Imperial dynamics and settler colonialism in East Central Europe. A review essay

The review essay discusses recent scholarly contributions on the entanglements between settler colonialism and imperialism in East Central Europe. Three recent publications inform the analysis: Robert Nelson, Frontiers of Empire: Max Sering, Inner Colonization, and the German East, 1871-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Bogdan G. Popescu, Imperial Borderlands: Institutions and Legacies of the Habsburg Military Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). The article emphasizes some of the implications of settler colonial interventions in the imperial borderlands for the historiography of nationalism and for the (new) history of empires in East Central Europe.