German Historical Institute London Podcast

What difference can queer perspectives make in our understanding of the German past and in present-day conversations around sexual and gender diversity? Having taught and published on LGBT history for several years in Berlin, London, and other places, Benno Gammerl takes this opportunity to reflect on the impact of such work. Looking at experiences and struggles of same-sex loving and gender-nonconforming people in Germany since around 1900, the talk discusses whether we should continue doing queer history in spite of the criticism that it essentializes sexual identity categories, and against powerful pushback from right-wing and other parts of the political spectrum in the East and West. Benno Gammerl is Professor of History of Gender and Sexuality at the European University Institute in Florence. His work addresses oral, emotional, queer-feminist, and intersectional histories. He is currently researching how bi-cultural couples in Germany have intimately navigated diversity since the 1960s. In 2023 he published Queer. Eine deutsche Geschichte vom Kaiserreich bis heute.

In this episode, host Kim König speaks with Benno Gammerl (European University Institute in Florence) about the research underlying his lecture on “Queering German history: Still a vital and viable endeavor?”. They explore what it means to “queer” history, both as a critical practice and as a methodological approach for rethinking established historical narratives. Benno Gammerl discusses why queering remains a vital tool for understanding German history and reflects on its implications for historiography more generally. They also consider how this perspective can offer valuable insights to scholars whose work may not explicitly engage with queer history.

This lecture, with a focus on India, aims to understand this important archive of knowledge of the natural world collected and organised in the context of the empire in the light of recent historiography on botany and empire. It highlights the importance of creating an inventory and digitally repatriating botanical specimens held primarily in British institutions, and highlights efforts for cultural remediation. The lecture examines neglected literature and networks in the imperial scientific network, which were crucial to what was a prodigious scientific renaissance in natural history and environmental understanding in the imperial context from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Vinita Damodaran is Professor of South Asian History at the University of Sussex and a specialist in the history of modern India with particular interests in environmental change, identity and resistance in Eastern India. Her research ranges from the social and political history of Bihar to the environmental history of South Asia, including using historical records to understand climate change in the Indian Ocean World. Her many publications include the books Nature and the Orient, Essays on the Environmental History of South and South-East Asia (1998), British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia(2010), Climate Change and the Humanities (2017), Geography in Britain after the Second World War (2019), and Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History: Empire, Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand (2020). At Sussex, Professor Damodaran is also director of the Centre for World Environmental History.

In this episode, GHIL Fellow for Medieval History Thomas Kaal and host Kim König talk with Henrike Lähnemann, Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the University of Oxford, about her recent GHIL lecture. They explore how Latin and German texts from around 500 years ago shaped the development of the German language and its cultural history, with examples ranging from nuns’ letters to Reformation pamphlets and songs, a brief musical interlude included.

The lecture will discuss how Latin and German texts written 500 years ago influenced the linguistic and historical development of early modern and modern Germany, looking at examples from nuns’ letters, Reformation pamphlets, and songs. This is part of a project to write a cultural history of Germany by developing a historical narrative which combines linguistic changes with political, social, and cultural topics, arguing that early 16th-century texts and agendas still have an impact today.

Current critical scholarship tends to cast the colonial West as the prime actor in shaping the non-Western world, ‘producing’ types of knowledge specific to itself and alien to others, ‘inventing’ not just tradition(s) but entire religions, and imposing boundaries premised on colonial knowledge and interest. The insight gained from this scholarship is deeply important. But it also carries the risk of overrating the power of imperial world-making. In large parts of the non-Western world, the formation of modern subjectivity and statehood drew on concepts, practices, and institutions that predated the colonial era and informed what was understood as articulations of local, or rather alternative, modernity. A look at the Middle East reveals that these processes of creation and contestation were driven by a complex interplay of political, socio-cultural, and religious factors which did not revolve exclusively around the colonial Other. The project of Islamic modernity, based on the education of the modern Muslim subject and the establishment of an Islamic state and society, as propagated by Hasan al-Banna and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s and 1940s, exemplifies these processes. The project was specifically Islamic in form and outcome, yet the combination of ideas, mechanisms, and institutions understood as either part of the ‘authentic’ tradition or European in origin is characteristic of attempts to create an alternative, non-colonial modernity in general. For this reason, these endeavours invite comparison well beyond the Middle East and Islam at large.

