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‘History of the Wahûma’? Publishing Practices and Colonial Knowledge Production

The first Europeans to travel through the interlacustrine region of East Africa, between Lake Victoria in the east and Lakes Albert, Edward, and Tanganyika in the west, were John Hanning Speke (1827–64) and James Augustus Grant (1827–92), who were searching for the source of the White Nile between 1860 and 1863. Sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society of London and supported by their guide and translator known as Sidi Mubarak (called ‘Bombay’ by Speke),1 they travelled on foot from Zanzibar, through the Arab trading town of Tabora (then called Kazé), before turning north and wandering through the kingdoms of Karagwe, Buganda, and Bunyoro to the settlement of Gondokoro. Their roughly three-year journey was documented by Speke and Grant alike in extensive bound volumes.

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  1. Richard Burton recorded his name as ‘Seedy Mubarak Mombai (Bombay)’. Richard Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa: A Picture of Exploration (London, 1860), 3. []

Between Spirituality and Resistance: The Sufi Pilgrimage Town of Ajmer under British Rule

In March 1920, a three-day conference was convened at the dargah (shrine complex) for the Sufi saint Muinuddin Chishti (d. c.1230) in Ajmer in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. More than 10,000 people attended, and various political speakers discussed the question of whether to support the Khilafat movement, which existed between 1919 and 1923 and opposed the removal of the Ottoman sultan. The British administration of Ajmer recorded such politically motivated activities in detail and, in light of the conference, deemed the shrine a ‘peculiarly fertile centre for political and religious propaganda’.1 These politically ambitious gatherings were observed and classified, and the details passed on to the India Office. A Sufi shrine as a centre of propaganda? How could this have happened?

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  1. Continuation of Home Department telegram of 2 Feb. 1920, Political and Secret Department Records, IOR/L/PS/10/798, British Library. []

Ruins and Visions of Empire: Famagusta and the Quest for Revival in the Late Nineteenth Century

‘Ruin’ was the primary term used by countless visitors to describe the Cypriot port town of Famagusta during the period of Ottoman rule (1571–1878), to the extent that the two terms became almost synonymous. A notable example is Namık Kemal (1840–88), the foremost Ottoman thinker and a critic of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), who left a lasting mark on modern Turkish political thought and literature by reworking the concepts of vatan (fatherland) and hürriyet (liberty). Stripped of his freedom and imprisoned in Famagusta  between 1873 and 1876, he evoked the city’s uncanny atmosphere, a deserted urban landscape marked by ruins that signalled both a prosperous past and a post-apocalyptic present: ‘As I gazed out the window and saw plains full of ruins and piles of stones as if the mountains had been shattered, I felt as if Raphael’s trumpet had been blown—but I hadn’t heard it.’1 Despite the intensity and desolation of the cityscape, he soon drafted a memorandum at the behest of the island’s governor. This proposal outlined a port renovation project intended to revive Famagusta as a major commercial harbour in the Eastern Mediterranean and as a base for military operations—capable of projecting power into the empire’s Arabian provinces and beyond, especially in the aftermath of the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869.2

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  1. Namık Kemal, Rüya ve Mağusa Mektubu (Kahire, 1908), 59–60. []
  2. Mithat Cemal Kuntay, Namık Kemal: Devrinin İnsanları ve Olayları Arasında (Istanbul, 2010), vol. ii, pt. 1, 374–80. []

‘Industrious’ Chinese and British ‘Scoundrels’: Stereotypes of Asian and British Seamen in the 1908 Issues of The Seaman

Introduction: Competition on the Labour Market

‘A Carnival of Calumny’1—that was how The Seaman, the journal of the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union, described the situation facing its readers in the early twentieth century. The journal was dominated by a campaign claiming that Chinese seamen, who earned lower wages than European seafarers, were the main reason why British seamen were being ‘driven to the workhouse’ (Fig. 1). At the same time, officials of the Shipping Federation, the union’s antagonist, pitted the ‘industrious’2 Chinese against British ‘drunkard[s] and scoundrel[s]’,3 arguing that British seamen were at a disadvantage because of their alleged poor work ethic.

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  1. ‘A Carnival of Calumny: The Refuse of Labour’, The Seaman, 7/1 (May 1908), 2. []
  2. ‘Checking the Chinese: Some Consideration for British Sailors’, The Seaman, 4/1 (Feb. 1908), 3. []
  3. ‘A Carnival of Calumny’, 2. []

The Danish–English–Halle Mission (1706–1845) and its Connection to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

My dissertation project is based on the relationship between the Lutheran–Pietist mission in Tranquebar (1706–1845) and similar locations, and the other Christian denominations, particularly the Roman Catholics, that also promoted their faith in southern India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first documented reference by a Lutheran to other Christians is found in the letters of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719), who was the first Pietist missionary to work in India and translated the Bible into Tamil. The German missionaries sent from Halle were able to establish themselves in Tranquebar thanks to the support of the Danish King, Frederick IV (1671–1730). Most of the Lutheran missionaries prepared for their missionary work at the educational institutions in Halle founded by August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). To explore this topic, I use the communications of the Tranquebar missionaries, which are known as the Halle Reports (Hallesche Berichte, 1710–72) and the New Halle Reports (Neue Hallesche Berichte, 1776–1848).

