Inter-imperiality: A Political Economy Reading

Abstract

The concepts of “creolization” and “inter-imperiality” proposed in Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă’s Creolizing the Modern are superb interventions in the study of society in Europe’s semi-peripheries. These concepts usefully complicate conventional readings in orthodox, decolonial and postcolonial studies at both the conceptual and methodological level. From a historically-minded political economy approach, the book is an opportunity to ask further questions about the scope of inter-imperiality in early 20th century Transylvania, the paucity of analysis of the British-managed Gold Standard finance in shaping the political economy of late Habsburg Transylvania and the ambiguous foundations of ethnic and class relations in this part of Europe.