German Historical Institute London Blog – Research Crossing Boundaries: British – Global

Rethinking Globalization and Regional Development behind Global Port Cities

Contrasting Regional Economic Geographies

Between the 1840s and the 1930s, strikingly different economic geographies emerged behind two powerful gateway cities in Asia. By the mid nineteenth century, Bombay had established itself as a thriving colonial and imperial stronghold. Yet across its vast hinterland, equally significant transformations were unfolding. Ahmedabad, a renowned financial and commercial centre, developed into one of the most important textile manufacturing cities in the subcontinent in less than half a century, earning the title of ‘the Manchester of India’. Across the Deccan, Sholapur evolved from a cotton trading town into a major industrial hub, while Nagpur gained prominence following Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata’s decision to establish the Empress Mills there in the 1870s. Notably, the industrial trajectories of Ahmedabad, Sholapur, Nagpur, and numerous smaller urban centres were often only loosely tied to Bombay. Rather than emanating from the port city, they were frequently shaped by entrepreneurial initiatives, investment flows, and business networks that extended across western India and, in some cases, the wider subcontinent. Although Bombay remained western India’s largest and most prestigious metropolis, it did not command the economic life of its hinterland. Instead, the region witnessed a multicentric and comparatively less port city-centred pattern of industrial and urban growth.

‘In the Service of Peace’: British–German Youth Hostelling during National Socialism and the Allied Occupation

Hiking in Germany was the title of a propaganda brochure published in 1934 by the Reichsbahnzentrale, an agency established by the German State Railway to advertise rail tourism. The pamphlet was written in English and specifically intended to encourage international tourists to visit youth hostels in the German Reich. The Nazis advertised the roughly 2,000 hostels in their country with the words: ‘Learn to understand German youth and the German people, and join with us in proclaiming the will to peace of a whole nation’.¹ Their aim was not just to enable foreign visitors to enjoy low-cost hiking holidays, but also to show them the alleged benefits of National Socialism.

Young Britons above all were drawn in by this messaging. Riding the wave of a new culture of tourism, Germany became an attractive travel destination in the 1930s. By promising to promote international understanding, the National Socialist regime was addressing a section of British civil society that did not primarily belong to the political right wing. Disarmament and reconciliation initiatives were in vogue in Britain at the time. There was also pronounced anti-war sentiment, shared by different political camps, which contributed to the adoption of a policy of appeasement towards Germany, focused on dialogue. The Nazi regime was able to exploit this strategically: for many years the Third Reich produced highly successful youth hostel propaganda with the aim of influencing public opinion abroad.

Reichsbahnzentrale für den Deutschen Reiseverkehr, Hiking in Germany (Berlin, 1934), 10. [↩]

The Political Dimension of Currency: Britain, Europe, and the Struggle for Sovereignty

To mark the launch of her new book Geprägte Freiheit: Großbritannien und das Europäische Währungssystem 1979–1992, now available from De Gruyter Brill in the series ‘Publications of the German Historical Institute London’, Juliane Clegg shares an insight into her research with the GHIL Blog.

‘Now we’ve all been screwed by the Cabinet’. This was the headline used by The Sun in September 1992 to report on one of the most defining events in recent British history: Britain’s withdrawal from the European Monetary System’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM).¹ A sterling crisis had forced the country out of the ERM, which was perceived as a humiliation and reinforced reservations about the planned European Monetary Union. In more recent interpretations, these events and experiences contributed significantly to Britain’s alienation from the EU and the subsequent Brexit vote in 2016.²

The Sun, 17 Sept. 1992. [↩]
William Keegan, David Marsh, and Richard Roberts, Six Days in September: Black Wednesday, Brexit and the Making of Europe (London, 2017). [↩]

Solving the Population Question with Science: Robert Dale Owen’s Birth Control Tract Moral Physiology (1831) within a Transatlantic Reform Movement

Moral Physiology; or a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question is a 48-page pamphlet that tells its readers how to limit their family size.¹ Its author Robert Dale Owen was the son of British factory owner turned early socialist Robert Owen. At the time of the pamphlet’s publication in 1831, he lived in New York and edited the progressive newspaper Free Enquirer along with fellow reformer Frances Wright. They advocated for a national school system in order to educate the American public. According to biographer Richard W. Leopold, Dale Owen wrote the pamphlet after fellow activist Thomas Skidmore challenged him to explain how fathers of large families could afford the school fee to educate all their children. Dale Owen replied that parents should only have as many children as they could provide for.² While he spent about three quarters of his pamphlet explaining why it was important to circulate knowledge about fertility control, he finally revealed his preferred method on page thirty-six: coitus interruptus, a method that he based on the experiences of French men he had met during his travels in Europe.³

