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On the Trail of Kaviani

According to legend, ‘Kaviani’ was the name given to their standard by the Sassanian warriors who won their independence from the foreign ruler Zahhāk. Kaviani was meant to show the world their triumph against tyranny and foreign domination. It became a royal banner and the first flag of Persia, remaining so until the seventh century CE, and the story of this heroic uprising developed into the national myth of Iran.1 At the beginning of the twentieth century, during a sweeping political and cultural renaissance movement in Iran, this national narrative once again came to the fore. When Iran was occupied by British and Russian troops in 1907, exiled Iranians spread their national myth far beyond their nation’s borders. As far away as Weimar Berlin, the name of the Sassanian standard was bestowed upon a Persian printworks and publishing house. The company’s logo was the Farāvahār, originally a Zoroastrian symbol for the spirit that also became a secular and cultural icon, especially after the fall of the Sassanian empire. Contrary to what one might assume, however, Kaviani took on a transnational outlook after 1920 and printed multilingual anti-colonial periodicals in various languages and scripts—including Arabic, Farsi, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, English, and German. From the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg, its publications reached numerous colonized and semi-colonized territories across West Asia and North Africa.

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  1. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, ‘Derafš-e kāvīān’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 7 Nov. 2013. []

Capturing Images: Butterfly Collecting and the Colour Printing Revolution

In 1767, the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus coined the term imago to describe the adult stage of an insect’s life cycle, borrowing a Latin word meaning ‘image’ or ‘likeness’.1 He thereby designated the winged insect as the true form of each species: the ‘image’ revealed once an insect has shed its prior disguises as an egg, larva, or pupa. Yet by the nineteenth century, as butterfly and moth (or Lepidoptera) collecting expanded from a fringe activity to become a widespread recreational pastime, the metaphor acquired a deeper resonance. With their spectacular colours, patterns, and symmetries, adult moths and butterflies came to be valued above all as images. Their beauty, argued Christian Friedrich Vogel in his 1822 butterfly guide, ‘is probably the reason why so many collectors place their collected butterflies under glass like pictures, in order to decorate a room.’2 Yet the seventy-eight finely coloured illustrations in Vogel’s book go to show that butterflies were a peculiar kind of picture. In order to create them—a laborious art that encompassed seeking, chasing, catching, killing, spreading, drying, pinning, and arranging—you needed to start with pictures. My PhD project takes this doubling of specimen and image as its point of departure, investigating the role of colour-printed illustrations in transforming moths and butterflies into collectable commodities.

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  1. Carl Linnaeus, Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis, 12th edn, 3 vols. (Stockholm, 1767–8), vol. i, pt. ii. 535. []
  2. Christian Friedrich Vogel, Schmetterlings-Cabinet für Kinder (Leipzig, 1822–8), p. iii. []

The Pirate, the Sovereign, and the Subject: Old Enemies and New Problems in the Face of Maritime Modernity (1890–1939)

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the seas radically changed. From the end of the 1870s onwards, Western-controlled steam and later diesel shipping established its global hegemony as the driving force of maritime mobility. Ironclad and motorized ships liberated shipping from the vagaries of the currents and monsoon winds. For the first time, they enabled precise schedules and furthermore massively increased transport capacities and speeds.1 This also produced unintended consequences. Lower Hajj costs led to a surge in pilgrim numbers and heightened the risk of global epidemics, such as cholera. Expanded capacities likewise intensified the movement of goods deemed dangerous by European empires, such as firearms to the East African coast.2 The combined effect was a broad devaluation of existing expertise, while rapid advances in mobility and communication reshaped expectations of maritime regulation. In short, European empires had to relearn how to read, identify, and secure ships, coastlines, and maritime mobility.

One of my three case studies examines how a new form of maritime violence in the waters around Hong Kong challenged European empires from 1900 onwards. My GHIL scholarship allowed me to visit British archives that hold a plethora of valuable documents on this under-researched story. This form of violence forced the British Empire in particular to rethink a centuries-old imperial bogeyman: the pirate.

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  1. Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2020), 404–9. []
  2. Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Hajj in the Time of Cholera: Pilgrim Ships and Contagion from Southeast Asia to the Red Sea’, in James L. Gelvin and Nile Green (eds.), Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley, 2013), 103–20; Felix Brahm, Merchandise of Power: Der Waffenhandel zwischen Europa und Ostafrika (1850–1919) (Frankfurt am Main, 2022). []

The Derry Civil Rights Movement: Between Historical Memory and Ongoing Struggle. Combining Archival Research and Fieldwork

My first journey to Derry (or Londonderry, depending on one’s political orientation and identity) brought me directly into the city’s living history. I arrived to attend the annual Think Left conference, held each year on the first weekend of October to commemorate the civil rights march of 5 October 1968, a pivotal moment often described as the symbolic opening to the Troubles. Sponsored largely by the city’s left-wing community, particularly the party People Before Profit, the conference served as a contemporary reminder of the enduring resonance of 1968. This year’s discussions centred heavily on Palestine Action, featuring speakers from Gaza and addressing the mounting restrictions on protest in the UK. The seamless interweaving of past and present was most palpable when Eamonn McCann, veteran of the Northern Irish civil rights movement (especially in the locality of Derry) and lifelong activist, reflected on his decades of political engagement and on how socialist frameworks have shaped both his understanding of protest and his imagination of social change.

As a historian, one may ask why I would immerse myself in a space where activists exchange ideas, mobilize campaigns, and articulate contemporary grievances. The short answer lies in the focus of my PhD project: I study how historical events are remembered, mobilized, and reframed across time, and how their meanings shift depending on who invokes them and for what purpose. My background in history and global studies has trained me not merely to reconstruct events historically, but to interrogate the narrative processes through which these events acquire significance and meaning up to the present day—for both the (historical) actors and historians alike. In other words, I work at the intersection of history and memory, assuming that the two are never separate but continuously shape one another.

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Between Control and Emancipation: Youth Work with the Second Generation of Post-Colonial Immigrants in 1970s and 1980s London

‘The Fire Next Time’—with this alarming subtitle, the British Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) published a report on ‘youth in multi-racial society’. It stressed that the children of post-colonial migrants from India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean faced disadvantages in education and the labour market. Spending much of their time in public spaces and out of work, these young people had become a focus of public concern. The CRE argued that youth work should play a central role, particularly by engaging ‘Black youth’ in inner-city areas, described as ‘virtually or totally alienated from society’, through supervised leisure programmes aimed at averting unrest.1

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  1. Commission for Racial Equality, Youth in Multi-Racial Society: The Urgent Need for New Policies. ‘The Fire Next Time’ (London, 1980), 11. []

‘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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