For the past four decades, scholars have inquired how the invention of traditions contributed to the formation of national identities by providing communities with a sense of historical depth. This workshop aims for taking stock of the discussions that have followed the publication Hobsbawm’s and Rangers seminal publication (1983) and explore the relation between social stratification, the establishing of modes of cultural self-representation and claims for sovereignty in a global historical perspective. What were the similarities and differences between German nation-building in the 1860s, the emergence of Black identity concepts of the Négritude, and the formation of national consciousness in India, to name but a few? Were these processes of collective self-fashioning in different parts of the world ultimately identical, differing only in their temporality?

The conference will explore the pathways, power struggles, and (re-)negotiations of nation-building and similar forms of community-fashioning in different world regions. It ties in with recent research that pointed out the role of scholarly disciplines such as History (Berger and Conrad 2015) or folklore studies (Baycroft and Hopkin 2012) for establishing sentiments of belonging within Europe and explores whether similar processes took place on other continents, as well as to what extent these processes were mutually entangled. Such an approach seems promising for the age of empire as in that period, the distinction between an allegedly civilized (i.e. European) and a supposedly uncivilized (i.e. colonial) world was not least drawn by different modes of temporality. Whereas the industrialised countries of the global North were deemed capable of historical change and development, the countries of the Southern hemisphere were denied coevalness (Fabian 1983) and considered backward ‘people without history’ by European intellectuals such as Hegel, Ranke, Mill, Macaulay or Droysen (Guha 2002). Actors from all around the world who participated in the self-fashioning of communities seem to be inspired by European academic traditions. Yet, they often maintained a level of non-conformity by emphatically locating themselves in scholarly tradition of their regions of origin, thus creating hybrid forms of scholarship. The invention of traditions and national histories that rooted communities in a historical past and allowed for projecting a certain trajectory towards the future and thus opening a distinct Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectation; Koselleck 1983) was therefore crucial for claims of territorial sovereignty in the imperial age.