Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

The art&market Exhibition in Karlsruhe

Catch the art&market exhibition at the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe by the end of the month! The exhibition sheds light on the London art market around 1800.

04/07/2025 – 28/09/2025

Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe
Nördliche Hildapromenade 3
76133 Karlsruhe

Continue reading The art&market Exhibition in Karlsruhe

From Amboyna to Boston: How Massacres Become Media Events

Massacres and their staging in the media impact our everyday lives more than we realize. Whether it’s the latest news about the horrors unfolding in the Middle East or shocking images from Ukraine, the media coverage of these events is brought directly into our living rooms. This information penetrates deep into the collective memory of societies, as these incidents are not just local tragedies, but raise questions about humanity, responsibility, and international reactions.

Continue reading From Amboyna to Boston: How Massacres Become Media Events

Compassion Mobilized: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Politics of Animal Welfare in Germany, 1945–2002

In Judaism, the protection of life, including animal welfare, is a biblical commandment, and only the meat of uninjured animals is considered kosher (prepared or kept in conditions that follow the rituals of Jewish law). The Jewish method of slaughter (schechtia) is carried out without prior stunning and is intended to ensure rapid loss of consciousness and maximal exsanguination of the animal. It is performed exclusively by a shochet, a religiously certified slaughterer whose training encompasses not only technical precision and physical skill, but also strict ethical and spiritual qualifications. The act involves a single, uninterrupted incision across the animal’s throat using a flawlessly smooth and extremely sharp knife (chalaf). This cut severs the trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins, and major nerve pathways, leading to quick unconsciousness and substantial blood loss, as required by Jewish dietary law. Animals that are diseased, injured, or show internal defects are disqualified from kosher status. These conditions are identified during the ritual inspection (bedika), following which the meat may be certified as kosher if no disqualifying signs are found.

Common stunning methods, such as a percussive blow to the head or the use of a captive bolt, cause injury to the animal’s skull and are therefore deemed unacceptable by Jewish authorities. For over 150 years, significant segments of German majority society have rejected the Jewish method of slaughter, demonstrating hate and hostility. Since the Second German Empire, animal protection societies have mobilized against shechita, denouncing it as a ‘cultural disgrace’ and ‘Jewish cruelty to animals’. Although numerous independent experts have disproved the allegation of cruelty, these societies have persisted in their calls for obligatory stunning in German slaughterhouses. Antisemitic voices have swiftly echoed this demand, while the rhetoric of animal welfare activists is itself not devoid of antisemitic undertones.

Continue reading Compassion Mobilized: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Politics of Animal Welfare in Germany, 1945–2002

Markets, Marginalization, and Maritime Violence in Late Medieval England

Investigating Violence at Sea

In 1343, more than 150 inhabitants of Great Yarmouth attacked two ships belonging to a certain Robert Morley that were anchored at the roadstead of Kirkley, a village ten kilometres to the south, and seized around £5,000 worth of goods.1 The assailants were members of the leading families of Great Yarmouth and ranged from ship owners and traders, to holders of political office (both royal and municipal), customs officers, bailiffs, and admirals. They were involved in the administration of justice, including as members of commissions appointed by the king or his chancery to investigate violence at sea. The victim, Morley, was also a familiar figure. He came from the local area, on the border between Suffolk and Norfolk, and was one of the most important landowners in the region. He also owned multiple merchant ships. In short, he was an important man in the early years of the war between the English and French kings, which had broken out in 1337. He had been appointed Admiral of the North several times by Edward III and had defended the Norfolk coast from a possible French invasion.2

The scene of the crime—a relatively unremarkable patch of water at first glance—plays an extremely prominent role in English sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as one of the key sites of economic activity in the region, as a place where customs were collected by the Crown and by local actors, and not least as a hotspot of maritime violence. The fact that Kirkley Roads became such a hotspot in the first place was due to the resource conflicts fought there between various actors from Great Yarmouth and other ports along the coast—specifically, over the catching and trading of herring.

Continue reading Markets, Marginalization, and Maritime Violence in Late Medieval England
  1. Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Edward III, 1343–1345 (London, 1902), 166–7, 168, 172, 385. []
  2. Graham Cushway, Edward III and the War at Sea: The English Navy, 1327–1377 (Woodbridge, 2011), 77, 91–2, 96, 114–16. []

How to Commemorate Railways at 200? Unearthing Histories of Maintenance, Global Material Flows, and Colonialism

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 Colonialism

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 Engagement

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 []