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colonial holdings abroad. While some Poles certainly pushed for a program of colonial expansion,

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there was, in the end, no Polish Senegal, Libya, or India.

While these arguments remind us of the political stakes in using the term “empire” in the case

of Poland—now, as then—they should not preclude a historically grounded investigation into the

complex ways in which Poles were shaped by global ideas about civilizational development that

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were necessarily connected to imperialism. Historians have struggled to do this well. They either
use terms like “colonialism” or “imperialism” unreflectively or measure up the Second Republic

49
against various definitions (from which there are, of course, many to choose). Scholars in the fields

of literary criticism and sociology have presented a more imaginative case, showing how Poles

attempted to navigate the space between colonial victim and civilizing (but not colonizing) European

power in the kresy, although their discursive analysis tends to feel somewhat removed from the rough

50
and tumble of everyday life. The best approach, perhaps, is to show how Poles—even without a

formal empire—operated in a world in which the creation of imperial hierarchies in non-European

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spaces informed similar processes within the imperial metropole. This allows us to see how Poles

47 Piotr Puchalski, “The Polish Mission to Liberia, 1934-1938: Constructing Poland’s Colonial Identity,” The
Historical Journal 60, no. 4 (2017): 1071-1096; Marek Arpad Kowalski, Dyskurs kolonialny w Drugiej
Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw, 2010).
48 As Krishan Kumar put it, “the idea of a natural succession ‘from empire to nation-state’ is a misleading one,
distorting both the actual history of recent times and the analysis of current forms and possibilities.” See Kumar,
“Nation-states as empires, empires as nation-states: two principles, one practice?” Theory and Society 39, no. 2
(2010): 120. For an overview of the blurring of these categories, see the essays in Alexei Miller and Stefan Berger
(eds.), Nationalizing Empires (Budapest, 2014).
49 For instance, Aviel Roshwald argues that the kresy “were governed virtually as colonial territories,” but does not
explain what he means by the term. See Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central, Europe,
Russia, and the Middle East, 1914-1923 (London and New York, 2001), 168. For an example of an attempt to
measure Poland up against a definition of colonialism, see Christoph Mick, “Colonialism in the Polish Eastern
Borderlands,” in The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past, eds. Roisin Healy and Enrico Dal Lago
(London, 2014), 126-141.
50 See Zarycki, The Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe; Izabela Kalinowska, Between East and
West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-Century Travel to the Orient (Rochester, 2004); Janusz Korek, ed., From
Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective (Huddinge, 2007); Bogusław
Bakuła, “Kolonialne i postkolonialne aspekty polskiego dyskursu kresoznawczego (zarys problematyki),” Teksty
Drugie 6 (2006): 11-33.
51 The classic introduction to thinking about how relationships in the metropole were constituted in dialogue with
those in the colonies is Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997). On France, see Weber Peasants into Frenchmen, particularly 485-493; Gary

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