Chills, aches and hot flushes. What exactly were people describing when they complained of fever around 1800? In this episode, host Kim König and GHIL Research Fellow Pascale Siegrist talk to Stefanie Gänger, Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University. They discuss the research behind her lecture on the history of fever and febrile diseases in the French, Iberian and British Empires from the 1770s to the 1820s, a period during which these diseases were widely considered to be the world's most common and fatal.

The talk is concerned with the history of fever and febrile diseases in the French, Iberian, and British empires, from the 1770s to the 1820s, a time when these were widely considered the most common and fatal diseases afflicting mankind. Emphasizing the historicity and cultural contingency of fever and the febrile experience, the presentation explores the concept of disease in the period in question, this ailment’s unusual prevalence at the time, sufferers’ sensory experience of it, and the commonness of ‘sequelae’, that is, of fevers which left sufferers with longer-term damage to their health. Stefanie Gänger is Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University. She is a historian of science and knowledge in the long nineteenth century and has published widely on issues including antiquarianism and collecting, self-medication and fever remedies, and the theory of (global) history.

In this episode, host Kim König and Research Fellow Ole Münch are joined by Christiane Reinecke, Professor of Modern European History at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, to discuss her research on notions of urban problems in late 20th-century European cities. Drawing on Christiane’s GHIL lecture, they discuss the shift in urban policy discourse from class-based concerns to issues of migration, race and ethnicity, and explore the role of social science in shaping these developments. Our conversation covers comparative European approaches to diversity and integration, from Germany and France to Britain and the Netherlands.

In this episode, we talk about working-class communities. Or rather: ideas about the working-class, some of which are quite romanticised. Joining host Kim König and Research Fellow Ole Münch to discuss the topic of his GHIL lecture is Jon Lawrence, Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter. Together, they explore how these ideas have influenced scholarly discourse and political imagination in post-war Britain, as well as the tension between lived experience and intellectual frameworks when it comes to understanding working-class life. Drawing on field notes from post-war social science projects, Jon's research uncovers surprising patterns in how researchers approached working-class culture and reveals why certain perspectives became more prominent than others. We also consider the enduring power of ideas about community and why these scholarly frameworks continue to be important for understanding Britain today.

Jon Lawrence: Shifting Visions of Working-Class Community in Post-War Britain The idea that the British working class had its own distinctive way of life and culture can be traced back to at least the 1880s, but in the wake of the Second World War it became common to argue that urban working-class life was marked by dense networks of reciprocal social relationships and shared norms worthy of the term ‘community’. Out of this came Michael Young’s influential engagement with working-class culture and ‘community’ in the early 1950s, especially Family and Kinship in East London (1957), which became a classic text for social workers. Working-class writers like Delaney and Sillitoe pushed back at middle-class romanticization, but ultimately, an anachronistic vision of ‘traditional’ working-class community emerged, with serious consequences for both class politics and social cohesion in modern Britain. Jon Lawrence is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter and author of Speaking for the People (1998), Electing Our Masters (2009) and most recently Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-War England (2019). He is currently working on a new history of working-class everyday (or ‘vernacular’) politics since the 1880s. Christiane Reinecke: Of Ghettos and Segregations: Making Sense of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Late Twentieth-Century Cities In the latter half of the twentieth century, migration and racial diversity came to be seen as major social problems in many Western European cities. This talk aims to make sense of this development by exploring how social scientists (and the data and narratives they produced) impacted on urban debates and policies in postcolonial France and the Federal Republic of Germany. As part of a double lecture, it discusses whether there was a shift from ‘class’ to ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in the construction of social problems in late twentieth-century Western European cities. Christiane Reinecke is Professor of Modern European History at the Europa-Universität Flensburg in Germany. Specializing in migration history, urban history, and the history of the social sciences, she mostly focuses on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century French, German, and British history, examining these Western European histories as part of global processes such as decolonization.

In this episode, host Kim König is joined by Ole Münch, Research Fellow for Modern History, and Achim Landwehr, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Konstanz. Together, they discuss the research behind Achim Landwehr's GHIL Lecture, which examined the constitutive role of voids in European early modernity. Their conversation moves from information-rich early modern calendars to the significance of gaps in our past, exploring how these influence the way we teach and write about history.

