Swiss involvement in colonialism
While Switzerland never had colonies, it was still involved in colonial practices and discourse and benefited economically from colonialism. In the NZZ, ETH4D member Professor Harald Fischer-Tiné discusses the involvement of Swiss players in the colonial business, the role of historians in current debates, and the ability of postcolonial studies to help us understand ideas, values and linguistic relics from the colonial past that still shape contemporary society.
Subscribers to the NZZ can read the full article (in German), which was published on July 10, external pagehere. Prof. Fischer-Tiné was also a guest on the SRF radio feature external page«Denkmal nach! Abreissen, stehen lassen oder neu denken?», which deals with the current debate on monuments and other vestiges of colonial history.
Interested readers can learn more about Swiss involvement in colonialism in the anthology “external pageColonial Switzerland”, edited by Prof. Fischer-Tiné and Prof. Patricia Purtschert. The collection provides in-depth analyses of how Switzerland as a state without former colonies was nevertheless involved in colonial practices and shaped by colonialism in various ways. The topics range from the relationship between colonialism and science to (post)colonial economies, self-representations, and politics. For the first time, the collection makes the products of recent scholarship on colonial and postcolonial Switzerland available in English.