 1–2). Social science’s consti-
tutive aspiration is, therefore, to make so-
cial dynamics not only “knowable”, “intel-
ligible”, and “predictable” but also – and 
more importantly – “governable”, “mould-
able”, and “reformable” (pp. 1–10).
By presenting different categories of “situ-
ated” actors dealing with peculiar condi-
tions and contexts, this book emphasizes 
practical engagement, commitment, and 
prescription as distinctive components of 
social science (pp. 215–216). Even though 
social scientists have often appeared to be 
fascinated by natural scientists’ ability to 
formulate universal and objective laws and 
have from time to time emulated their de-
tached approach, the book suggests that 
they have historically pursued a much 
more ambitious intellectual quest. As they 
advised rulers on policies at the local and 
international levels, social scientists ap-
plied knowledge production for govern-
ment and reform purposes; in making 
studying society instrumental to improv-
ing it, they intended not only to describe 
reality but also to change it.
In this book, this social scientific pursuit 
is not contextualized within Eurocentric 
or state-centric spheres that tradition-
ally defined the theatre of social science 
scholarship but is instead projected onto 
an expanded horizon populated by com-
peting imperial formations. The global 
integration brought about by modern em-
pires, which dominated the international 
scene until at least the end of World War 
II, induced social scientists willing to serve 
their countries to “engage the world” and 
devote their attention to the imperial dy-
namics on which their own nations’ wel-
fare depended (p. 5). Consequently, social 
scientists’ contributions to nation-build-
ing could not disregard practices of em-
pire-building, including the accumulation 
of “local contextual” information about 
unfamiliar places and peoples as the very 
precondition for the development of gov-
ernment procedures capable of harnessing 
knowledge about colonies in the interest 
of the mother country (p. 31).
Social scientists, in fact, proposed catego-
ries that rendered the colonial “otherness” 
thinkable, “manageable”, and, by exten-
sion, “improvable” and “civilizable” by the 
imperial centre (pp. 3, 32). These figures 
promoted the implementation of tech-
niques to foster successful commerce, con-
quest, and colonization, and they outlined 
theories validating political-economic 
policies, despotic and arbitrary exertions 
Rezensionen | Reviews | 497
of power, and “civilizing missions” on 
the global scale. By turning empires into 
transnational sites for theoretical observa-
tion and practical experimentation, social 
science contributed to shaping a “global 
knowledge regime” characterized by the 
coexistence of a multiplicity of actors who, 
more or less intentionally, demonstrated 
that knowledge production was never neu-
tral because it was inseparable from justifi-
cations of power relations and from the in-
vention and reproduction of social, racial, 
and political hierarchies (p. 6).
Rather than conceiving of empire as a 
mere topographical expansion of the so-
cial sciences’ traditional state boundaries, 
the book adopts empire as a methodologi-
cal category. This reframing of empire is, 
indeed, the work’s most original scholarly 
contribution. While the book’s chapters 
focus on several empires, its title points 
to empire as method – an epistemologi-
cal rather than geographical framework of 
analysis. Understood this way, the notion 
of empire subsumes the most distinctive 
feature common into all historical impe-
rial formations: the fact of being unitary 
yet not internally uniform.
In empires, aspirations to and accomplish-
ments of unity have coexisted with inner 
differentiation and fragmentation. Asym-
metries in scales (between metropole and 
colonies, the self-arrogated centre and 
alleged peripheries), as well as racial and 
political inequalities forged within impe-
rial structures, could never be reduced to 
stable hierarchies but instead produced 
conflictual processes that shaped polycen-
tric assemblages (p. 217). As historical 
imperial polities, by encapsulating this 
polycentrism, featured that combination 
of integration and heterogeneity which 
would become the most distinctive char-
acteristic of the global world, empire thus 
can be understood as an epistemological 
category that can be employed as a crucial 
instrument in the methodological tool-
box of global history (p. 9). By adopting 
an imperial perspective that incorporated 
“home” and “abroad” into a single analyti-
cal frame, social scientists historically stim-
ulated the creation of “cross-border sys-
tems” of understanding and ruling, which 
scholars can study as intellectual bricks in 
the expanding edifice of the “global history 
of knowledge” (pp. 3–4).
Florian Bieber: Debating Nationalism. 
The Global Spread of Nations,  
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 
2020, 246 S.
Rezensiert von  
Stefan Berger, Bochum 
Seit den 1980er Jahren hat das Thema Na-
tionalismus in der Wissenschaft Konjunk-
tur und es gibt mittlerweile eine Vielzahl 
von guten Überblicken, die die zahllosen 
Debatten und die fast unüberblickbaren 
empirischen Arbeiten zum Thema ver-
ständlich und konzise zusammenfassen. 
Florian Bieber reiht sich mit seinem Buch 
in diese Literatur ein. 
Die Einleitung bietet eine gute Problema-
tisierung der leider besonders in der Politik 
immer noch weit verbreiteten, aber eben 
in die Irre führenden Unterscheidung zwi-
schen Patriotismus und Nationalismus. 


Jeremy Adelman (ed.): Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge, London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, 233 p.

Not a member yet