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traditional argument has been that interwar Poland, like the other successor states that emerged from

the First World War, was a “decolonial state” or an “Other of Empire” in which Poles, who had long

been the victims of imperial oppression, seized on Wilsonian ideas of national self-determination and

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democracy and came to reject empire once and for all. Scholarship on Poles as the objects of
colonialism has certainly blossomed, most notably among historians of the German empire’s policies

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in its linguistically Polish eastern borderlands prior to the First World War. Discourses of “the
East,” we read, were based on the pejorative idea that Poles—like non-Europeans—were dirty,

uncivilized, and incapable of looking after their lands, an idea that permitted German elites to support

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their own “membership inside a civilization-generating ‘Europe.’” On the other hand, however,

some historians have recently argued that the putative nation-states of eastern Europe, of which

Poland was the largest and arguably the most significant, might best be understood as “little empires”

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or “mini empires” themselves. Pieter Judson, in particular, has noted that replicating the term

“nation-state,” which was cultivated by representatives of the successor states who had a vested

interest in distancing themselves from imperialism, blinds us to the imperial strategies that these

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states employed. The satisfyingly ironic argument is that Poland (or any of the successor states)

39 Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York, 2015), 31; Leonard V. Smith,
“Empires at the Paris Peace Conference,” in Empires at War, 1911-1923, eds. Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela
(New York, 2014), 259.
40 See Robert L. Nelson, ed., Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 through the Present (New
York, 2009); Lenny A. Urena Valerio, “The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and
Biopolitics in the Prussian-Polish Provinces (1840-1914)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2010); Elizabeth
Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, CT, 2003); Michael
Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge and New York,
1988); Kristin Kopp, Germany's Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor, 2012); Vejas
Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford and New York, 2009).
41 Kristin Kopp, “Reinventing Poland as German Colonial Territory in the Nineteenth Century: Gustav Freytag's Soll
und Haben as Colonial Novel,” in Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East, ed. Robert L. Nelson, 25.
42 Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, 2016), 451; Reynolds, The Long Shadow, 12.
43 Judson, The Habsburg Empire, 444. Much of the interwar language about internal borderlands evoked by elites in
Czechoslovakia, most strikingly by Czechs in relation to their Slovak and Ruthenian “brothers,” suggests that the
“mini empire” framework might be a useful one for reassessing the fundamental nature of the successor states more
generally. In Czechoslovakia, Jan Masaryk advocated a vision of ethnic tolerance through familial metaphors,
arguing that the Czechs, with their higher levels of culture, had to carry out a “civilizing mission” over their poorer
Slovak brothers. See Carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State,
1918-1987 (Princeton, 2014), 138. A similarly paternalistic discourse was evoked in reference to the Rusyns of Sub-

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