Investigating Colonialism within Europe

Abstract

In this quotation, premier African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois described the state of the European-dominated world of the 1920s as haunted by the shadow of colonialism. He could foresee an eventual end to European colonial dominance, but could not imagine how Europe and much of the world would look in the wake of decolonisation, so intrinsic was Europe’s relationship with its colonies to its identity in the early decades of the twentieth century. This volume, The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past, attempts to pursue the field of inquiry that he called for, ‘of likening and contrasting each [European] land and its far-off shadow’.2 We intend to explore the reverberations of the colonial experience across the European continent in the modern period. The image of the shadow, so eloquently invoked by Du Bois, highlights the complexity of the relationship between the European metropole and its hinterland. With its connotations of darkness, distortion and elasticity, the shadow functions as a useful metaphor for the negative and variable impact of colonial practices on Europe. The shadow is intrinsic to the object that projects it in the same way that colonial practices are an intrinsic feature of the mind of the coloniser, whether directed overseas or closer to the metropole.