Books by Moritz von Brescius
This seminal study explores the national, imperial and indigenous interests at stake in a major s... more This seminal study explores the national, imperial and indigenous interests at stake in a major survey expedition undertaken by the German Schlagintweit brothers, while in the employ of the East India Company, through South and Central Asia in the 1850s. It argues that German scientists, lacking in this period a formal empire of their own, seized the opportunity presented by other imperial systems to observe, record, collect and loot manuscripts, maps, and museological artefacts that shaped European understandings of the East. Drawing on archival research in three continents, von Brescius vividly explores the dynamics and conflicts of transcultural exploration beyond colonial frontiers in Asia. Analysing the contested careers of these imperial outsiders, he reveals significant changes in the culture of gentlemanly science, the violent negotiation of scientific authority in a transnational arena, and the transition from Humboldtian enquiry to a new disciplinary order. This book offers a new understanding of German science, its role in shaping foreign empires, and provides a revisionist account to the questions of authority and of authenticity in reportage from distant sites.
Die Geografen Hermann und Robert Schlagintweit sowie der Geologe Adolph Schlagintweit zählen zu d... more Die Geografen Hermann und Robert Schlagintweit sowie der Geologe Adolph Schlagintweit zählen zu den ersten deutschen Wissenschaftlern, die den Himalaja und das Karakorum-Gebirge erforschten. Einige Gebiete dieser damals weithin noch unerschlossenen Gebirgsregionen betraten sie als erste Europäer überhaupt. Die Expedition war von Alexander v. Humboldt angeregt und durch die britische Ostindien-Kompanie sowie den preußischen König Friedrich Wilhelm IV. finanziert worden. Diese Konstellation erwies sich als konfliktreich. Die Entdeckungsreisenden sahen sich der universalwissenschaftlichen Naturforschung Humboldts verpflichtet aber auch den politischen und wirtschaftlichen Interessen ihrer britischen Auftraggeber. Dies und der unterschiedliche Wissensstand über Asien in Großbritannien und dem restlichen Europa sorgten für kontroverse Bewertungen der Expedition, die zwischen einer Glorifizierung der Brüder als herausragender Entdecker und ihrer kompletten Ablehnung schwankten. Die Autoren dieses reichbebilderten Katalogs stellen die Expedition und ihre Ergebnisse erneut auf den Prüfstand, geben Aufschluss über die Organisation einer solch großen Unternehmung und vermitteln einen Einblick in die umfangreichen Sammlungen, welche für heutige Forschungsfragen weiterhin von großer Relevanz sind.
Papers by Moritz von Brescius
Der Kolonialismus in den Dingen: Das Museum Fünf Kontinente und seine Bestände aus der Kolonialzeit, 2024
What is meant by “COLONIAL COLLECTIONS”? A set of artefacts collected in a colonial context, or n... more What is meant by “COLONIAL COLLECTIONS”? A set of artefacts collected in a colonial context, or necessarily one acquired through varying degrees of coercion, plunder and violence? I just published an article with my colleague Stephanie Kleidt unpacking some of these notions for a blockbuster museum exhibition, “Colonialism in Things”, now opening in Munich's Museum Five Continents.
James Poskett’s Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–... more James Poskett’s Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–1920 presents an ambitious and captivating global history of phrenology, the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. Its findings have significance beyond the genealogy of this peculiar doctrine, whose history has so far been too narrowly told from biographical, national, or single-empire perspectives. Here, in contrast, is an empirically rich, analytically versatile, and gracefully written global account of how phrenological thought and practice spread throughout Europe and was taken up in North America, Australia, the Cape Colony, and South Asia, being changed, enriched, disciplined, seized, and contested along the way.
In following the global pathways and myriad appropriations of phrenology amid multiple spaces and sociopolitical conjunctures, the book demonstrates how this “pseudoscience,” as its critics from early on dismissed it, ultimately informed hugely divergent scientific and imperial interests and causes across the globe—from abolitionists to white planters and slaveholders in the American South, and from Bengali medical students contesting the negative effects of British rule to its invocation by educational campaigners and prison reformers in Norfolk Island and New York.
