Professor Lucy Riall of the EUI Department of History has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for a five-year project on the relationship between migration policies and imperial ambitions in South America. She will lead MIGRANT COLONIALISM ('Migrant colonialism: South American states and global empires, c.1840–c.1940').
MIGRANT COLONIALISM compares settler colonies founded by Italian, German, and Japanese migrants across several South American states between the 1840s and the 1940s. It examines the political and economic designs behind these communities, on the part of both the sending and the receiving states, alongside the actual conditions of migrant life within the colonies, with particular attention to the encounters between migrants and Indigenous peoples.
"The impact of migrant colonialism is visible today: in agriculture, development policies, social ecologies, racial inequalities, and citizenship laws. But the schemes themselves have rarely been studied seriously, and never comparatively," Riall said.
At the heart of the project is the idea that migrant colonialism brought together two sets of political ambitions. For the South American states, Riall explains, migrant colonies formed part of a racialised process of nation-state formation, serving as "a tool of frontier conquest meant to replace Indigenous groups with settler families and commercial agriculture". For Italy, Germany, and Japan, they were "part of a push to create zones of trade and political preference", explicitly conceived to extend each country's imperial reach.
The project also studies these colonies from the bottom up. Riall intends to research how the colonies worked on the ground, how migrants and Indigenous peoples encountered one another, and whether the schemes' ambitions fell short, as they often did.
Riall traces the project's origins directly to the EUI. Through a seminar on Empire she co-taught with Professor Pieter Judson, she grew dissatisfied with approaches to modern empire that treated the British, and to some extent the French, empires as the default model. "I became fascinated by evidence of Italian informal imperialism in South America," she explains, "and especially by the creation of national colonies in the countryside, many of which survive to this day in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, but which have never been studied properly."
Discussions with Judson and with EUI researchers in the seminar encouraged her to build German and Japanese migrant colonies into the project as well. "The project is very much an EUI project," she says. "It comes directly out of my experience supervising and teaching in the History Department and is influenced by what I learned there."
For Riall, the wider aim is to treat imperialism as a many-sided and often informal process, and to use it as a way of understanding the complex and violent restructuring of global power in this period. By spotlighting these informal dynamics, she argues, MIGRANT COLONIALISM can complicate established interpretations of colonialism and imperialism, and it can shed light on their legacies in South American societies and beyond.
Lucy Riall is Part-time Professor at the EUI Department of History, an Invited Professor at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo, and an International Fellow of the British Academy. Until August 2024 she was Professor of the History of Europe in the World at the EUI, and she was previously Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. Her current research focuses on informal imperialism and migration, particularly European settlement colonies in South America.
The European Research Council, established by the European Union in 2007, is Europe's leading funding body for frontier research. Its Advanced Grants, awarded under the Horizon Europe programme, support established researchers pursuing ambitious, high-risk projects across all disciplines. The 2025 call was one of its most competitive to date: the ERC received a record 3,329 proposals and funded 319 researchers, with a success rate of 9.6%.
Picture: Casa Palmatambo, Pozuzo, Peru, built by Austro-German migrants. Courtesy of Lucy Riall.