Introduction

Does it still make sense to dedicate a special issue to European identities in Africa today? To be sure, the concept of identity itself and its value for the humanities and social sciences has been rigorously challenged over recent decades. Most famously, in 2000, sociologist Rogers Brubaker, a prominent researcher in fields such as nationalism, ethnicity, citizenship, diasporas, and social theory, and historian Frederick Cooper, a leading expert in colonial and African history, called for scholars to move beyond the term “identity.”Footnote ¹ Identity, they argued, is deeply ambiguous, pointing in many and sharply different directions: identity can be used to discuss either an individual phenomenon, highlighting one’s individuality, or a collective one, highlighting sameness within groups; it can mean either a self-understanding or something attributed by others; it can be used to refer to the unstable, multiple, fluctuating, and fragmented nature of selfhood, but also to invoke its allegedly deep, abiding, and foundational condition.Footnote ² Therefore, Brubaker and Cooper questioned the usefulness of a term that can mean almost everything and its opposite, lacking the conceptual clarity required for social analysis. To avoid confusion between the different meanings of identity, they suggested three alternatives. The first one was identification or categorisation, which calls attention to the processes by which one identifies oneself or is identified by others, underlining the situational and contextual character of these complex processes.Footnote ³ To replace identity in the sense of one’s perception of who one is and of one’s social location, the authors suggested self-understanding or self-representation: while the former may be tacit, the latter implies some degree of explicit discursive articulation.Footnote ⁴ Finally, Brubaker and Cooper proposed the terms commonality, connectedness, or groupness to designate the sense of belonging to a distinctive group, involving a feeling of sameness and solidarity with fellow group members, as well as a feeling of difference and sometimes antagonism towards the outsiders.Footnote ⁵

Brubaker and Cooper’s article emerges following several decades during which the term identity achieved widespread currency within both scholarly disciplines and everyday language. The popularisation of ‘identity’ as a key term dates back from the 1950s and was propelled by Anglophone academia. Central to this process was the German-American psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, who observed in 1950 that “we begin to conceptualize matters of identity at the very time in history when they become a problem.”Footnote ⁶ While the term’s initial spread is inextricably linked to contemporary anxieties about rootlessness and the fate of the individual in mass society in the 1950s, it became a crucial framework for understanding the personal and collective struggles at the heart of the Civil Rights movement and women’s liberation movement during the unrest of the 1960s. As the language of politics of identity and difference took hold in activism in the following decades, simultaneously questions of racial, gender, sexual, and cultural identity also gained momentum in the social sciences and humanities.Footnote ⁷ This intellectual and political shift was not confined to the United States. In the UK, for instance, the postwar migration of Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean and India and Pakistan to Britain not only led to the adoption of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, a policy designed to control non-white immigration, but also complicated notions of who was British and who was not in an increasingly multi-cultural society. Among the new arrivals from the Caribbean during this period was Stuart Hall, who came on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1951 and would later become a pivotal theorist of these very identity questions. His concept of identity, as he summarised in 1996, was “not an essentialist, but a strategic and positional one.”Footnote ⁸ For Hall, identity was not a stable core of the self but rather the dynamic and contested meeting point between discourses and practices of society – such as institutions, media, laws, or norms – and the processes that produced subjectivities (i.e. the internal sense of self produced through the experiences within one’s culture). While the former continually ‘interpellate’ or hail individuals to position them within predefined roles, the internal sense of self shapes the individual’s capacity to recognise, resist, or embrace these calls. Identity, therefore, was constructed in this ongoing negotiation.

