Tag: Michael Goebel

Political Proteus: Nationalism’s Entangled Histories (26-27 August)

Published on by CIGH Exeter

The Pierre du Bois Annual Conference, organised by the Graduate Institute in partnership with the Pierre du Bois Foundation and with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, will take place at Maison de la paix.

Michael Goebel, Professor of International History and Politics and Pierre du Bois Chair Europe and the World, is organising the Conference. 

A keynote lecture titled “Being in Time: The Experience of Nationhood” will be given by Bernard Yack, the Lerman Neubauer Professor of Democracy and Public Policy at Brandeis University.

The background note can be found here and the biographies of participants here.

Registration: Click here to register for events.

10. A Parisian Ho Chi Minh Trail: Writing Global History Through Interwar Paris

Published on by CIGH Exeter

Editor’s Note: In the weeks leading up to the new year, please help us celebrate 2015 at the Imperial & Global Forum by checking out the past year’s 10 most popular posts.

10. A Parisian Ho Chi Minh Trail: Writing Global History Through Interwar Paris

Michael Goebel
Freie Universität Berlin
Follow on Twitter @mgoebel29

Antiimperial Metropolis cover

Anxieties over the possible political fallouts of African and Asian migration to Europe have a much longer history than the current refugee crisis might have you suspect. Colonial migration to interwar Paris, as I argue in Anti-Imperial Metropolis, turned into an important engine for the spread of nationalism across the French Empire. Studying the everyday lives of these migrants, in turn, might also offer a way out of the impasse that global historians currently face.

Let me begin with an anecdote that encapsulates my argument: In autumn 1919, while statesmen gathered in Paris’s upscale banlieues to redraw the political world map, local police hired a discharged Vietnamese adjutant as an undercover agent. His task was “to exercise a discrete surveillance” over a compatriot of his who had distributed leaflets entitled “The Demands of the Annamite People” among diplomats and informal spokesmen in the city’s shabbier neighbourhoods. [continue reading]

A Parisian Ho Chi Minh Trail: Writing Global History Through Interwar Paris

Published on by CIGH Exeter5 Comments

Antiimperial Metropolis cover

Michael Goebel
Freie Universität Berlin
Follow on Twitter @mgoebel29

Anxieties over the possible political fallouts of African and Asian migration to Europe have a much longer history than the current refugee crisis might have you suspect. Colonial migration to interwar Paris, as I argue in Anti-Imperial Metropolis, turned into an important engine for the spread of nationalism across the French Empire. Studying the everyday lives of these migrants, in turn, might also offer a way out of the impasse that global historians currently face.

Let me begin with an anecdote that encapsulates my argument: In autumn 1919, while statesmen gathered in Paris’s upscale banlieues to redraw the political world map, local police hired a discharged Vietnamese adjutant as an undercover agent. His task was “to exercise a discrete surveillance” over a compatriot of his who had distributed leaflets entitled “The Demands of the Annamite People” among diplomats and informal spokesmen in the city’s shabbier neighbourhoods.

The newly enlisted informer took his assignment very seriously. He filed daily reports on just about every movement in the city’s Vietnamese community, producing a paper trail that can now only be traced through the National Archives in Paris and in the Colonial Archives in Aix-en-Provence. Continue reading “A Parisian Ho Chi Minh Trail: Writing Global History Through Interwar Paris” →