The ‘Colonised Coloniser’: Coloniality, Internal Colonisation, and the Anti-Ottoman Civilising Mission in Austria-Hungary

This article examines how colonial repertoires of knowledge, governance, and political imagination were deployed within the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1878–1918). Rather than focusing on overseas colonial formations, it employs the figure of the “colonised coloniser” as a heuristic device to reconstruct how colonial repertoires were reconfigured within the continental setting of the Habsburg Empire. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches to coloniality, internal colonisation, and civilising missions, the article reconstructs the discursive and administrative configurations that legitimised the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a project of cultural transformation and state-directed modernisation. It argues that representations of Bosnia as a “future province” relied on anti-Ottoman narratives, Roman-Christian concepts of culture, ethnographic and archaeological knowledge production, and public health policies to legitimise a distinctive imperial civilising mission (Kulturmission). Around 1900, ethnonational Pan-Germanism inverted this imperial logic by representing Germans themselves as the colonised victims of the multinational state rather than as agents of imperial civilisation. By reconstructing this configuration of coloniality, the article contributes to debates on empire, coloniality, and internal colonisation in East Central Europe.