Construction of Identities and Imperialism During the 19th and 20th Centuries

Inside the X Congress of Contemporary History, that will take place at the University of Cantabria, Spain, on 16 and 17 September 2010, we invite you to participate at the panel 'Construction of Identities and Imperialism During the 19th and 20th Centuries.'

 Our objective is to explain how the history of empires, during the transition from the Ancien Régime to liberalism, has been written from a historiographical standpoint that considers states were built by metropolitan groups of power from their metropolises. However, in recent years (since the 1980s), some writers have shown us how, in the process of assembling states during the nineteenth century, the power elites of the so-called ‘colonial peripheries’ confronted the state projects that reduced them to the category of colony, and tried to get a more advantageous situation for their territories. It took place complex and multidirectional proces of identity formation whose knowledge is fundamental to understand the history of their metropolises. The objective of this panel is to study the process of construction of all those identities in the different European empires (the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, etc.) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under this perspective, there are some fundamental concepts, ‘nation’, ‘identity’, ‘community’.