This open access book provides a thought-provoking new perspective on European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. It does so by inquiring how smaller European powers and regions at the margins of the continent integrated into a globally interconnected world that was heavily shaped by their more powerful European neighbours. Case studies on Nordic, Eastern and Central European regions uncover how countries such as Sweden, Serbia or Switzerland became imperial, despite having no or only short-lived overseas colonies of their own. By uncovering the structures and networks that enabled these regions to actively participate in and benefit from the imperial world around them, these case studies also reveal a crucial dynamic of European imperialism that has rarely been analysed in extant historiographies of Empire and Europe: the fact that 19th-century European imperial subjugation of almost the entire planet was driven not only by undeniable rivalry and competition among the greater European powers, but also necessarily depended on collaboration and exchanges across national and imperial boundaries.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Bernhard C. Schär is Eccellenza Professor at University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He specializes on 19th-century global and imperial history of Europe with a focus on entanglements in South and Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and Brazil.

Mikko Toivanen is a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His work deals with the Dutch and British Empires in 19th-century Southeast Asia, with a focus on transimperial connections and the development of colonial cities.