The AHR Forum, « Cultures of Colonialism in the Metropole », brings together three articles that were originally submitted independently, all looking at colonial elements or experiences in the European metropole. As Marc Matera notes in his introduction, « Metropolitan Cultures of Empire and the Long Moment of Decolonization », these essays deal with the many ways in which empire abroad shaped the development of metropolitan imperial cultures and identities, reflecting the growing interest in the final decades of colonial rule. Matera’s introductory essay situates the other three articles within broader historiographical trends and highlights some lessons that they offer to historians of the metropolitan reverberations and afterlives of imperialism.

In the first article in the forum, « ‘The Capital of the Men without a Country’ : Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris », Michael Goebel explores the role of interwar Paris as a marketplace for the global spread of anticolonialism. He situates the early intellectual history of liberation movements in the everyday lives of migrants in the metropole, thus combining urban with global history. Goebel pays particular attention to immigrants from across the French Empire who in Paris became leaders in their ethnic communities. Their politicization owed much to the fact that the global disparities of the imperial order were becoming increasingly visible from … [Full Text of this Article]

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