European cultures tend to overlook voids, or, at best, see them as unpleasant phenomena. Yet voids are not only unavoidable, but actually constitutive in the emergence of European-Western modernity over the last four hundred years—which might now be coming to an end, possibly due to the excessive production of voids. Although the meaning of emptiness was certainly not first conceived in the seventeenth century, empty spaces took on a new role in this early modern period. There were of course the well-known vacuum experiments, but other voids were gaining in importance too: white spots in cartography, the concept of ‘terra nullius’, speculative bubbles, and the technical-military possibilities of extensive destruction, for instance. Voids are thus not only disturbing phenomena or regrettable losses, but crucial constitutive elements in European modernity. Achim Landwehr is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Konstanz. In his research, he has investigated questions of early modern statehood and aspects of time and the present in the seventeenth century, but has also repeatedly worked on questions of historical theory.

The exhibition “The Horror Camps”, displayed in the Reading Room of the Daily Express in London from May 1945, featured enlarged photographs from the liberated Nazi camps. It prompted questions about the relationship between image and evidence, as well as the public use of degrading images, which remain profoundly relevant to this day. Janina Struk (independent scholar), Paul Betts (University of Oxford) and James Bulgin (Imperial War Museums) discuss these questions against the backdrop of changing historical conditions and curatorial practices. The event, in cooperation with the Rethinking Modern Europe Seminar (Institute of Historical Research (IHR)), is part of the series Facing Nazi Crimes: European Perspectives after 1945 organised by the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Documentation Centre “German Occupation of Europe in the Second World War”. This European event series explores the social and historical contexts of the early exhibitions on Nazi crimes organised between 1945 and 1948. The series will unfold in the cities where these exhibitions were originally held – Paris, Warsaw, London, Liberec and Bergen-Belsen – and will conclude in Berlin. How did the exhibitions relate to the early visual, documentary, legal, political, and historical efforts to address the German occupation and its crimes? How were they received and what influence did they have on today’s culture of remembrance?

How do colonial-era racial theories continue to influence modern science in India? Today, we're exploring this question by examining new research which traces the transnational connections between Germany and colonial India in the field of racial science. In this podcast interview, host Kim König is joined by Indra Sengupta, Senior Fellow and Head of our India Research Programme. They speak with Thiago Barbosa, winner of the 2023 GHIL dissertation prize, about his book, 'Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905–1970)', which has just been published as Volume 91 of our series 'Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London / Publications of the German Historical Institute London'. Focusing on the pioneering Indian anthropologist Irawati Karve, Thiago's work combines historical and ethnographic research to reveal the transnational impact of German racial sciences — and how that legacy continues to influence anthropology in India today.

How do we define a process? What types exist, and how does our understanding of them reflect our historical and cultural context? In this interview host Kim König and GHIL/UCL Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow Almuth Ebke (University of Mannheim) talk to Wolfgang Knöbl (Hamburg Institute for Social Research) about the research behind his GHIL lecture on (historical) processes. Their conversation explores these questions while examining the role of storytelling in claims about social processes and why plausible process claims cannot be made without knowledge of narratological arguments.

Talk of ‘social processes’ is widespread in historiography as well as in the social sciences; process terms such as industrialization, urbanization, individualization, secularization, etc. are ubiquitous. Nevertheless, it is usually rather unclear what processes actually are, how they should be theorized, and what types of processes can be distinguished. The lecture will 1) pose the question of why these process terms came to dominate the social sciences in the first place; 2) attempt to prove the thesis that process claims inevitably entail narrative elements; and 3) conclude that plausible process claims cannot be made without knowledge of narratological arguments. Wolfgang Knöbl was a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, before he became Director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in 2015. His main research interests are in the fields of political and historical sociology, social theory, and the history of sociology. His most recent book is Die Soziologie vor der Geschichte: Zur Kritik der Sozialtheorie (2022), and he is currently finishing a volume on the history and sociology of violence in Germany after 1945.

In this episode, host Kim König and Ole Münch, research fellow in modern history, talk to Professor Philipp Gassert, whose lecture at the German Historical Institute explored a compelling question: Why does street protests remain powerful in our digital age? Professor Gassert’s research examines 250 years of protest history in different societies and geographical contexts. His project aims to develop a historical framework for understanding why physically taking to the streets remains an effective form of political expression, even as digital platforms offer new avenues for dissent.