Robert Dale Owen, Moral Physiology; or a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question, 5th edn. (London, 1840; 1st pub. 1831), in The National Archives, HO 44/38, 36. All citations in this blog post are from the 1840 edition. [↩]
Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (Cambridge, MA, 1940), 77–8. [↩]
Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, 36. [↩]

Languages as Hubs of National Imagining within the Arsenal of ‘Total War’: Critically Comparing the Teaching of ‘Enemy’ Language and Culture in Britain and Germany, 1914–1918 and 1939–1945

Since its emergence in the nineteenth century, the concept of the nation has been at the heart of language teaching, with terms such as ‘native’ and ‘target language countries’ presupposing semi-essential boundaries between cultures and naturalizing fixed, bounded notions of national identity.¹ This intrinsic link between language and the nation raises the question of whether language teaching and learning are vulnerable to exploitation by nationalist causes in times of international conflict.

Karen Risager, Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to a Transnational Paradigm, (Clevedon, 2007), 6. [↩]

Empires Drifting Apart: South Africa and the Emergence of British–German Public Alienation (1894–1907)

Introduction: An ‘Unwritten’ Anglo-German Alignment

In 1890, Britain and Germany signed the Treaty of Heligoland, which regulated their respective colonial claims in sub-Saharan Africa. Members of the British press celebrated it as constituting a colonial marriage between the two nations. The notion of an ‘unwritten’ alliance between them not only informed their policy but was also a commonplace in the context of international diplomacy. The bond between the two empires was based on national and dynastic kinship, cultural and religious ties, and modern historical precedent.

Life Squared: Early Modern Utopian Ecologies

How can people and animals live alongside each other? How should land and resources be distributed in society? People searched for answers to these questions in both literary and built utopias from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and utopian projects were ways of developing and testing out alternative models for society. The new designs for islands, settlements, cities, or mining projects that they contained were generally a response to criticism of contemporary conditions. I aim to show that non-human entities were part and parcel of such projects, though they have often been overlooked. Whether found in literature or implemented in practice, early modern schemes for better collective living are teeming with animals, plants, and minerals—as well as buildings and infrastructure designed to control them. In order to explore these kinds of utopian ecologies, which address humans in their relationships with organisms and infrastructures, I employ an approach based in transnational microhistory. My goal is to understand local utopian projects—whether a book, a mining project, or the founding of a new colonial city—in their global contexts.

Sexual Borderlands and Social Margins: Prostitution and Migration in West Germany, 1949–1989/1990

Before 28-year-old Olivia Packard walked up the steps of the Public Health Office on Neumarkt in Cologne on 23 November 1984, she had already worked as a prostitute in several German cities.¹ Olivia was a British citizen. She had been born and raised in the mid 1950s near Epping Forest District, Essex, north-east of London. In 1982, she left the United Kingdom and migrated to the north of the Federal Republic of Germany to offer sexual services. A year later, she moved to Essen. There, and at times also in Cologne and Düsseldorf, she continued to work in prostitution. From 1984 onwards, she was employed at the Eros Centre at Hornstraße 2 in Cologne, one of the largest brothels in West Germany, later known as ‘Pascha’. At the end of the same year, in December 1984, she moved to Munich to continue her work there.²

For data protection reasons, ‘Olivia’ is a pseudonym. [↩]
All information in this paragraph is drawn from file Acc. 561, A 382 held at the Cologne City Archives. [↩]

Measures of Success and Failure: Remembering Money in Medieval History Writing

At the beginning of February, Marcus Meer’s project ‘Money, History, and Moral Economies: Communicative Functions of Monetary Information in the Institutional Historiography of the Later Middle Ages (1250–1530)’ welcomed Gabriele Passabì to the team. Together, Dr Meer and Dr Passabì will look at why medieval chronicles abound in specific numeric references to sums of money (such as prices, taxes, debts, exchange rates) and broader discussions of monetary topics (about the debasement of currency, or problems with inflation or deflation, for example). Monetary rhetoric, the project argues, was a versatile communicative tool used in medieval chronicles to serve institutional strategies of remembering the past for the needs of the (medieval) present and to frame aspirations for the future. By investigating the monetary rhetoric of chronicles produced by and for cities, monasteries (both men’s and women’s), and courts in England, the Low Countries, and northern Germany between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the project will trace different manifestations of expanding monetary consciousness(es) and the economic thought and practice that accompanied them. In this post, they give a glimpse of their current work.