Authors

Andrei Dan Sorescu¹;  ¹ New Europe College Institute of Advance Studies, Romania

Discussion

The present paper aims to discuss the surprising importance that “colony” and “colonisation” held in nineteenth-century Romanian public discourse, by discussing the ways in which both the ethnic Romanian majority and Romanian minorities could be coded, in the historical actors’ own terms, as “colonists”. On the one hand, Romanians imagined themselves as the descendants of the Roman emperor Trajan’s colonists, and even occasionally referred to themselves as “colonists” outright, as a means of highlighting Roman origins. On the other, fears of Jewish presence or would-be German expansionism on the Danube were also explicitly connoted as “colonial”, which had an impact on how the two minorities in question were engaged with in policy and cultural representations. Moreover, various plans of settling foreign colonies as catalysts of civilisation were also discussed, primarily in the first half of the century, before nationalism proclaimed the monopoly of the titular ethnic nation on the territory of the emerging state, but also later on. As the Romanian constitution of 1866 included a specific provision banning colonisation with “peoples of foreign stock”, Italian colonisation would be subsequently proposed as an acceptable way of strengthening the Latin racial make-up of the country. In sum, the paper will offer a series of interconnected vignettes, covering a period a period from the 1830s to World War One, and, drawing upon parliamentary debates, press, and pamphlets in multiple languages, examine how minority “colonies” qua socio-territorial units and communities were imagined in relation to the ethnic majority.