This international conference brings together the histories of various natural resources with a p... more This international conference brings together the histories of various natural resources with a particular focus on the rich histories of their potential substitutes. It works with the hypothesis that any profitable commodity at one point faced possibly cheaper, more easily accessible or producible surrogates, and seeks to explore such competing resource cycles and their social, ecological, economic and political effects.
The scholarly context for the Pierre du Bois Annual
Conference 2022 is a fascinating development... more The scholarly context for the Pierre du Bois Annual
Conference 2022 is a fascinating development in the
discipline of history in the last decade: the rising interest in
trans- and interimperial histories. These build on studies
showing that a single empire’s metropole and colonies
need to be empirically and conceptually integrated. In the
first decade of the 21st century, such more contextualized
and decentered histories of empire started evolving into
trans- and interimperial histories proper. Inspired by an
earlier turn to transnational and global histories, respective
historians have been critiquing a deeply rooted and
ultimately nationally-biased tendency, by many historians
of empire, to focus empirical research and even conceptual
conclusions on one single empire. The rise of trans- and
interimperial histories crystallized by the 2010s—though it
was, one may say, predated by older studies of non-
European modern empires. While methodologically
dissimilar to present trans- and interimperial studies, these
studies quasi by necessity paid considerable attention to
(often unequal) relationships especially with modern
European and American empires.
The fundamental objective of the present conference is
to take stock of this fascinating, partly old though mainly
new field of historical inquiry as it regards the modern
period; to bring together people who work on diverse transand
interimperial themes, approaches, and geographical
areas; and to chart possible future research synergies,
prospects, and trajectories.
To this effect, the conference, which will feature a keynote
by a preeminent scholar of the Japanese Empire,
Louise Young, brings to the Graduate Institute in Geneva
about forty participants whose studies involve the Belgian,
British, Qing Chinese, French, German, Habsburg, Qajar
Iranian, Italian, Japanese, Ottoman, Portuguese, Russian,
and US-American empires, and who will speak on themes
ranging from methodological and historiographical reflections
to regions, labor, economy, settlers and agriculture,
war and violence, culture, institutions and knowledge,
race, law, and nation(alism)s.
Comparativ, 2022
This article presents the first detailed study of the agronomic practitioner Ernst Fickendey (187... more This article presents the first detailed study of the agronomic practitioner Ernst Fickendey (1878–1958), who worked for five different empires over the course of five decades. Trained within the imperial structures of Wilhelmine Germany, he later embodied a type of itinerant expert able to bridge several political ruptures to align himself with varying political and imperial regimes to pursue plantation projects in both tropical colonies and Europe. The article explores Fickendey’s technocratic gaze that disregarded human and ecological contexts and the consequences of his planting schemes of rubber, palm oil and cotton. It shows how foreign recruitment and sojourning allowed Germans, also after 1918 and 1945, to remain involved in processes of European imperialism and achieve social mobility. With Fickendey cultivating a range of slow-yielding species, the article finally considers also how he sought to adapt the biological rhythms of plantation economies to the temporal orders of industrial production.
“Unequal Encounters: A Recurrent Dynamic of Global History”
This session is open to the publi... more “Unequal Encounters: A Recurrent Dynamic of Global History”
This session is open to the public. Registration is required for this Zoom webinar.
Speakers:
Moritz von Brescius, Affiliate, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Mandy Izadi, Affiliate, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Broadbent Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford; ALARI Research Fellow, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University.
Matthew Sohm, PhD Candidate, Department of History; Graduate Student Affiliate, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Chairs:
Charles S. Maier, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH) (emeritus). Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.
Sven Beckert, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Laird Bell Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.
After reflecting, in the first part, on the changing conditions of outsiders’ activities in the I... more After reflecting, in the first part, on the changing conditions of outsiders’ activities in the Indian subcontinent, the article fleshes out a more inclusive model of European imperialism. It does so by providing a typology of outsiders’ involvement in the scientific, technical and medical developments and projects of British India. To consider the personal experiences of temporary sojourners and skilled migrants allows one to connect macro-level approaches to migratory movements between Europe and South Asia with a more contextual and vivid exploration of individual lives – including
the professional opportunities and social obstacles these mobile actors encountered. The suggested typology of imperial outsiders in British India reflects on the varying degrees of their institutionalised service in the structures of the East India Company (EIC) and, after 1857 and the crown takeover, the Raj. While the scientific and technical services in particular were remarkably open to foreign involvement even for high positions, other segments of the imperial labour market worked through a different machinery of recruitment and were effectively closed to non-British subjects. Exemplary of this was the Indian Civil Service (ICS), a central pillar of British Indian statecraft.
