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.
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.
Mirjam Brusius
Empire, Heritage, and the Decolonization Debate
This project gives a transregional perspective on museums, collecting, and fieldwork as an imperial enterprise incorporating the British Empire, France, and Prussia. It shows how emerging survey methods and disciplines such as archaeology were instrumentalized in political, orientalist, and racial discourse in the increasingly contested landscape of the Ottoman Empire.
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.
Collaborative Project
Education and the Urban in India
Research Group in cooperation with India Branch Office, Delhi
The group aims to examine the relation between education and the urban in a society that has undergone rapid and complex processes of urbanization in the seven decades since independence from colonial rule in 1947. A special focus of the group is on marginalization and its relationship with education and the urban.
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.
Mallika Leuzinger
Archival Imaginaries and the Politics of History in South Asia
This project looks at the rise of internet platforms dealing in histories of the Indian subcontinent. It asks how, why and for whom these platforms constitute 'archives'. It examines the affective, material, visual and geopolitical registers they deploy and conjure, situating them in relation to institutional and/or stubbornly analogue collections; activist media projects; and popular history initiatives in Africa and the Middle East.
Mallika Leuzinger
Dwelling in Photography: Intimacy, Amateurism and the Camera in South Asia
This project traces the development of photography as an everyday practice in South Asia, focusing on women’s engagements with the camera in and beyond the household.
ICAS
History as a Political Category
ICAS: 'Metamorphosis of the Political'
M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies
Past and completed Projects
- 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)