Colonial history has long been written through the lens of imperial frameworks and state-centered logics. When historiography turned its attention to individual actors, it generally did so through a biographical approach and by tracing the circulation of key figures across the colonial world, whether naturalists, entrepreneurs, or missionaries.

Within a historiography shaped both by the study of political action and by actor-centered perspectives, one fundamental dimension of the dynamics that structured relations between European metropoles and the colonies, and, more broadly, colonial relations as a whole, remains underexplored: the interpersonal relationships that made possible, often indirectly, the formation, consolidation, and reproduction of global colonial structures. Colonial dynamics do not rest solely on administrations, markets, or mechanisms of coercion. Nor are they simply the result of the actions of particularly audacious actors with a keen sense of business. Rather, a web of familial, commercial, religious, political, and intellectual relationships facilitates the circulation of people, capital, knowledge, and forms of power. These relationships are at the heart of this conference.

The conference thus seeks to explore, on the one hand, the connections among actors, family strategies, and institutions from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, a period of colonial expansion, intensifying capital flows, and the reconfiguration of relationships among money, power, and imperial spaces. On the other hand, it examines the legacies and memory of these relationships and the ways in which they are addressed in the public sphere.

The conference welcomes proposals addressing, for example, the following themes:

• Families, businesses, and networks of power
• Economic structures and actors
• Intermediary actors
• Cities, territories and spaces
• Legacies, memory and uses of the past
• Methodological approaches

Submission deadline: 15 December 2026