Wann wurde Deutschland letztlich postkolonial? HistorikerInnen haben in den letzten Jahren in zun... more Wann wurde Deutschland letztlich postkolonial? HistorikerInnen haben in den letzten Jahren in zunehmendem Maße das Gefüge etablierter Geschichtsperiodisierungen kritisch aufgebrochen und hinterfragt – für ein neues Verständnis von der Kontinuität imperialer Verflechtungen Deutschlands über die klassischen Zäsuren von 1918 und 1945 hinweg. Die Vorlesung untersucht die zahlreichen kolonialen Stationen des international einflussreichen Agronomen Ernst Fickendey (1878-1958) – und wie deutsche Tropen-Experten eine sich wandelnde Weltordnung von deutschen, holländischen, osmanischen und spanischen Imperialprojekten in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts navigierten und für ihre eigenen Karrieren nutzten. Sie zeigt, wie durch vielfältige Anwerbungen in überseeische Kolonien und Remigration das Wissen und die Praktiken kolonialer Agronomie im Gefolge des Zweiten Weltkriegs und der nationalsozialistischen Ostkolonisation letztlich auch Einzug in Europa gehalten haben. Fickendeys Laufbahn, während der er über fünf Jahrzehnte lang in fünf Imperien wirkte, zeigt abschließend, dass mit dem Zusammenbruch von Hitlers Reich die deutsche Teilnahme an der Expansion, der Verwaltung tropischer Plantagenökonomien und der Ausbeutung indigener Arbeiter nicht mit dem Beginn des Kalten Krieges endete.
Südasien-Chronik: South Asia Chronicle 10/2020, pp. 301-3, 2020
Modern Asian Studies, 2020
This article examines the little-known but exceptionally well-documented German Schlagintweit bro... more This article examines the little-known but exceptionally well-documented German Schlagintweit brothers’ expedition to India and Central Asia in 1854–58, under the auspices of the British East India Company and the king of Prussia. The brothers’ careers present an instructive study of the opportunities and conflicts inherent within transnational science and the imperial labour market in colonial India in the course of the nineteenth century. Until now, historians have largely emphasized the ways in which European East India companies provided scientific practitioners with professional mobility from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. In these accounts, German scientific practitioners are represented as especially mobile, moving more or less freely within foreign empires, because at the time no ‘German’ empire existed that might compete for allegiances and make them appear suspect. My article, in contrast, offers a revisionist account of this globalizing picture in two senses. First, a close look at the local everyday practices of the Schlagintweit brothers’ expedition highlights the considerable tensions and frictions that accompanied imperial recruitment to South Asia—even for German scientific practitioners. What emerges instead is a rich picture of the contradictory interpretations of supposedly cooperative projects among contemporaries, and the instrumentalization of scientific activities for political ends in the Indian subcontinent, for both established and aspiring colonial powers. Second, the ways in which the Schlagintweits’ scientific expedition was represented and remembered in subsequent decades shows how the politics around transnational science projects only intensified with German unification.
Oxford World History of Empire, 2020
This chapter provides an analytical overview of the German and Japanese imperial projects from th... more This chapter provides an analytical overview of the German and Japanese imperial projects from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II. It shows how Germany and Japan—two imperial latecomers in the late nineteenth century—redefined imperialism and colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. In order to realize their dreams of a new imperial world order, both countries broke with what had come before, and their violent imperial projects turned out to be radically new and different. While Europe had never seen an empire like Hitler’s, the same is true of East Asia and the so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Second World War. In the end, it was their wars for empire and brutal legacies that not only profoundly shaped their respective national histories, but also undermined the legitimacy of imperialism after 1945. The chapter, which focuses on a series of important moments from a trans-imperial perspective, highlights two points. First, it stresses that the German and Japanese empires had a shared history. Second, it shows that by their emergence as colonial powers, Japan and Germany first fundamentally challenged and later changed the very rules of the “imperial game” and the existing global order. Their histories are central to understand great power competition in the first half of the 20th century as well as the imperial nature of the World Wars.