By 2000, constructivist approaches to identity, of which Hall’s is one example, were not exceptional and had become the academic orthodoxy. In Brubaker and Cooper’s view, these approaches had provided a necessary critique of essentialist understandings of identity by emphasising its fluid, multiple, fragmented, and socially constructed nature. But, paradoxically, this very emphasis had also allowed the proliferation of identities and ultimately contributed to the evisceration of the concept’s analytical power to understand contemporary identity politics, leaving it ill-equipped to examine the often essentialist claims driving them. Brubaker and Cooper’s criticisms on the ambiguity of the term identity remain valid. What, then, is the justification for this collection on European identities in Africa? This special issue proceeds from the conviction that the limitations as an analytical category that, for Brubaker and Cooper, are their reason to move beyond ‘identity’ are precisely what makes identities interesting. Admittedly, Brubaker and Cooper made a distinction between categories of analysis and categories of practice, drawing heavily on Bourdieu’s theory of practice.Footnote ⁹ The individuals’ practical sense of their place in the world, and of what they could or could not hope to achieve based on their social location – i.e. Bourdieu’s sens pratique – is what shapes their modes of action in a given social situation. In reality, the categories of analysis conjured up by historians and other social scientists do not necessarily match the categories that historical actors conceive and deploy to explain and structure their social practices. While individuals may not be conscious of how they are actively involved in giving life to identities when they categorise, they do use these categories to explain, position, and make sense of themselves and others. In the complexity of the historical actor’s everyday lives, the different meanings of identity identified by Brubaker and Cooper are not clear-cut. Rather, these meanings are interdependent and often chronically implicated in one another, not coming across as distinct phenomena that can be easily broken down. An individual sense of self inherently involves interaction, being defined in relation to others and the outside world and is rarely dissociated from collective sense of belonging to one or more groups. Self-understanding is profoundly shaped by how one is identified by others, in the same way that identification by others may be shaped by idioms of self-understanding. It is from this interplay between self-identification and other-identification – or, as Richard Jenkins put it in his influential examination of the concept of ethnicity, between processes of internal and external definition of individual or collective identitiesFootnote ¹⁰ – that any form of identity is created. Identity results from the dialectic between sameness and otherness, between similarity and difference, but the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are often contingent and open-ended in the sense that actors make choices informed by their practical sense of their place in society. Moreover, not only may there be a divergence between a person’s perception of their own identity in a given situation and that ascribed to them by others, but a person may also take on several different identities or be identified in several different ways across different types of situations. This idea that individuals wear different ‘hats’ in different contexts and identity, or presentation of self, is a situated performance has long been theorised by sociologist Ervin Goffman.Footnote ¹¹

The articles gathered in this collection approach European identities as a category of practice rather than an analytical category. They tackle processes of self- and other-identification as European, as well as self-understanding and self-representation and the sense of belonging to a distinctive group that could be described as commonality, connectedness, or groupness in Brubaker and Cooper’s perspective. The focus on identities as a category of practice (and thus sacrificing some analytical conceptual clarity) allows us to explore how historical actors instrumentally used notions of identity to position themselves in relation to others and how, in turn, this very social action was partly responsible for perpetuating those notions and, ultimately, shaping social structures and power relations in colonial Africa. In other words, focusing on how individuals actively ordered and made sense of identities supports the idea of agency among diverse historical actors and explains how it generated not only compliance or opposition but also alternative behaviours. Through the analysis of concrete manifestations of European identities across space and time and in an array of configurations of social practices, the articles explore the variety and diversity of strategies and mechanisms of multiple historical actors according to their various, and sometimes contradicting, interests and visions. Geographically, this collection’s scope brackets together contributions on different locales, covering the British, German, and French empires in Africa. Chronologically, the articles cover a period starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the 1950s.

This period witnessed major transformations in Africa in terms of political rule. The burst of European military campaigns to conquer new possessions during the Scramble for Africa was accompanied by an administrative apparatus to control the territories and their peoples from the late nineteenth century onwards. Africa was mainly composed by independent African kingdoms before the 1880s. By 1914, however, only Liberia and Ethiopia were not under European control: while the former had declared independence from the American Colonisation Society in 1847,Footnote ¹² the Ethiopian army successfully defended its independence from the invading Italian forces in 1896.Footnote ¹³ The situation remained virtually unchanged during the interwar period. Britain recognised Egypt’s independence in 1922, but without actually granting Egyptians full sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁴ Ethiopia was occupied by Italy for approximately six years after being invaded by Mussolini’s troops in October 1935.Footnote ¹⁵ After the Second World War, the rising tide of African nationalism compelled European powers to relinquish control over their colonies in the continent. The transition process from European rule to independence was marred by violence, oppression, and turmoil and came late. Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African country attaining independence in 1957. Only in the following decade was Africa swept by the ‘wind of change,’ to use the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s expression in his celebrated speech at the parliament of South Africa in early 1960.Footnote ¹⁶ Later that year, the Belgian Congo and all the colonies of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa became independent.Footnote ¹⁷ By contrast, South Africa declared itself a republic and left the Commonwealth following a whites-only referendum in October 1960. The racially based apartheid system which had been established in 1948 persisted and the transfer of power from a privileged white minority to the majority of the population took place only in 1994.Footnote ¹⁸