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The Enemy’s Weapon: Learning Guerrilla Warfare Through an American Rifle

Sarawak, January 1964

‘You may be intrigued to hear that we have got our first Armalite rifle in Sarawak—captured from the Indos yesterday’, an officer of the British Far East Land Forces stationed in Singapore wrote to his colleague in Whitehall. ‘This may act as a suitable incentive to hasten our own.’1 In the context of the broader correspondence between these officers, preserved in the National Archives, the ironic tone becomes clear—a barely concealed frustration with the sluggish procurement bureaucracy in London, expressed through studied understatement.

Indeed, British troops fighting since 1963 in an undeclared war against Indonesian guerrillas in the jungles of Borneo felt abandoned by their leadership. While their own long, heavy rifles, designed for conventional warfare against Soviet troops, were of little use in the dense jungle, their opponents carried brand-new American weapons with which they could execute rapid raids from the undergrowth. Attempts to obtain such rifles themselves led to what amounted to organized looting expeditions; the British government could only gradually procure these still barely known weapons, today familiar under the name AR-15 and primarily known for horrific mass shootings and as an identity symbol of American gun culture.

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  1. J. F. Kenyon to T. J. Richardson, 6 Jan. 1964. The UK National Archives (hereafter TNA), DEFE 24/644. []

The Changing Face of Factory Regimes in South Asia: The Great Indian Peninsula Railway Workshops in Parel, Bombay, between 1879 and 1939

In 1879, Bombay (today Mumbai) saw the opening of the workshops of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company (GIPR) in Parel, the single largest industrial complex in the city at the time. On a site of roughly sixty acres it employed thousands of workers to maintain the locomotives and wagons that facilitated passenger travel and the exchange of mail between the centres of British rule on the subcontinent, as well as the transport of goods, especially cotton, to and from the city’s harbour. This circulation of people, information, and commodities was dependent on the smooth running of the trains, which in turn could only be assured if the staff employed at the workshops kept them in proper condition.1

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  1. Questions of maintenance have recently attracted more attention from historians, who acknowledge its centrality despite its invisibility to most observers. See e.g. Martin Meiske, ‘How to Commemorate Railways at 200? Unearthing Histories of Maintenance, Global Material Flows, and Colonialism’, German Historical Institute London Blog, 31 July 2025. []

The Book and its Missions: Past and Present as a Missionary Source for Global Bible Distribution

Introduction

My research project, entitled ‘A Global History of Bible Women, 1857–1916’, explores the history and agency of the Bible Woman as a missionary figure within world Christianity. Bible Women were local female evangelists employed to spread Christian teachings, distribute Bibles, and educate local women in literacy and Scripture. Initially emerging in London through the Protestant philanthropist and writer Ellen Henrietta Ranyard’s London Bible and Domestic Female Mission in 1857, the role rapidly expanded across Europe and the Global South through missionary networks, particularly those associated with the British and Foreign Bible Society. The project investigates the partnership between the London Bible and Domestic Female Mission and the Bible Society, focusing on the latter’s strategies for Bible distribution and the Bible Women’s motivations for engaging in this mission.

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The International Participation of Women in the Spanish Civil War: Searching for Traces in British Archives

Modern wars have global impacts. The war in Ukraine in particular has produced a large international solidarity movement. As a result, numerous international volunteers have travelled to Ukraine to take part in the war—including women. This fact has attracted a great deal of attention in international reporting since the beginning of the war. It still seems unusual to see women in the armed forces and in active warfare, especially when they are voluntarily participating in a war that does not directly affect them. This reveals gender stereotypes associated with war that go back many centuries: active men who protect their homeland, wives, and families vs passive women who dutifully care for their homes, children, and the wounded. As a result, women are denied political maturity, which has fatal consequences for their political role and rights of participation in times of war and peace alike.1

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  1. See e.g. Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining (eds.), A Companion to Women’s Military History (Leiden, 2012); Karen Hagemann, Stefan Dudink, and Sonya O. Rose (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (New York, 2020); Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford, 2002); Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 2001). []

Who’s Responsible? ‘Illegitimate’ Children in England and Wales

Throughout time, the concept of ‘the family’ has had a variety of—often politicized—meanings in different parts of the world. In twentieth-century Britain, the nuclear ‘male breadwinner family’ remained the ideal, consisting of a father who provides for the family and a mother who raises the children and takes care of the household.

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