Leverhulme Workshop in collaboration with Oxford University, Centre of Global History, co-organis... more Leverhulme Workshop in collaboration with Oxford University, Centre of Global History, co-organised by Moritz von Brescius, Jürgen Osterhammel and Cornelia Escher.
Vortrag und Gespräch mit Dr. Moritz von Brescius (Universität Bern) über ein vielgestaltiges Mate... more Vortrag und Gespräch mit Dr. Moritz von Brescius (Universität Bern) über ein vielgestaltiges Material, ohne das die Moderne undenkbar wäre.
Themenabend im Rahmen der Ausstellung "Weltausstellung". © Johann Jacobs Museum
Introduction to the correspondence:
https://edition-humboldt.de/H0017989
Adolph, Hermann und Rob... more Introduction to the correspondence:
https://edition-humboldt.de/H0017989
Adolph, Hermann und Robert Schlagintweit unternahmen zwischen 1854 und 1858 eine Forschungsreise durch Indien und Zentralasien. Alexander von Humboldt unterstützte ihre Reisepläne: Er vermittelte die finanzielle Förderung der Reise unter anderem durch Friedrich Wilhelm IV. und sorgte für die Publikation erster Forschungsergebnisse bereits während der Reise. Moritz von Brescius’ Einführung in den Briefwechsel der Jahre 1849 bis 1859 stellt die Reise der Brüder und ihr Verhältnis zu Alexander von Humboldt in den Kontext einer sich wandelnden Forschungslandschaft und zeigt, wie die Schlaginweits britische und preußische Interessen für ihre eigenen, wissenschaftlichen und finanziellen Zwecke zu nutzen verstanden.
Nie zuvor in der Weltgeschichte wurden so viele natürliche Ressourcen verarbeitet und gehandelt w... more Nie zuvor in der Weltgeschichte wurden so viele natürliche Ressourcen verarbeitet und gehandelt wie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Die Sicherung von Ressourcen aus dem Tier-, Pflanzen- und Mineralienreich wurde insbesondere im territorialen Zeitalter (Charles Maier) als Grundlage staatlichen Reichtums gedeutet und mobilisierte politische und ökonomische Akteure auf lokaler, nationaler und imperialer Ebene.
Das Panel betrachtet Ungleichheiten, Machtasymmetrien und Konflikte um Rohstoffe und analysiert am Beispiel europäischer und nicht-europäischer Staaten den Umgang mit begrenzten Ressourcen in einer sich industrialisierenden Welt.
Folgende Fragen stehen im Zentrum: Inwiefern wurden globale Ungleichheiten durch die Nutzung bestimmter Ressourcen verstärkt? In welchem Ausmaß beinhaltete die Erschließung natürlicher Ressourcen die Anwendung von Gewalt und politischer Expansion und inwiefern war die Aneignung von Ressourcen die Grundlage für die Ausübung militärischer Gewalt? Inwiefern kam es zu Spannungen zwischen politischen und ökonomischen Akteuren? Und inwiefern erlaubt Ressourcengeschichte die Etablierung von Chronologien und (Dis-)Kontinuitäten, die anders gelagert sind als politische Zäsuren und Umbrüche?
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Books by Moritz von Brescius
Papers by Moritz von Brescius
In following the global pathways and myriad appropriations of phrenology amid multiple spaces and sociopolitical conjunctures, the book demonstrates how this “pseudoscience,” as its critics from early on dismissed it, ultimately informed hugely divergent scientific and imperial interests and causes across the globe—from abolitionists to white planters and slaveholders in the American South, and from Bengali medical students contesting the negative effects of British rule to its invocation by educational campaigners and prison reformers in Norfolk Island and New York.
Conference 2022 is a fascinating development in the
discipline of history in the last decade: the rising interest in
trans- and interimperial histories. These build on studies
showing that a single empire’s metropole and colonies
need to be empirically and conceptually integrated. In the
first decade of the 21st century, such more contextualized
and decentered histories of empire started evolving into
trans- and interimperial histories proper. Inspired by an
earlier turn to transnational and global histories, respective
historians have been critiquing a deeply rooted and
ultimately nationally-biased tendency, by many historians
of empire, to focus empirical research and even conceptual
conclusions on one single empire. The rise of trans- and
interimperial histories crystallized by the 2010s—though it
was, one may say, predated by older studies of non-
European modern empires. While methodologically
dissimilar to present trans- and interimperial studies, these
studies quasi by necessity paid considerable attention to
(often unequal) relationships especially with modern
European and American empires.