Even though we now live in an age of digital media, physical street protest is not a thing of the past. Anyone knows that even in the twenty-first century, public, symbolically charged spaces continue to be occupied by protesters who hope to score political points. We may even be under the impression that the frequency of street protests has increased. So why does ‘taking to the streets’ still work, even though we can be so wonderfully outraged online today? The obvious answer is: it can be explained historically. I will take my examples from 250 years of history, covering a wide range of societies, issues, and geographical entities in order to present preliminary findings on an ongoing project about a world history of street protest.

Dhruv Raina's lecture explores the conceptual challenges of developing a comprehensive historiography of techniques and technology in a global context. The encounter between Europe and Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced several discourses on the non-Western/non-European worlds that played a formative role in the crystallization of the social science disciplines. Late twentieth-century scholarship has indicated that there is no purely European discourse on India and its knowledge forms. Nevertheless, despite important differences, there is a family resemblance in the description, naming, and troping of colonial forms of knowledge. On the other hand, the history of technology is framed by certain conceptual distinctions and ideological paradigms that distinguish techniques from technology as much in Europe as elsewhere. Interrogating the distinction between the history of techniques and technology opens up other ways of historicizing their evolution in South Asia and the Global South.

Irreconcilability seems to define both global politics and societal dynamics today, leading to a growing focus on reconciliation processes. While political science has long established reconciliation as a key area of research, especially since the 1990s, historians have engaged with it far less. Despite its obvious relevance to their discipline, as calls for reconciliation are always rooted in the past. In this episode of the GHIL podcast, host Kim Koenig and research fellow Pascale Siegrist talk to Christine Krüger, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Bonn, about her GHIL Lecture ‘Analyzing Reconciliation and Irreconcilability from a Historical Perspective: the example of Germany and Britain’. Together they discuss the potential of historical reconciliation research.

Whether in a global political context or within society, irreconcilability seems to be the hallmark of our present times. This explains the growing interest in reconciliation processes. Since the 1990s, ‘reconciliation’ has been an established field of research in political science. Historians, however, have explored this field only to a limited extent, although the topic should be an obvious one for them, as the call for reconciliation always relates to the past. Political science analyses of reconciliation or irreconcilability usually concentrate on political explanations. They pay little attention to social or economic and even less to cultural factors. This is where historical research can contribute to a better understanding. The aim of the lecture is to shed light on the potential of historical reconciliation research, with a particular focus on the entangled history of Germany and Great Britain.

How do historical narratives and memories shape our understanding of national identity and collective memory? Lucy Noakes (University of Essex) and Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck) reflect on how the Second World War has shaped Germany and Britain after 1945. The conversation offers insights into the ways in which the two nations navigated the aftermath of the war and redefined their identities and roles in the contemporary world.

Oceans and seas have long been a focal point in historiography, particularly in the field of global history, which emphasizes the connective power of these vast bodies of water. This focus naturally extends to the study of seafaring, shipbuilding, and maritime infrastructures. Yet while global history highlights oceanic linkages, it has also acknowledged the inherent dangers and uncertainties of seafaring, from the so-called Age of Exploration through to the twentieth century. Shipwrecks—ranging from minor groundings to catastrophic maritime disasters —have always played a central role in maritime history. Historians of this field have recognized the disruptive effects of these wrecks and have examined the development of maritime security and insurance systems designed to mitigate risks, safeguarding both passengers and investors alike. But what of the wrecked ship itself, its lost cargo, and the tragic fate of its crew? What about the environmental or navigational hazards posed by these wrecks? And what of the symbolic weight that many sunken ships carry? This talk turns the spotlight on marine salvage and its significance in global history. Salvage operations, as ancient as seafaring itself, primarily aim to recover valuable resources or clear hazardous wreckage. At times, they also seek to uncover the causes of maritime accidents or to retrieve vessels of particular symbolic importance. In any case, salvage work is a complex endeavour, fraught with nautical, technical, environmental, and legal challenges. And studying this practice offers valuable insights into the intricate dynamics of global connections and disconnections—insights this talk aims to explore.

Is globalization a threat to democracy? In this podcast interview, PR Officer Kim König is joined by Julia Angster, professor of modern history at the University of Mannheim, to discuss the research behind her GHIL Lecture on globalization, democracy and the nation state in Germany after 1990. They explore the impact of globalization and neoliberalism on the nation state and national identity, the current state of liberal democracy and future directions for historiography beyond the national frame.

