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Knowledge Production between Mission, University, and Colonial Administration: Swahili Studies in Britain and Germany, 1840s–1940s

The brutalist Philips Building in central London does not look very inviting at first. Nevertheless, it is a magnet for students and researchers from all over the world working on Asia and Africa. Nowadays probably the most important institution in the Global North for research on the Global South, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) was originally founded in 1916 to train colonial officials and to produce knowledge about the British colonies.1 Little trace of this remains—today, SOAS calls itself ‘The World’s University’ and is considered internationalist, left-wing, and anti-imperialist.

Continue reading Knowledge Production between Mission, University, and Colonial Administration: Swahili Studies in Britain and Germany, 1840s–1940s
  1. Ian Brown, The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning (Cambridge, 2016). []

‘Woman’s Work’? What Debates about Policewomen in the Inter-War Period Tell Us about Contemporary Understandings of Sexual Violence

‘It’s a woman’s work.’ With these words, a 1939 leaflet encouraged women to join the Metropolitan Women Police, which at this point had existed for twenty years. While one of the photos in the brochure shows female officers learning self-defence, other pictures emphasize more gender-conformist tasks: a photo of a female officer comforting a child is captioned ‘Her first job’.1 Louise A. Jackson’s 2006 book on the history of female police officers in the UK has commented on their ambivalent position between welfare work and policing.2 Jackson has shown that the decision to recruit female police officers in the early twentieth century was influenced by the contemporary idea that victims of sexual assault should give their statements to women. According to her, the difference female police officers made was ‘structural rather than ideological’, as they operated on the basis of prejudices towards complainants of sexual violence that were similar to those of their male counterparts.3 Instead of discussing the practices of policewomen, however, my blog post focuses on the debates about the nature of their employment, as well as that of female doctors, and asks what these reveal about contemporary understandings of sexual violence and victimhood.

Graphic illustration of the head of a policewoman in profile, with Trafalgar Square in the background, under the headline 'It's a woman's work'.

Fig. 1: Leaflet: ‘It’s a Woman’s Work’. Courtesy of The Women’s Library at LSE, 4NVA/4/06/11

Continue reading ‘Woman’s Work’? What Debates about Policewomen in the Inter-War Period Tell Us about Contemporary Understandings of Sexual Violence
  1. The Women’s Library at LSE (hereafter TWL), 4NVA/4/06/11, Leaflet: ‘It’s a Woman’s Work’, 112 WP, The Metropolitan Women Police. A Career for Women (June 1939). []
  2. Louise Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006). []
  3. Louise Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006). P.171 []

An Intellectual Sufi between Empires: Muhammad Tawfīq al-Bakrī (1870–1932)

Public performance of the dawsa, a traditional Sufi ritual, was an inseparable part of the traditional mawlid festival1 held every year in Cairo. Mainly affiliated with and performed by the Saʿdiyya Sufi order, the ritual had several phases. The most striking part of the ritual was when the Shaykh of the Saʿdiyya Sufi order rode his stallion, on his way to his tent, over the backs of hundreds of dervishes (disciples) lying face-down in the streets of Cairo. According to some historical accounts, the Shaykh (Master) was also accompanied by other dervishes who performed various ‘radical’ practices such as piercing their bodies, eating broken glass, or swallowing burning coals.2

Continue reading An Intellectual Sufi between Empires: Muhammad Tawfīq al-Bakrī (1870–1932)
  1. The celebration of the birthday of the Prophet Muḥammad. []
  2. Frederick de Jong, Ṭuruq and Ṭuruq-Linked Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A Historical Study in Organizational Dimensions of Islamic Mysticism (Leiden, 1978), 91. []

From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Part 3—Deindustrialization as Pollution Export: From Pittsburgh and Chicago to Baghdad and Delhi

In spring 1960, a senior city councillor from Frankfurt set off on a two-week trip to the USA to study the measures taken there to keep the air clean in industrial cities, and to bring them back to Germany if appropriate.1 From 7 to 23 May, he visited the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cleveland, OH. In New York, he visited the seventy-storey Rockefeller Centre, from where he could see no air pollution from either chemical or heavy industry—all that was visible was the smoke from the power stations. A visit to the city administration revealed that smoke inspections had been in operation since 1935 and had been conducted by an independent office with eleven employees and its own laboratories since 1952. Numerous ordinances and bans regulated inner-city combustion, prohibiting not only smoke, soot, dust, vapours, gases, and fly ash as ‘pollution of the air by noxious or unpleasant substances’, but also ‘odours that are detrimental or cause a nuisance to people.’2 Violations (in 1959 there were almost 5,000) were punished with fines or plant closures.