In addition, and related to these political rule changes, this period also saw a significant variation in the number of Europeans in Africa. In North Africa, Algeria, which had been declared a department of France in 1848, had been attracting a significant number of not only French but also Italian settlers since the mid-nineteenth century. Its proximity to Europe and ease of access further enabled migration, even among lower-class Europeans.Footnote ¹⁹ The technological, medical, and pharmaceutical advances of the nineteenth century also enabled the increase of the number of Europeans in Sub-Saharan Africa, a process that followed the military advances in this region.Footnote ²⁰ While steam power shortened distances, making travel to Africa and within the continent faster and cheaper for Europeans, quinine significantly reduced their mortality, becoming an essential weapon against malaria. Africa’s appeal lay in its natural resources, from raw materials like rubber and palm oil, which were in high demand after Europe’s Industrial Revolution, to diamonds, gold, copper and other minerals, as well as crop plantations, like coffee and cotton – all of which could be extracted and cultivated by exploiting Africans as a source of cheap labour. The increase of migrants from Europe, slow at first, notably accelerated during the interwar period, often taking advantage of settlement policies promoted by the imperial states.Footnote ²¹ These schemes did not end after the Second World War. In fact, in Portuguese Africa, they emerged in force only in the post-war period.Footnote ²² Settlement schemes run parallel to, and were part of, broader development initiatives that were also being adopted by other European colonial powers and formed the basis for what Anthony Low and John Lonsdale famously termed the “second colonial occupation” when referring to British colonial rule in Africa.Footnote ²³ Conversely, the independence of former European colonies triggered reverse migratory flows, beginning in the 1940s with the repatriation of Italians from Libya and the British-occupied Italian East Africa.Footnote ²⁴ As Portuguese colonies in Africa were the last to achieve independence, the retornados did not leave to Portugal until the mid-1970s.Footnote ²⁵ In the meantime, over a million French settlers of Algeria, often termed pieds-noirs, had arrived in France in the 1960s,Footnote ²⁶ and migration from former colonies to their metropoles continued even after the collapse of Rhodesia in 1980 and the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 160,000 Europeans moved to Britain between 1945 and the early 1990s.Footnote ²⁷

Although mass migration of Europeans to and from Africa defined the twentieth century, a European presence on the continent existed long before. This presence changed the very concept of what it meant to be identified as European in Africa over time. From the late fifteenth century onwards, Africans witnessed the arrival of Europeans of different origins to their homelands. Europeans established permanent trading posts and forts in coastal areas in close proximity to existing local markets, but geographical obstacles and tropical disease hampered their penetration into the hinterlands. Due to their small numbers and high mortality, Europeans initially depended on Africans. More than trading partners, the former relied on the latter for supplies and defence. Exchanges between Europeans and African ensued, giving rise to societies of cultural and biological métissage that combined African and European elements. A well-studied example is the lançados (from the Portuguese ‘lançados com os negros’, i.e. those who throw themselves among the ‘negroes’) in the Upper Guinea Coast.Footnote ²⁸Lançados were private traders of Portuguese origin, frequently Sephardic Jews escaping religious persecution and forced conversion, who settled in Africa on their own initiative, not only without the support of the Portuguese crown, but also in opposition to the Portuguese crown’s wishes. They adapted to local trading practices and entered into informal marriage alliances with local women, often from the social elite of their host societies. In addition, they increasingly adopted local cultural and social practices, becoming intermediaries between local African populations and visiting European merchants. Their role in bridging these two worlds was continued by their children and grandchildren, as their racial and cultural fluidity made them ideal cultural and economic brokers. ‘Creolised’ societies such as the one that ensued after the arrival of lançados were not a phenomenon exclusive to the Upper Guinea but rather a common feature of Africa. Footnote ²⁹ The local elites that emerged among colonists of European and mixed descent in the early modern period were central to the advancement of European commercial interests into the interior. In the process, they were able to pursue their own agendas, forging durable connections with the surrounding African communities and accumulating wealth, political power, and status. African ‘creolised’ societies, which comprised Europeans, Africans, and people of mixed descent, contained different individual and collective forms of identification and were racially segmented. However, forms of self-identification and other-identification as European did not derive from skin colour alone. For instance, as early as 1546, Cape Verdeans of mixed descent and free Africans petitioned the Portuguese king for equality with whites and the right to participate in local administration. The grounds for their claim to equal status were that, as cultural brokers, they were uniquely able to control the enslaved African population and prevent unrest. Furthermore, amid rising fears about incoming cristãos-novos, they presented themselves as the only group trustworthy enough to protect the king’s interests. The petition was successful and this emerging elite would become known as the brancos da terra (whites of the land).Footnote ³⁰ In African ‘creolised’ societies, race was thus an important but not the primary category of European identity. Ideas of who was European, or not, were not in black and white, being better understood on a spectrum with many gradations in which economic and social position and status also played a role in defining or ascribing one’s identity.

