Tom Menger

Tom Menger is a historian of Empire in the time period between c. 1870 and 1914. His main interests lay in transimperial history, the history of colonial violence, and the history of imperial infrastructures. At global dis:connect, Tom is looking at the infrastructures of the early (semi-)colonial oil industry in the Ottoman, British and Dutch Empire, and how these infrastructures relate to global connectivity and disconnectivity in this age. Previously, Tom acquired his PhD with a transimperial history of fin-de-siècle colonial violence and war (publication forthcoming).

Tom Menger studied History and European Studies at the University of Amsterdam between 2010 and 2014. He received a Research Master’s in History from the same University in 2016. His MA thesis was subsequently awarded the Otto von der Gablentz Thesis Prize. Between 2017 and 2021, Tom wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Cologne and graduated summa cum laude for his thesis, titled ‘The Colonial Way of War: Extreme Violence in Knowledge and Practice of Colonial Warfare in the British, German and Dutch Colonial Empires, c. 1890-1914’. During his doctoral phase, Tom was Associate PhD at Queen Mary University of London (2018) and held a fellowship at the Institute for European History (IEG) in Mainz (2020). From August 2021, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the global dis:connect Research Centre at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich.

For a full publication list, download Tom’s CV below.

‘Energy Dis:connectivity in Europe’s Oil and Gas Supply’, Forum Global Dis:connections, Journal of Modern European History (2023) published online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221148939

‘Concealing Colonial Comparability: British Exceptionalism, Imperial Violence, and The Dynamiting of Cave Refuges in Southern Africa, 1879-1897’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50: 5 (2022) 860-889. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2022.2057742

‘”Press the Thumb onto the Eye”: Moral Effect, Extreme Violence, and the Transimperial Notions of British, German and Dutch Colonial Warfare, c. 1890-1914’, Itinerario 46: 1 (2022) 84-108. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115321000371

“Of ‘Big Bags’ and ‘Golden Bridges’: Thinking the Colonial Massacre in British, German, and Dutch Manuals of Colonial Warfare, 1860-1910,” European History Yearbook 22 (2021) 79-97. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110776232-005

Download Tom’s CV here.