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Welcome to the podcast of the German Historical Institute London, a research centre for German and British academics and students in the heart of Bloomsbury. The GHIL is a research base for historians of all eras working on colonial history and global relations or the history of Great Britain and Ireland, and also provides a meeting point for UK historians whose research concerns the history of the German-speaking lands. In each podcast episode, ranging from interviews to lecture recordings, we take a look at historical research from different periods and areas. Subscribe to our podcast and visit our website at www.ghil.ac.uk to learn more about our research and work at the GHIL.
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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.
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