Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 16:15-17:45
Department of Development Studies,
Sensengasse 3, Room SG 2, 1090 Vienna
Moderation: Franziska Müller (University of Vienna)
World-systems and decolonial perspectives fasten their analysis on the constitutive relation between European colonial expansion and capitalism. The overwhelming scholarly spotlight on the Americas as the primary arena where these processes took place leaves processes occurring in the East of Europe and in the context of imperial rather than colonial dynamics largely unaccounted for. The talk draws on the case of Transylvania in order to account for dialectical developments in Europe and to include the imperial alongside the colonial dimensions of capitalism. It proposes a detailed engagement with Transylvania's inter-imperial history at the crossroads of Eurasian empires and Western colonial powers as one of the many
necessary contributions to the larger project of creolizing the prevailing category of the modern as featured in and endlessly reproduced through dominant conceptions of modern Europe, modern empires, the modern nation-state, and the modern world-system.
