Colonial Complicities and Imperial Entanglements

Abstract

Europe is literally a product of the Third World, wrote Frantz Fanon provocatively in The Wretched of the Earth.¹ This brilliant insight into the mutually constitutive relationship between colonizing and colonized societies formulates a key theme of postcolonial scholarship avant la lettre. Of what possible relevance, however, could postcolonial theories be for an understanding of the past or present of Switzerland, a landlocked country in the heart of Europe, which neither possessed colonies nor pursued geopolitical interests in other regions of the world? Colonizing ambitions played little part in Swiss national identity formation, nor were imperial desires attributed to Switzerland either by other European colonizing powers or in the colonies. What makes this collection of essays unique is the very implausibility of its provocative claim to demonstrate the long shadows cast by (post)imperial formations on parts of Europe that were not colonizing societies but participated in the colonial project in a variety of ways and shared in its spoils. We see the Swiss as sojourners, not settlers, but nevertheless deeply imbricated in the imperial projects of their European neighbours overseas as they trade, proselytize, practise medicine, explore and travel or conduct anthropometric and botanical research in the colonies. Even in the absence of a colonial administrative service of their own, European empires could well offer a career for Swiss men, and occasionally women as well.