Law, Landscapes, and Legitimacy: Polish Professionals and the Conquest of Africa

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel furthers the cause of excavating East Central Europe’s place in the history of colonialism and decolonization in Africa. It explores Polish geographers, jurists, and explorers whose professional decisions shaped African society, popular Polish understandings of Africa, as well as Europe’s view of the Polish nation. Progressing chronologically while focusing on geography and international law, this panel offers new perspectives on the making of modern Poland in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Ben Van Zee’s paper analyzes developments in international law, arguing that Stefan Szolc-Rogoziński’s efforts to represent the Polish nation in the Scramble for Africa can be understood as an extension of the broader struggle to regain Polish independence. Justyna Turkowska explores Szolc-Rogoziński’s and other explorers’ geographical work a lasting legacy of misinformation about West African geography in the Polish public imaginary that persisted well into the 1960s. Finally, Jakub Szumski examines how ambivalent attitudes toward nationalism and empire led one Polish judge, Bohdan Winiarski, to pass rulings that derailed Ethiopia’s and Liberia’s legal challenges to South African Apartheid at the International Court of Justice. Taken together, these case studies suggest that Polish anti-imperial attitudes were not automatically translated to other geographical locations and that Polish-African entanglements were consistently trilateral and involved appeals to an imagined “European” character of Poland on the global stage.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Roy Albert Kimmey, U of Notre Dame

Papers

• International Law, the Polish Struggle for Independence, and the Partition of Africa - Ben Van Zee, European U Institute (Italy)

• Maps and the Shaping of the Image of Africa or How the Non-Existent Mount Kong Lies in Poland - Justyna Aniceta Turkowska, U of Bielefeld (Germany)

• Empire on Trial: Bohdan Winiarski and Cold War Formalism in the South West Africa Case - Jakub Szumski, U of Jena (Germany)

Discussant

• Tomasz Zarycki, U of Warsaw (Poland)