Continue reading From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
  1. See ISG FSA_3705, Hauptakten der Magistrat/Sozialverwaltung der Stadt Frankfurt a.M.: Bekämpfung von Lärm und Luftverunreinigung im Stadtgebiet: Obermagistratsrat Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft in den Vereinigten Staaten: Bericht über eine Studienreise’, Frankfurt a. M., 1960. []
  2. Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 5. All quotes translated by Marielle Sutherland, GHIL []

The Concordia: A Global Microhistory of a Bremen Ship 

‘To the seventh interrogatory this deponent saith that . . . the said ship or vessell Concordia was bound to Cork in Ireland and from thence to Saint Eustatius aforesaid in the West Indies and from thence to Amsterdam in Holland and to no other port or places in her voyage and that . . . she carried from Bremen a cargo of linnen and pipe staves and delivered the same at Cadix in Spain from where she sailed in ballast to Saint Lucar in Spain and carried from thence a cargo of Lemons and Oranges and delivered the same in London aforesaid from whence she sailed in Ballast to Cork aforesaid and carried from thence a cargo of beef butter salmon candles soap and other goods . . . and delivered the same to Saint Eustatius aforesaid from whence she carried her present Cargo of Coffee and Cotton and no other goods.’1

This was the route and cargo of the Bremen three-master Concordia before its voyage came to an abrupt end in April 1758. On that day, the Concordia was captured by the John and Stephen, an English privateer ship, off the south coast of England at Beachy Head, which in those days was a notorious hotspot for privateering. The words quoted are excerpts from a witness statement by the Concordia’s captain, Arendt Buck, who was suspected of transporting French goods or even contraband—that is, military equipment—for the enemy. The ship had come from Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean, which was known for such goods at the time. In this period, France and England were bitter enemies, fighting against one another in the Seven Years War and the French and Indian War, which meant that almost every ship sailing by the coast of England at this time was captured. Privateering was a legitimate means of tactical warfare at sea in the early modern period, with the only condition being that the captured ship had to be an enemy vessel. This legitimacy was tested in court, with documents taken from the captured ships as evidence. If conclusive proof was found that the ship belonged to the enemy, it was declared a ‘prize’—legitimate booty—and was put up for auction with its cargo.

Continue reading The Concordia: A Global Microhistory of a Bremen Ship 
  1. Examination of Arendt Buck, master of the ship Concordia, 8 April, 1758, TNA, HCA 32/176. []

From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Part 2—Sniffer Squads on the Odour Trail: Smog in Frankfurt

The fog phenomenon seen, and smelled, in London in the late 1800s had still not been eradicated by the midpoint of the next century. On the night of 22 January 1957, mysterious events occurred in Frankfurt am Main that were similar to those in Victorian London. As ‘all Frankfurt daily newspapers unanimously’ reported, adults, and especially children, were afflicted by headaches, dizzy spells, and nausea, while passers-by staggered around in the streets and telephoned from pubs, gasping for a doctor.1 What had happened? The Frankfurter Rundschau answered its own question as follows:

The previous day, the residents of the city had gone about their business, like any other day, and had returned home for a well-earned rest in the evening. In the city centre there was the usual night-time bustle, and in the suburbs and residential areas a peaceful silence prevailed. You could even say there was a deathly silence in the air. Not even the slightest breeze. But it was precisely this silence that resulted in numerous calls to the police and doctors during the night, and in citizens angrily discussing ‘Frankfurt’s bad air’ the next morning.

Continue reading From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
  1. Willy Rosentreter, ‘Verpestung der Luft wird zur gefährlichen Plage’, Frankfurter Rundschau am Wochenende, 4 May and 11 May 1957. Transcript/typescript, Institute for the History of Frankfurt (ISG) MA_1095. []

Germany–India Entanglements in the Scientific Racialization of Caste

This blog post marks the launch of the latest monograph in our series, Publications of the German Historical Institute London:

Racializing Caste: Anthropology between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905–1970)

by Thiago P. Barbosa, winner of the 2023 Prize of the German Historical Institute London and the Frobenius Research Promotion Award 2023

Front cover of the book 'Racializing Caste' featuring a portrait of Irawati Karve on a red background.

The idea of ‘race’ has shaped our understanding of human diversity. As an idea that became a key concept in different sciences dealing with the variation of human form and life, race has been part of the discourse since the nineteenth century. Following the movements of scientists, books, and technologies, the idea of race travelled around the globe. As Germany intensified its racial frameworks in science and politics, several students from different nations, including India, trained within the German school of racial anthropology, a tradition of anthropology that reached its political apex at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin. One of these international students was Irawati Karve (1905–70), a prominent Indian anthropologist who trained in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the infamous KWI-A.