The fundamental objective of the present conference is
to take stock of this fascinating, partly old though mainly
new field of historical inquiry as it regards the modern
period; to bring together people who work on diverse transand
interimperial themes, approaches, and geographical
areas; and to chart possible future research synergies,
prospects, and trajectories.
To this effect, the conference, which will feature a keynote
by a preeminent scholar of the Japanese Empire,
Louise Young, brings to the Graduate Institute in Geneva
about forty participants whose studies involve the Belgian,
British, Qing Chinese, French, German, Habsburg, Qajar
Iranian, Italian, Japanese, Ottoman, Portuguese, Russian,
and US-American empires, and who will speak on themes
ranging from methodological and historiographical reflections
to regions, labor, economy, settlers and agriculture,
war and violence, culture, institutions and knowledge,
race, law, and nation(alism)s.
This session is open to the public. Registration is required for this Zoom webinar.
Speakers:
Moritz von Brescius, Affiliate, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Mandy Izadi, Affiliate, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Broadbent Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford; ALARI Research Fellow, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University.
Matthew Sohm, PhD Candidate, Department of History; Graduate Student Affiliate, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Chairs:
Charles S. Maier, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH) (emeritus). Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.
Sven Beckert, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Laird Bell Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.
the professional opportunities and social obstacles these mobile actors encountered. The suggested typology of imperial outsiders in British India reflects on the varying degrees of their institutionalised service in the structures of the East India Company (EIC) and, after 1857 and the crown takeover, the Raj. While the scientific and technical services in particular were remarkably open to foreign involvement even for high positions, other segments of the imperial labour market worked through a different machinery of recruitment and were effectively closed to non-British subjects. Exemplary of this was the Indian Civil Service (ICS), a central pillar of British Indian statecraft.
https://brescius.net/snf-ambizione/
https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/22989/10%20-%20Forum%20-%20von%20Brescius%2C%20Moritz%20-%20The%20Private%20Side%20of%20Cultural%20Brokerage.pdf?sequence=1
Themenabend im Rahmen der Ausstellung "Weltausstellung". © Johann Jacobs Museum
https://edition-humboldt.de/H0017989
Adolph, Hermann und Robert Schlagintweit unternahmen zwischen 1854 und 1858 eine Forschungsreise durch Indien und Zentralasien. Alexander von Humboldt unterstützte ihre Reisepläne: Er vermittelte die finanzielle Förderung der Reise unter anderem durch Friedrich Wilhelm IV. und sorgte für die Publikation erster Forschungsergebnisse bereits während der Reise. Moritz von Brescius’ Einführung in den Briefwechsel der Jahre 1849 bis 1859 stellt die Reise der Brüder und ihr Verhältnis zu Alexander von Humboldt in den Kontext einer sich wandelnden Forschungslandschaft und zeigt, wie die Schlaginweits britische und preußische Interessen für ihre eigenen, wissenschaftlichen und finanziellen Zwecke zu nutzen verstanden.
Das Panel betrachtet Ungleichheiten, Machtasymmetrien und Konflikte um Rohstoffe und analysiert am Beispiel europäischer und nicht-europäischer Staaten den Umgang mit begrenzten Ressourcen in einer sich industrialisierenden Welt.
Folgende Fragen stehen im Zentrum: Inwiefern wurden globale Ungleichheiten durch die Nutzung bestimmter Ressourcen verstärkt? In welchem Ausmaß beinhaltete die Erschließung natürlicher Ressourcen die Anwendung von Gewalt und politischer Expansion und inwiefern war die Aneignung von Ressourcen die Grundlage für die Ausübung militärischer Gewalt? Inwiefern kam es zu Spannungen zwischen politischen und ökonomischen Akteuren? Und inwiefern erlaubt Ressourcengeschichte die Etablierung von Chronologien und (Dis-)Kontinuitäten, die anders gelagert sind als politische Zäsuren und Umbrüche?
