Biography:

Ben Van Zee is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. He received his undergraduate degree in History and German Studies from Swarthmore College. He was awarded both graduate research and study fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to complete a M.A. in modern history at the Freie Universität Berlin. As a doctoral student his research has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA), the DAAD, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, and the Kosciuszko Foundation. His research interests include the histories of modern Germany and Poland, the Habsburg Monarchy and the successor states, comparatives empires, migration, and global and transnational history.  

Dissertation: Emigrant Colonialism in the Interwar World: Germans and Poles on the Frontiers of Brazil and East Africa, 1880-1945

Ben Van Zee’s dissertation reconstructs the transnational history of “emigrant colonialism,” a novel style of imperialism that emerged in the decades after the First World War. With the world divided among the great colonial powers and immigration restrictions gradually paralyzing international mobility, states like Poland and Germany, Japan and Italy, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, pioneered “emigrant colonialism” as geopolitical strategy to put their respective emigrants in service of state expansion overseas. Using private companies, they each purchased large tracts of land in isolated regions in South America and Africa. By funneling their countrymen to these frontiers—establishing homogeneous, self-governing demographic blocs—these communities, they reasoned, would incrementally acquire political rights, maturing into autonomous political regions if not fully independent daughter states. Through the perspectives of Polish and German activists, his dissertation explains how so many small states simultaneously developed such an ideosyncratic and yet so similar expansionist style. “Emigrant colonialism” he demonstrates, emerged dialogically, with each state inspiring, spurring, and radicalizing the others. As a practice of exercising deterritorialized state sovereignty, he shows how the evolving norms of governance made “emigrant colonialism” possible. As such, he argues that “emigrant colonialism” must be understood as one of the many national-imperial state-building experiments that proliferated across the interwar world.