In the late nineteenth century, as aforementioned, Europeans became able to penetrate Africa’s interior more easily thanks to technological and medical progresses, initiating a new phase of colonial occupation. This new phase, too, relied heavily on African intermediaries as cultural brokers, who were essential for the establishment of European colonial rule. They not only served as interpreters, mediating the communication between the coloniser and local populations, but they also took formal positions in local administration, working as clerks and lower-level administrators. The term “white-blacks,” which was used by the local population for African employees of the colonial administration in French West Africa, neatly captures the ambiguity of African intermediaries in terms of racial identification by others.Footnote ³¹ However, as more and more Europeans went to Africa and the structure of the colonial state changed, the dependence on Europeanised Africans as intermediaries decreased.

For instance, Jill Dias, Eugénia Rodrigues, and Jacopo Corrado have shown how the creolised elite that identified itself as European, Euro-African, or Luso-African lost influence and political and economic power in Portuguese Angola from the late nineteenth century onwards: not only increasingly more Portuguese settlers arrived from the metropole, but they also brought new, and more rigid, ideas about racial differences with them.Footnote ³² The linguistic, religious, and sartorial practices from which Europeanised Africans identification as Euro-Africans originated gradually came to be seen as mere mimicry of ‘true’ Europeans. As the bureaucracy of the colonial state solidified, their opportunities to take part in colonial administration declined. In 1929, all the African functionaries, who had occupied key positions in the colonial administration, and thus had been important agents for the expansion of Portuguese colonialism, started being dismissed and their posts were filled by newcomers from metropolitan Portugal.Footnote ³³ However, rather than putting an end to nuanced hierarchies between who was European and non-European, increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance forced Euro-Africans to renegotiate their position within the political nation and the economic system. Whereas before this period the focus was on their Europeanness as an element of distinction from other Africans, their loss of prestige motivated the extension of the notion of African (irrespective of having European ancestors, skin colour, or cultural and socioeconomic distinctive elements) to include them and position them as leaders against the Portuguese colonial power.Footnote ³⁴ The Duala in Cameroon, which Ralph Austen and Jonathan Derrick suggest can be seen as a typical example of middlemen in Africa, adopted similar strategies and mechanisms: first, playing an important role as trading intermediaries between the Europeans in the coast and Africans in the hinterlands; then, adopting European ways of living and thinking, becoming an elite of Europeanised Africans working as clerks, interpreters, and teachers under German and French rule; and finally as claimants to anti-colonial political leadership.Footnote ³⁵ In a similar vein, Rebecca Shumway has shown how the Fante political and trading elites in nowadays Ghana who deeply engaged in the exchange of commercial, political, and cultural ideas and practices with Europeans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became the nascent African nationalists of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century.Footnote ³⁶ To put it succinctly: the way the Duala and the Fante, like the Luso-Africans, articulated or invested in the articulation and acknowledgment of European elements of their identities was never fixed in time.Footnote ³⁷