In following the global pathways and myriad appropriations of phrenology amid multiple spaces and sociopolitical conjunctures, the book demonstrates how this “pseudoscience,” as its critics from early on dismissed it, ultimately informed hugely divergent scientific and imperial interests and causes across the globe—from abolitionists to white planters and slaveholders in the American South, and from Bengali medical students contesting the negative effects of British rule to its invocation by educational campaigners and prison reformers in Norfolk Island and New York.
Conference 2022 is a fascinating development in the
discipline of history in the last decade: the rising interest in
trans- and interimperial histories. These build on studies
showing that a single empire’s metropole and colonies
need to be empirically and conceptually integrated. In the
first decade of the 21st century, such more contextualized
and decentered histories of empire started evolving into
trans- and interimperial histories proper. Inspired by an
earlier turn to transnational and global histories, respective
historians have been critiquing a deeply rooted and
ultimately nationally-biased tendency, by many historians
of empire, to focus empirical research and even conceptual
conclusions on one single empire. The rise of trans- and
interimperial histories crystallized by the 2010s—though it
was, one may say, predated by older studies of non-
European modern empires. While methodologically
dissimilar to present trans- and interimperial studies, these
studies quasi by necessity paid considerable attention to
(often unequal) relationships especially with modern
European and American empires.
The fundamental objective of the present conference is
to take stock of this fascinating, partly old though mainly
new field of historical inquiry as it regards the modern
period; to bring together people who work on diverse transand
interimperial themes, approaches, and geographical
areas; and to chart possible future research synergies,
prospects, and trajectories.
To this effect, the conference, which will feature a keynote
by a preeminent scholar of the Japanese Empire,
Louise Young, brings to the Graduate Institute in Geneva
about forty participants whose studies involve the Belgian,
British, Qing Chinese, French, German, Habsburg, Qajar
Iranian, Italian, Japanese, Ottoman, Portuguese, Russian,
and US-American empires, and who will speak on themes
ranging from methodological and historiographical reflections
to regions, labor, economy, settlers and agriculture,
war and violence, culture, institutions and knowledge,
race, law, and nation(alism)s.
This session is open to the public. Registration is required for this Zoom webinar.
Speakers:
Moritz von Brescius, Affiliate, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Mandy Izadi, Affiliate, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Broadbent Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford; ALARI Research Fellow, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University.
Matthew Sohm, PhD Candidate, Department of History; Graduate Student Affiliate, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Chairs:
Charles S. Maier, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH) (emeritus). Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.
Sven Beckert, Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations/Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Laird Bell Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.
the professional opportunities and social obstacles these mobile actors encountered. The suggested typology of imperial outsiders in British India reflects on the varying degrees of their institutionalised service in the structures of the East India Company (EIC) and, after 1857 and the crown takeover, the Raj. While the scientific and technical services in particular were remarkably open to foreign involvement even for high positions, other segments of the imperial labour market worked through a different machinery of recruitment and were effectively closed to non-British subjects. Exemplary of this was the Indian Civil Service (ICS), a central pillar of British Indian statecraft.
https://brescius.net/snf-ambizione/
https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/22989/10%20-%20Forum%20-%20von%20Brescius%2C%20Moritz%20-%20The%20Private%20Side%20of%20Cultural%20Brokerage.pdf?sequence=1
Themenabend im Rahmen der Ausstellung "Weltausstellung". © Johann Jacobs Museum
https://edition-humboldt.de/H0017989
Adolph, Hermann und Robert Schlagintweit unternahmen zwischen 1854 und 1858 eine Forschungsreise durch Indien und Zentralasien. Alexander von Humboldt unterstützte ihre Reisepläne: Er vermittelte die finanzielle Förderung der Reise unter anderem durch Friedrich Wilhelm IV. und sorgte für die Publikation erster Forschungsergebnisse bereits während der Reise. Moritz von Brescius’ Einführung in den Briefwechsel der Jahre 1849 bis 1859 stellt die Reise der Brüder und ihr Verhältnis zu Alexander von Humboldt in den Kontext einer sich wandelnden Forschungslandschaft und zeigt, wie die Schlaginweits britische und preußische Interessen für ihre eigenen, wissenschaftlichen und finanziellen Zwecke zu nutzen verstanden.
