In recent years, railways have undergone a remarkable renaissance in Europe—night train lines have been (re-)established, the high-speed rail network continues to grow, and in the continent’s effort to reduce CO2 emissions, railways play a key role in the much-needed reform of the transportation sector. However, persistent issues like delays and cancellations highlight the consequences of the long-term neglect of railway infrastructure in many European countries today. Inspired by the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway on 27 September 1825, a series of events and exhibitions will celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of modern railways in Great Britain and all around the world in 2025. So, how should we commemorate the 200th anniversary of the railways? A good starting point to explore this question is a unique location on the British Isles where the past, present, and future of this transformative transport technology converge: the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York.
Continue reading How to Commemorate Railways at 200? Unearthing Histories of Maintenance, Global Material Flows, and ColonialismMonth: July 2025
Expanding the Archive: Fact and Fiction, Reading against the Grain, and Formats of Engagement
A Roundtable Discussion
Mirjam Brusius, Mirjam Hähnle, Mallika Leuzinger, Markus Mößlang, Ole Münch, Michael Schaich, Indra Sengupta, Pascale Siegrist, Clemens Villinger, Christina von Hodenberg
The archival repositories historians work with, and the methods they use to analyse their source base, have undergone significant changes in the past few decades. Increasing efforts are being made to reconstruct the history of groups which are historically under-documented in institutional archives, such as women, the poor and the aged, immigrants, or lower-caste and marginal community groups. Alternative sources and methods are being sought to supplement or challenge official records, not least in colonial, pre- and postcolonial settings, and regions where formal archives are sparse or difficult to access. At the same time, historians are being confronted with a range of new, often still untested digital history and artificial intelligence-led tools which promise the possibility of processing large corpora of sources. Our projects focus on the analysis or re-analysis of diverse sources, such as social science-generated data, quantitative databases, websites and social media, oral history interviews, visual sources such as photographs, locally produced tourist brochures, serial data, and material objects. We engage critically with questions of method, theory, digital history, and archival practice in this regard, and we look at power as an epistemic force undergirding the modern archive.
This discussion between GHIL historians on the institute’s cross-cutting research theme ‘Expanding the archive’ was recorded in January 2025. The questions were asked by Clemens Villinger and the answers collated by Christina von Hodenberg.
Continue reading Expanding the Archive: Fact and Fiction, Reading against the Grain, and Formats of EngagementKnowledge 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- Ian Brown, The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning (Cambridge, 2016). [↩]