Continue reading Germany–India Entanglements in the Scientific Racialization of Caste

From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Part 1—Shades of Yellow, Black, and Grey: The London ‘Pea Souper’, The ‘Manchester Entire’, and Sooty Hamburg around 1900

In London, a mysterious weather phenomenon clouded the fin de siècle. For eight consecutive winters from October 1893, large parts of the city were repeatedly engulfed in a mixture of smoke and fog which were perceived with several senses: not only was the visibility reduced to 200 yards, but the fog also made it difficult to breathe, and it came with a characteristic smell.1 Over three days in October 1901, this fog was so thick that artificial lighting was required around Piccadilly during the day; even though the sun was shining in Kensington, it could not penetrate the haze in central London.2 This gave rise to unusual colours: what would have been ordinary white fog in the countryside was stained yellowish-brown, and at times almost black, by ‘our myriad of chimneys’ in the city. As one meteorologist explained, the ‘combination of fog and smoke had disastrous effects on human life, and when the people of London knew what the cost in life and money was they would be willing to do everything possible to stop the smoke nuisance.’3 In November 1900, the London-based Meteorological Council therefore wrote to the London City Council urging it to initiate an investigation ‘into the occurrence and distribution of fogs in London’.4

Continue reading From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
  1. The London Archives (TLA), CL/MD/1/1, London County Council (Department of the Clerk of the Council): General Purposes Committee: Minutes and Correspondence. Subject: ‘Atmospheric Pollution’ (unpag.), ‘Fog Observations’. Memorandum by the Medical Officer Shirley F. Murphy (undated). []
  2. See ‘Distribution of Fogs’, The Insurance Observer (25 Oct. 1901). []
  3. ‘Distribution of Fogs’, The Insurance Observer (25 Oct. 1901). []
  4. TLA, CL/MD/1/1: Letter from the Meteorological Council to the General Purpose Committee (21 Nov. 1900). []

From Germany to the Caribbean: The Baring Bank of London’s Involvement in the Slave Plantation Economy

Along with Barclays, RBS, and Lloyd’s,1 the Baring Bank of London was one of the most influential financial institutions in shaping the Atlantic economy in the 1800s. Although the bank was famous for its government bonds, investments in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803,2 and the silver transfer from Mexico to Spain in 1805,3 little is known about its involvement in the Caribbean slave plantation economy. Therefore, this blog post sheds light on the investments of London’s oldest merchant bank in the plantation economy of English Jamaica, Danish St. Croix, and Dutch–English Suriname and Berbice, and argues that the bank, owned by the brothers Francis and John Baring, played a crucial role in sustaining the Caribbean slave plantations during the 1800s by providing mortgages, credits, and loans to the European owners of exploitative, high-risk, and capital-intensive slave plantations, who often repaid their instalments in the form of slave-grown produce such as sugar, coffee, cotton, and rum. Combining scattered archival documents from England, the Netherlands and Germany, this blog post examines, in particular, the financial flows between Baring, its partner financial institutions, and plantation owners in the Caribbean and comes to the surprising conclusion that the slave plantation business, despite the boundary-crossing movement of capital and investors of various origins, remained nationality-bound by colony until the produce-based repayment model of the Dutch negotiatie was replaced by the monetary repayment mode of English mortgages from the year 1820.

Continue reading From Germany to the Caribbean: The Baring Bank of London’s Involvement in the Slave Plantation Economy
  1. Jasper Jolly, ‘Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds among UK banks that had links to slavery’, The Guardian, 18 June 2020. []
  2. The Baring Archive, London (BA), A4, ‘Louisiana Purchase Papers’ (1803–66). []
  3. Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, ‘Vincent Nolte: Global Player and Bankrupt Entrepreneur, 1779–1856’, Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German–American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present. []

The Modern Architecture Discourse of Design (1957–1988) through a Postcolonial Lens

This research documents how the Indian magazine Design (1957–88), along with magazines like Marg, The Indian Architect, Illustrated Weekly, Femina, and Filmfare, formalized institutions of discourse in Nehruvian modern India. Design emerged as a ‘transnational’1 agent that challenged the idea of imitating the West as a way of bringing Western modernism to India. Instead, it portrayed the role of architecture, especially modernist architecture, in the development of society and the modernization of the country. It identified national and global projects and issues that could be seen as potential instances of change and modernization in India. Architecture and design themselves were presented as media for taking these ideas into the public domain. Design promoted ‘transculturality’2 emphasizing that it should be interpreted from one’s own perspective. It commissioned the intervention of diverse constellations of media, architectural production, and cultural narratives in the socio-economic paradigm, in political communes, and in the creation of buildings and structures. This architectural production reflects the democratic process of negotiating between different attitudes and goals among the diverse actors and parties involved in the journal’s issues.

Continue reading The Modern Architecture Discourse of Design (1957–1988) through a Postcolonial Lens
  1. The German linguist Georg Curtius (1820–85) was the first user of the adjective ‘transnational’, which means transcending the limits, interests, etc. of a single nation. See Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Transnational’, in Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (Basingstoke, 2009), 1047–55. []
  2. The transcultural approach originates in the conceptual term transculturación, which was coined by Fernando Ortiz in his study on processes of cultural reconfiguration in early modern Cuba, first published in 1940. Here, it is considered as a notion of cultural encounter, such that its consequences for both the socio-political and economic value of structures and their cultural identities are palpable. See Daniel G. König, ‘The Transcultural Approach Within a Disciplinary Framework: An Introduction’, Journal of Transcultural Studies, 7/2 (2016), 89–100. []