About

Welcome to the Center for Transimperial History [CTH]

What is ‘transimperial history’?

‘Transimperial history’ is an emerging field of research dealing with the histories of modern empires and of resistances thereto, as well as the impacts of both on the present-day world. While it always takes multiple empires as the object of study within a single framework of analysis, its purpose is not to write their comparative histories. Rather, transimperial history focuses on how both those who ran empires and those who opposed them engaged in acts of comparison within complex relations of cooperation and competition. By looking at a range of phenomena, such as cross-border circulations of ideas and policies and movements of people and things, it foregrounds historical instances where relations of mutual influences and interactions unfolded across different colonial situations located in different empires.

Aims

The aims of CTH include:

  • promote research on transimperial history
  • connect institutions and scholars across the globe
  • provide a supportive environment for graduate and postdoctoral students

History

Center for Transimperial History (CTH) evolved out of its precursor, ‘Studies in Trans-Imperial Histories’ (STIH), a research forum which existed between 2016 and 2022. STIH was part of a collaborative research project, ‘Colonialism and anti-colonialism as seen from the perspective of transimperial relationality: the historical structures of comparison, collaboration, co-existence, and movement’, which was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Project Number 16H03501).  On 1 May 2022, STIH was superseded by CTH, which started as one of the official research centers of Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. Between 2022 and 2026, CTH will be run in conjunction with a JSPS grant project, ‘The theory and practice of trans-imperial history: towards an open-ended framework of research’ (JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)’, Project Number 22H00690).