Is ‘globalization’ a threat to democracy? From the 1990s to the late 2010s, social scientists, economists, and historians in Western countries thought so. They worried about a loss of national sovereignty and agency, about national identity, and most of all about liberal democracy, which was based upon the national framing of state and society. This discourse was most prominent in post-unification Germany. The lecture will look at perceptions of ‘globalization’ and analyse the underlying assumptions about democracy and statehood. It argues that instead of a crisis of democracy, this was a crisis of national patterns of political thought dating back to the nineteenth century.

Some years ago, historians reacted to the elite bias of much historical writing by advocating a ‘bottom-up’ approach focusing on peasants, workers, the urban and rural poor, racial minorities, women, and others of subordinate status in their social contexts. To do so is not only to bring out the violence, exploitation, and suffering to which people at the bottom of a social order were subjected, but to look beyond the categories of knowledge through which dominant elements in society operate and to explore alternative conceptual schemes. The resulting scholarship has enriched different fields of history, not least my own field of African history and colonial and postcolonial studies more generally. Of course, some people are on the bottom because others are at the top, so bottom-up and top-down histories need each other. In this talk I will approach the study of power from a different angle, inspired by categories developed by the Senegalese politician, poet, and political thinker Léopold Sédar Senghor.

It is a widespread belief that the Reformation introduced the possibility of choosing between different variants of the Christian faith. In contrast, this lecture argues that the early German Reformation created a field of experimentation in which it was disputed who was able, and who was permitted, to decide on which faith options, and how. The Reformation gave rise to new questions of individual and collective religious decision-making, encompassing many different dimensions, such as faith options, the semantic and practical framing of situations in which choices were made, and the actors and procedures involved.

During the Reformation people had to choose between the Protestant and Catholic faith - or so the popular narrative goes. But is it really that simple? GHIL Deputy Director Michael Schaich and podcast host Kim König are joined by Matthias Pohlig, Professor of Early Modern European History at Humboldt University of Berlin, to discuss the research behind his GHIL Lecture on ‘Religious Decision-Making in the Early German Reformation’.

In this GHIL Podcast episode host Kim König is joined by GHIL Senior Fellow and Head of the India Research Programme Indra Sengupta to talk to Radhika Singha about her recent GHIL lecture and her research on criminology and 'scientific' penology in India, 1894-1955. Their conversation touches on criminal and labour histories, and seeks to answer the question of how the history of colonial India can be written into broader global histories.

The Indian Jail Committee report of 1919–20 is often cast as the turning point in colonial penal policy, when reform and rehabilitation were added to deterrence. But it is also acknowledged that very little changed on the ground. Why after all did a cash-strapped, politically-besieged regime sponsor a globe-trotting tour of jails and reformatories? Why did the committee return to enthuse about ‘flexible or indeterminate sentencing’, a principle embraced in the USA but faltering in Britain? To deflect criticism about the harsh treatment of ‘seditionist’ prisoners, the Jail Committee recast spaces of confinement as sites for agendas of post-war economic, institutional, and civic reconstruction. It presented a combined vision of confinement and social engineering that was taken up by colonial successor regimes.

Today, the state of emergency seems to be as permanent as it is omnipresent. The term became ubiquitous in the early twentieth century and continues to guide the self-description of contemporary societies. Yet, referring to ‘emergencies’ implies a large range of meanings, from actual states of war to moments of humanitarian crisis, from abstract realms of the law to concrete territories under siege. The lecture argues for a history of emergency experiences in the long twentieth century that reaches beyond ‘classical theories’ and focuses on the social dimensions of administrative agency instead. It treats the ‘state of emergency’ as an imaginary that informs technocratic practices and legal theory at the same time, and argues that historicizing it can help us to understand the critical role of the state apparatus in moments of transformation.

From living through wars to experiencing humanitarian crises, in this podcast episode, GHIL Research Fellow Clemens Villinger and PR officer Kim Koenig talk to Stephanie Middendorf about the research behind her GHIL Lecture on states of emergency and exception. What did they mean for societies in the 20th century and what can we take away for our own current moment? Listen to Stefanie Middendorf's lecture on ‘Societies under Siege: Experiencing States of Emergency in the Long Twentieth Century’.

Can federations be stable? Should political orders last forever and constitutions be permanent? 75 years ago, the German Basic Law came into force. In this GHIL podcast interview, Research Fellow for Modern History Pascale Siegrist and PR Officer Kim König talk to Eva Marlene Hausteiner, Chair in Political Theory and History of Political Thought at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, about her research on historical debates surrounding the introduction of the German Basic Law and the durability of federal constitutions.

