WEEK 3

This week’s reading made me rethink what global history looks like in practice. Instead of just being about connections between different parts of the world, it seemed to be more about how power, knowledge and identity are produced through those connections and often in uneven ways. Reading Conrad alongside Valerio showed me that empire is also about controlling movement and producing scientific knowledge as well as defining difference.

What stoof out to me in Conrad’s chapter on Polish seasonal workers was how contradictory their position was. On the one hand, Polish labour was clearly essential to agriculture in Prussia’s eastern probinces, but on the other hand, Polish workers were treated as suspicious and temporary and their movement was heavily regulated by the state. I found this idea of mobility being actively controlled really interesting. Conrad’s suggestion that Prussian Poland functioned almost like an internal colony also stuck with me, blurring the line between European and overseas colonialism in a way I had not really considered before.

Valerio’s work made me think about empire from a different angle as well. The author looks at how medical science, especially germ theory, became tied up with German imperial power. I was particularly struck by how the shift from miasma theory to germ theory was not just sscientific, but also political, as it enabled more surveilance and control over populations. The way disease became radicalised in the colonies and Polish borderlands was unsettling, but also illuminating in terms of how science can reinforce existing hierarchies. At the same time, I appreciate Valerio didn’t present the Poles simply as victims. The discussion of Polish physicians showed that they were actively involved in scientific debates and sometimes used bacteriology to assert their own intellectual legitimacy within the German Empire. This made the picture feel more complicated and less one-sided than I originally expected.

Reading these texts together helped me see how transnational history involves traces the movement of ideas and power alongside the movement of people. Koch’s work on cholera in Egypt and India and the circulation of Polish workers across Prussia both pointed to a world that was already deeply connected in the late nineteenth century. But these connections were clearly shaped by inequality – between Germans and Poles and between metropole and colony.

This week allowed me to see empire from a different standpoint. Rather than only seeing it in terms of territory or economics, I now see it as something that operated through everyday practices like policing borders, defining disease and deciding who belongewd. Conrad and Valerio approach this from different perspectives, but together they show how deeply imperial power shaped both Europe and the wider world.