Colonial and Global History
Research Area
Research on imperial history and the history of colonialism in Africa, India, and the Middle East has been an integral part of the work of the GHIL since its establishment in 1976. Current research at the Institute is engaged in contemporary debates on colonialism, post-colonial studies and global history. We focus on the contested spaces, sites and objects of negotiating empire and belonging.
Global Indo-Pacific
Connecting Histories and Futures, 2025-27
Max Weber Foundation Institutes in Delhi, London, Paris, Tokyo and Washington, the Institute for Asian and African Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore (NUS)
Image credit: Map of the Indo-Pacific biogeographic region, Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Colonial and Global History
Mirjam Hähnle
Life in the Grid
Urban Nature in City Utopias, c. 1600-1750
How should human and non-human beings live together? How to distribute resources in a model society? In the 16th and 17th centuries, the place through which utopian answers to such questions were developed and tested was often the city. The project explores urban nature in literary and built ideal cities, focusing on utopian conceptualisations as well as everyday human-environment relations.
Felix Lüttge
Excavation and Notation
A History of the Archaeological Record, 1890–1980
This project investigates the sites, objects, and subjects of archaeological knowledge produced by excavation systems and paper technologies. It examines the media history of changing conceptions of archaeological ‘contexts’: How have different notation systems, colonial bureaucracies, and political economies of empire contributed to forging the big picture(s) of nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology?
Indra Sengupta
Selling History
Tourist Guides, Bazaar Histories, and the Politics of the Past in India the late 20th and early 21st Centuries
This project examines historical tourist guidebooks and locally produced historical tracts that circulate around historical/heritage sites in Murshidabad in eastern India. The aim is to understand the mutually constitutive relationship between popular regional ideas of the past and the changing political sphere in India since the late decades of the previous century.
Indra Sengupta
Collecting, Copying, Trading
Ancient Indian Manuscripts in India, Britain and Germany in the Nineteenth Century
This project speaks to some of the key questions surrounding colonial knowledge as a field of inquiry. It examines the practices surrounding collecting, copying and the trade in old Indian (primarily Sanskrit) manuscripts by European scholars and their Indian interlocutors in the nineteenth century. It looks at the material history of Indian manuscripts to understand the economic and social underpinnings of knowledge projects undertaken by European (in this case German and British) scholars of India working both within and without the colonial state.
Colonial and Global History
GHIL
India Research Programme
Operating through a network of scholars and research collaborators in India and Germany, the India Research Programme at the GHIL consists of historical research with strong social-science and interdisciplinary components. It focuses on four broad themes: 1) History and sociology of education and its relationship with poverty; 2) Labour history; 3) Politics of history and heritage; and 4) Movement of peoples, ideas, and images.
ICAS
Constructing Alternative Pasts. (New) Sources and Methods
ICAS: 'Metamorphosis of the Political'
M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies
Past and completed Projects
- Education and the Urban in India (Research Group in cooperation with India Branch Office, Delhi)
- Empire, Heritage, and the Decolonization Debate (Mirjam Brusius)
- Archival Imaginaries and the Politics of History in South Asia (Mallika Leuzinger)
- Dwelling in Photography: Intimacy, Amateurism and the Camera in South Asia (Mallika Leuzinger)
- International Standing Working Group on Medialization and Empowerment (Christina von Hodenberg, Jane Freeland)
- Merchandise of Power: Arms Trade and Control between Europe and East Africa, 1850-1919 (Felix Brahm)
- Preserving India’s Past: Law, Bureaucracy and Historical Conservation in Colonial India 1904–1925 (Indra Sengupta)
- Transnational Research Group: Poverty and Education in India
- Archaeology, Nasser's Egypt, and the Making of the Post-War Past (William Carruthers)
- 'The Great Plan for Mass Education': 20th-Century Colonial and Postcolonial Experiments in Education (Valeska Huber)
- Georg Wilhelm Schimper – In Abyssinia: Observations on Tigre – Online Edition (Andreas Gestrich and Dorothea McEwan)
- Female Education and Social Mobility in 19th-Century Sierra Leone (Silke Strickrodt)
- Criticism of Colonialism from the 18th to the 20th Centuries (Benedikt Stuchtey)