In political theory and political debates, an implicit expectation looms large: a ‘good’ polity is durable, ideally even permanent. Federal polities are accordingly conceptualized as orders which can regulate heterogeneity and resolve conflict—for the sake of long-term stability. The lecture will question this expectation of permanence by pointing to exceptions in global intellectual history from early Soviet proponents of federalism and the founding fathers and mothers of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany: when and to what normative end is the idea of permanent federation subverted?

This podcast episode is a recording of the second Thyssen Lecture, given by Sebastian Conrad, and organized by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in cooperation with the GHIL. Sebastian Conrad’s lecture explores how the construction of a particular, western notion of time and temporality, of modernity, was central to the constitution of western imperial hierarchies in Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples such as the alignment of calendars, the synchronisation of clocks and the writing of history, Conrad argues that, as producers of historical time narratives in the process of imperial ‘world-making’, historians became imperial agents and world-makers in their own right. But was this purely a colonial imposition, or a response to global conditions? What are the lasting effects of this reshaping of temporality, and how does it influence us today?

Money doesn’t stink – or so the famous phrase goes. So, what did peasants in the Middle Ages mean when they complained about bad coin? Can a focus on monetary issues shed new light on the Peasants' War? In this GHIL Podcast interview, Research Fellow for Medieval History Marcus Meer and PR Officer Kim König are joined by Philipp Rössner, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, to talk about the research behind his lecture on ‘Peasants, Wars, and Evil Coins: Towards a “Monetary Turn” in Explaining the Revolution of 1525’.

The ‘Great German Peasant War’ of 1524–6 has quietly slipped off the historian’s agenda. Structural-materialist interpretations have waned since the fall of the Iron Curtain, giving rise to several ‘cultural’ and other ‘turns’, most of which have also passed. One phenomenon, however, has been missed completely, in older as well as more recent historiography: the monetary problem. Monetary issues—relating to currency and how different coins were used to pay fines, dues, and tithes—featured in most known medieval peasant grievances up to the Peasant War proper, significantly contributing to the peasants’ economic cause for revolt. This paper suggests how a ‘monetary turn’ may shed new light on Germany’s first modern revolution.

Why did people in Imperial Germany became increasingly interested in their personal performance? Was there a link between global entanglements of Imperial Germany on the one hand and a rise in personal achievement culture on the other?

Within a few decades, people in Imperial Germany witnessed a dramatic rise in global exchange, as well as an increased public interest in personal achievement. Work performance, intelligence, sporting achievements, and so on were measured, standardized, optimized and—above all—cherished. This lecture scrutinizes the link between both of these trends. It highlights two aspects: on the one hand, global exchange allowed and helped certain people in Germany to achieve new and sometimes outstanding things, but on the other, the idea of a purely personal achievement made the global factors behind such achievements invisible. In other words, the fin de siècle cult of personal achievement relied on global interactions and at the same time concealed them.

Between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the British transported over a quarter of a million convicts to colonies and settlements including in Australia, the Andaman Islands, Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. About one percent of the approximately 167,000 convicts shipped to the Australian colonies (1787-1868) were of Asian, African or Creole heritage; convicted either in Britain or British colonies. Most of the c. 108,000 convicts sent to penal settlements in Penang, Mauritius, Singapore, Malacca, Burma, and the Andamans (1789-1945) were from British India or Ceylon. This paper will explore some of the histories and aftermaths of these convict flows, including their relationship to experiences and legacies of enslavement and other forms of imperial labour, and to Indigenous dispossession. It will draw on research in archives and with descendants and communities in Australia, Mauritius, Penang, and the Andamans to show how over time penal transportation broke and remade families, and to think through the ways in which economic, social, and cultural factors relating to race, ethnicity, religion and (for Hindus) caste, social background, education, and status intersected in the formation of convict and convict-descended societies. It will suggest that through genealogical research in recent years these societies have become connected to sending (and origin) locations and to sites of onward migration in Britain and the settler world. In some cases, descendants o

The issue of restitution continues to animate public debate in both European and African societies. The search for ways and means to present the problem and to involve communities is becoming a challenge for some African leaders because opinions on the issue tend to diverge between the communities and social groups concerned, depending in part on the quality of information available to them. This lecture aims to show the perception of colonial cultural goods and human remains among communities of the former German colony of Togo, now located in Togo and Ghana, and how their positions have developed in response to the social changes that have occurred in their respective environments.