The loss of influence of Euro-African elites took place at the same time ‘racial sciences’ gained momentum, classifying humans into races and codifying and consolidating pre-existing ideas of natural inequality associated with phenotype features. Creating taxonomies resembling the ones used for animals and plants, the novel scientific field reinforced the conviction of the superiority of the ‘white’ race and European civilisation over all others and shaped contemporary attitudes towards the variety of humankind.Footnote ³⁸ It has been argued that these new ‘scientific’ claims of racial inequality replaced the more nuanced hierarchies of the early modern period.Footnote ³⁹ However, scholars of modern colonial societies have shown that self-identification and other-identification as European remained fluid and contingent. Rather than following a coherent system of racial classification based on phenotype features only, they resulted from the interplay of race, class, and culture embedded in social practices.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ann Laura Stoler’s work has assumed a leading role in this discussion about European identities as socio-political constructs in colonial settings. With a focus on the Dutch East Indies, Stoler has shown that colonial categorisations as Europeans were flexible: neither were the boundaries between European and non-Europeans clear-cut, nor were Europeans and non-Europeans homogeneous groups.Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, Bart Luttikhuis has demonstrated that culture, class, education, religion, and lifestyle also formed grounds for justifying a socio-legal categorisation as “European” in the Dutch late colonial period. Consequently, even though the colonial system undeniably favoured European males, individuals from other ethnic backgrounds were able to secure a favourable social position by tactically employing these “civilising” features.Footnote ⁴² This held true for the African context as well.

A curious example of how legal structures that had been designed to protect the colonial hierarchy between Europeans and non-Europeans were used by individuals from other ethnic backgrounds for their own benefit is to be found in French North Africa, more specifically in Tunisia. While several consular courts had operated during Ottoman rule to protect Christians from Islamic law, after the French occupation, the French authorities sought to combat this proliferation of consular courts by granting their own courts jurisdiction over all ‘Europeans.’ As Mary Lewis has shown, determining who was ‘European’ was not straightforward and was used by people who culturally and ethnically would not be classified as European for their advantage. For example, Algerians settled in Tunisia invoked their status as Europeans by virtue of being French nationals; after the 1911 Italian occupation of Libya and the extension of Italian nationality to Libyan subjects, Libyans settled in Tunisia could similarly invoke European status, which exempted them from head taxes and conscription and granted them access to the French courts.Footnote ⁴³

The heterogeneity of Europeans of European ethnic background was another source of anxiety in French North Africa, as many Italian migrants of lower and working-class backgrounds settled in Algeria and Tunisia from the 1880s onwards.Footnote ⁴⁴ At a time when theories of race and eugenics were being used to bolster the concept of the innate superiority of the white race, scientific ideas on human diversity also maintained that there were biological and primordial differences between ‘light’ and ‘dark’ Europeans. In this context, national origin thus served as a ‘racial marker,’ classifying individuals as more or less European. French fears of an Italian invasion, coupled with concerns about how these ‘poor whites’ would erode European prestige in the eyes of the colonised, fuelled this anxiety. Anxieties regarding ‘poor whites’ were not unique to the French in North Africa but were, in fact, a common concern among all colonial powers.Footnote ⁴⁵

Another issue that continued to complicate matters of European identities in the modern period was, obviously, the existence of mixed-descent individuals, muddling the criteria of who was European, and to what degree of Europeanness. Reflections on race-mixing between Africans and Europeans, and how to prevent it, had gained increasing importance in racist theories across Europe from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, even though this concern only translated into formal prohibitions of inter-racial marriages in the independent Boer Republic of Transvaal (1902), German South-West Africa (1905), and German East Africa (1906).Footnote ⁴⁶ The socio-legal status of the métis varied across empires and often within the same imperial formation, depending on visible signs of European blood as well as class, social status, civil condition, and familiarity with European culture. While this status was externally imposed by colonial authorities, the ways in which people of mixed descent contested, negotiated, and fought for it were historically decisive, as evidenced by the greater political efficacy of their lobbying in British Central Africa compared to British East Africa explored by Lawrence Mbogoni.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, the agency of mixed-race Africans was a formative force in shaping the colonial state structures and the social and political contours of the societies they lived in. For instance, Hilary Jones has argued that the restructuration of electoral politics in Senegal in the early twentieth century occurred in part because the colonial administration wanted to limit the public interference of métis assemblymen, as they had become savvier in pursuing their own interests through the General Council (the local assembly), instrumentally using the French Republic’s institutions for their own gain.Footnote ⁴⁸