Das Panel betrachtet Ungleichheiten, Machtasymmetrien und Konflikte um Rohstoffe und analysiert am Beispiel europäischer und nicht-europäischer Staaten den Umgang mit begrenzten Ressourcen in einer sich industrialisierenden Welt.
Folgende Fragen stehen im Zentrum: Inwiefern wurden globale Ungleichheiten durch die Nutzung bestimmter Ressourcen verstärkt? In welchem Ausmaß beinhaltete die Erschließung natürlicher Ressourcen die Anwendung von Gewalt und politischer Expansion und inwiefern war die Aneignung von Ressourcen die Grundlage für die Ausübung militärischer Gewalt? Inwiefern kam es zu Spannungen zwischen politischen und ökonomischen Akteuren? Und inwiefern erlaubt Ressourcengeschichte die Etablierung von Chronologien und (Dis-)Kontinuitäten, die anders gelagert sind als politische Zäsuren und Umbrüche?
The various modes of exploitation, negligence and abandonment of commodity frontiers require an approach that is locally grounded without losing sight of the patterns and systemic nature of resource development.
This international conference invites scholars to examine the history and political ecology of various resources—biotic, animal, or mineral—in the modern era. It calls on scholars to analyze these resources, their trade and regulation, and their impact on national and world trade in the nineteenth and twentieth century. What roles did natural resources such as petroleum, copper, palm oil or water play in the field of law, the environment, and the economy? In what ways did these resources influence and transform national and international histories? What is the relationship between the past and our contemporary concerns with global supply structures and the volatility of markets. We particularly welcome papers that highlight the role of local actors; consider multinational firms operating during critical junctures such as military conflicts and across the era of decolonization; explore case studies within and beyond the Western hemisphere; and adopt an interdisciplinary approach to studying the global history of natural resources and their links to the worlds of politics, strategy, law, and the economy.
Potential papers can address (though are not limited to) the following:
- The social and ecological costs of extraction in local and global contexts
- International commodity schemes and control acts / monopolies and the manipulation of markets / systems of “imperial preference”
- The role of smallholders and non-western actors at commodity frontiers, as intermediaries, smugglers, consumers and producers
- Ruptures and continuity of resource production and trade across political junctures, including military conflicts and decolonization
- National sovereignty and “layered sovereignty” at resource frontiers, including the power and political leverages of firms
- Scientific-technical expertise and the role of knowledges
- Resources, land rights and nationalism
- The role of national and international institutions – from botanic gardens to the ILO
- The history of labour and work migration, forms of indentured and unfree labour
- Gender dimensions of land ownership, resource extraction, processing, and consumption
- Discourses of scarcity and their reception
- The Cooperative Movement and alternatives modes of commodity production and social organization
- Postcolonial/National Development Programs, Five-Year Plans in the Communist countries and the Global South
welche Biographien und grenzüberschreitenden Lebensläufe waren zu welcher Zeit überhaupt möglich? Wie sich gesellschaftliche, politische, ökonomische, kulturelle Strukturen, die sich wandelten, anhand von life stories erschließen?
Aufgrund beschränkter Kapazitäten wird um Anmeldung gebeten bis zum 05. Mai 2019 an:
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The truly original part of the book analyzes the many scandals caused by the brutally opportunistic but highly successful ways in which the Schlagintweit brothers manipulated their sponsors for their own purposes—although their successes backfired during the second part of their careers.
seized with great resolve and resourcefulness. Thus the power structures
between the European travellers and their guides or translators,
as well as amongst the group of helpers, who were from very diverse
backgrounds, emerge as complex and fluid. When one of the expeditions
advanced into mountainous regions beyond British India, the
Europeans depended on Amin’s expertise to identify appropriate
disguises, feasible passages, and possible trading routes. His case
also shows that his work for the expedition, though handsomely
paid, in effect forced him to give up his livelihood as a caravan merchant
because he had divulged his trade secrets and committed treason
against the Chinese government. After escaping from the turmoil
around Adolph Schlagintweit’s death in Turkestan in 1857, Amin
resettled in India and successfully pleaded for employment with the
British colonial government. This story brings life to the abstract concept
of the ‘go-between’ and is therefore a highly relevant contribution
to the field. It is also encouraging for future research because it
shows what sources may be available if, like Brescius, one is willing
to invest time and energy in locating them.