The issue of restitution is an ongoing topic of public debate in both European and African societies. In this GHIL podcast interview, GHIL Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König talk to Kokou Azamede, Associate Professor at the Department of German Studies at the University of Lomé, about his work with local communities in the former German colony of Togo, which assesses their knowledge and perception of colonial cultural goods and human remains from their region. Azamede’s research shows new pathways to understanding and cooperation with a view to possible restitution.

In this lecture Regina Toepfer will present her concept of translational anthropology and show how philological comparisons can reveal patterns of thought, systems of knowledge, and values held by historical individuals and societies. She considers literary translations to be key anthropological texts and sees shifts in meaning between the source and target text not as aesthetic shortcomings, but as cultural gains. This model will be presented through an analysis of the first translation of Homer into German in 1537/8. Simon Schaidenreisser’s Odyssee offers numerous insights into social norms, ideals, and difficult issues in the early modern period. For example, core ideas about poetry, politics, and religion, about morality, masculinity, and family, and about guilt, misfortune, and death are addressed in the invocation of the muse and the assembly of the gods at the beginning of Homer’s epic.

How have India's colonial past and its life as a postcolonial nation state shaped the history of climate change, particulate matter, and germs and viruses in the region? What is the relationship between these histories and India's urban modernity? In this GHIL podcast interview GHIL Senior Fellow and Head of the India Research Programme Indra Sengupta and PR Officer Kim König are joined by Awadhendra Sharan, Director and Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, to talk about the research behind his GHIL lecture on ‘India’s Atmospheric Modernity: Smoke, Particulate Matter, and the Modern City’.”

Around the mid nineteenth century, air pollution began to be discussed in India, especially in its largest cities, Calcutta and Bombay. The concern was with black smoke and the impact that this had on the quality of urban life, human health, and economic efficiency. In time, visible smoke yielded to invisible particulate matter as a serious object of concern. And, more recently, heat waves and extreme weather events have become significant public issues. In this lecture, Awadhendra Sharan revisits these earlier historical concerns around air quality, underlining both their specificity and what lessons they have to offer to us in the age of the Anthropocene.

This podcast episode is a recording of the inaugural Thyssen Lecture, given by Sumathi Ramaswamy, and organized by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in cooperation with the GHIL. Drawing inspiration from Edward Said's concept of imperialism as geographical violence, she delves into the ways in which various scientific disciplines, like geography and cartography, played a role in shaping how India was perceived and understood during the two centuries of British colonial rule – in other words, how they ‘worlded’ India. Her lecture uncovers a conflicted relationship between science on the one hand and art and imagination on the other, entwined in the process of ‘worlding’ India.”

How was the hand to be guided, the eye to be trained, the senses sharpened in preparing the child for an adult world? In princely Mysore in southern India, the missionaries, who took the initial steps in opening up education to wider circles than those entitled to forms of knowledge, and the Government efforts that followed were faced with new and complex challenges in a society wracked by the proscriptions of caste and gender. On the one hand, the classroom presented opportunities for ordering space and time, and for remaking bodies and habits in the process of building new skills. But the classroom and the boarding school were perforce also sites of unlearning, of breaking down habits and prejudices relating to touch/sight, as well as older skills and styles of learning, in order to enable the modern educated subject to emerge. A small but suggestive body of visual and other records allows for speculation about the experience of schooling in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mysore.

How can we unpack the history of schooling in colonial India by looking beyond official records of success and failure? How did the classroom in the Princely State of Mysore become a place where children and young adults unlearned traditional prejudices and picked up new sensory skills, which in turn shaped their understanding of their own selves in a modern world? In this GHIL podcast interview PR Officer Kim König is joined by GHIL Senior Research Fellow and Head of the India Research Programme Indra Sengupta to talk to Janaki Nair about the ideas behind her lecture on ‘The Classroom as Sensorium: Tactility, Attention, and Perception in the Mysore School, 1860–1930’.

Why was the Enlightenment a turning point in the way in which humans think about climate? In what way did climate catastrophes affect revolutions and vice versa? How did climate politics emerge during this time? In this GHIL podcast interview, Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König, talk to Patrick Anthony about the research behind his GHIL lecture on Climate Crises and Politics in the Eighteenth Century.