The actions and intentions of specific historical actors, or groups of historical actors, that reveal their self-perceptions and worldviews are central to their identities and, therefore, to this collection of articles on European identities in colonial Africa. The collection proceeds from the premise that European identities in colonial Africa were relational and situational claims, constantly being made, unmade, and contested on African ground. The following articles depart from an array of different actors with varying degrees of power and vulnerability within the colonial societies in which they were in and also with varying degrees of identification with Europeanness. Each contribution considers singular cases to highlight the complex nature of European identities, showing how the lives and experiences of individuals and groups can be used as windows to glimpses of local societies in colonial Africa in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the first article of this collection, Michael Rösser follows the trajectory of a single individual of mixed-race descent who identified himself as European. Ranga Reinhardt Kaundinya’s case, however, immediately complicates this framework even further, as he was not of African heritage. The son of an Indian Christian missionary and a German woman, Kaundinya moved from British India to German East Africa to oversee a cotton plantation. Kaundinya used his career in Africa as a vehicle for social mobility and to forge his reputation as an expert in colonial affairs in the early twentieth century. Due to his Indo-German background, Kaundinya faced discrimination from both the German colonial administration and his own European subordinates in Africa, but he always positioned himself into the European sphere in the colonial society. Rösser shows how Kaundinya reinforced his European identity after the start of the First World War, posing as an expert in colonialism – not only German colonialism, but also British colonialism – and becoming a fierce advocate for the German superiority as a colonial power. Ranga Reinhardt Kaundinya’s transcontinental trajectory crossing Asia, Africa, and Europe exemplifies the value of a single biography to illuminate the interconnected, global nature of colonial societies, as well as the fluidity of European identity claims within them.

The second article take us to French West Africa and it is focussed on a migrant community, revealing cracks and nuances in the sense of commonality, connectedness, or groupness of historical actors. Looking at the period after the Second World War, Julien Charnay researches a well-established middlemen minority in Senegal: the Lebanese. The article moves beyond the responses of French settlers and the colonial government to the presence of the Lebanese in the colony, which were increasingly perceived as a thread. Fears of decline of the French white settlers fuelled campaigns against the Lebanese community. The article departs from the Lebanese reactions to these campaigns to reveal a fragmented community in terms of their attitudes towards not only France and French colonialism, but also French identity itself. While some Lebanese actors in Senegal actively claimed this French identity for themselves, others did not. Through this lens, Charnay’s research offers some insights into the motivations and visions behind their challenged loyalties, showing how colonial identities were fractured not only between groups but within them. This internal fragmentation demonstrates that colonial identities were sites of intense negotiation even among those ostensibly sharing a common ethnic position. The article thus contributes to a more nuanced understanding of agency, showing how intermediary groups between the coloniser and the colonised were internally divided by generation and political strategy in their engagement with the colonial order.

Lastly, Naïma Maggetti investigates Britain’s late-colonial efforts to reaffirm the legitimacy of its colonial rule and improve and strengthen the links with its African colonies on the eve of decolonisation. Her article revisits the articulation between British Empire and the idea of assimilation, arguing that there was concerted cultural project to promote a “British Way of Life” in this period. Using two important tools deployed by the imperial power to export Britishness to the colonies as the point of departure of her analysis, Maggetti reconstructs the officially ‘approved’ version of what Britishness was and should be in Africa, as well as how different members of the colonial society – European settlers, Africans, and Indian and Arab migrant communities – responded to these attempts to encourage a British Way of Life. Exploring a state-driven identity project and its fragmented reception, this article reminds us that colonial identities were a contested field of projection, reception, and negotiation.

In different ways, all the contributions will shed light on the shifting contours of European identities and the many nuances of what being ‘European’ in colonial Africa meant. European identities in colonial Africa were shaped both by personal and communal strategies from below and by deliberate ideological projects from above, with both processes resulting in fragmentation, negotiation, and contestation. By focusing on the historical actor’s strategies and mechanisms and how they negotiate and renegotiate their identities in a changing world, this special collection aims to offer new perspectives on the role of evolving local social structures and power relations in shaping, supporting, and/or thwarting modern European colonial projects.