Climate and Environmental History Seminar: Jawad Daheur (CNRS, Paris)

Abstract

This presentation explores German colonisation in Central and Eastern Europe through the lens of environmental history. It first examines the place of the environment in contemporary scholarship on German colonisation in the region, questioning how environmental factors have been integrated—or marginalised – in dominant narratives.

It then zooms in on forest exploitation in nineteenth-century central Poland and Volhynia. German settlers engaged in extensive forest clearing that converted forest biomass into marketable commodities, while also participating in broader migration flows as forestry workers employed by timber firms.

In this dual capacity – as settlers and as mobile labourers – they contributed to transforming “dormant” natural resources into cash value and to supplying labour for commercial networks operating well beyond the immediate region. Colonisation thus appears not simply as agrarian expansion, but as part of a dynamic frontier of resource extraction shaped by mobility, market demand, and ecological change.

Jawad Daheur, Researcher at CNRS – Centre for Russian, Caucasian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies, Paris (France), presents at The Climate and Environmental History Seminar 11 March.

About the seminar

Conveners: Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Martin Skoglund, and Iva Lučić.

Zoom link: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/63531651391

For information about the seminar, e-mail: fredrik.c.l@historia.su.se