colonial history – German Historical Institute London Blog

Empires Drifting Apart: South Africa and the Emergence of British–German Public Alienation (1894–1907)

Introduction: An ‘Unwritten’ Anglo-German Alignment

In 1890, Britain and Germany signed the Treaty of Heligoland, which regulated their respective colonial claims in sub-Saharan Africa. Members of the British press celebrated it as constituting a colonial marriage between the two nations. The notion of an ‘unwritten’ alliance between them not only informed their policy but was also a commonplace in the context of international diplomacy. The bond between the two empires was based on national and dynastic kinship, cultural and religious ties, and modern historical precedent.

Life Squared: Early Modern Utopian Ecologies

How can people and animals live alongside each other? How should land and resources be distributed in society? People searched for answers to these questions in both literary and built utopias from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and utopian projects were ways of developing and testing out alternative models for society. The new designs for islands, settlements, cities, or mining projects that they contained were generally a response to criticism of contemporary conditions. I aim to show that non-human entities were part and parcel of such projects, though they have often been overlooked. Whether found in literature or implemented in practice, early modern schemes for better collective living are teeming with animals, plants, and minerals—as well as buildings and infrastructure designed to control them. In order to explore these kinds of utopian ecologies, which address humans in their relationships with organisms and infrastructures, I employ an approach based in transnational microhistory. My goal is to understand local utopian projects—whether a book, a mining project, or the founding of a new colonial city—in their global contexts.

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.

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. [↩]
Christian Friedrich Vogel, Schmetterlings-Cabinet für Kinder (Leipzig, 1822–8), p. iii. [↩]

‘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.

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. [↩]

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

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 Spark of a Universal Uprising? Echoes of the Murder of Lord Moyne, 1944–5

Murder on Jabalya Street

Multiple shots were fired at Walter Guinness, better known as Lord Moyne, as his car was parking at his residence on Jabalya Street in Cairo. Later that day, on 6 November 1944, the British Minister Resident for the Middle East succumbed to his wounds. After a shoot-out with the Egyptian police, the two assassins, who had also killed Moyne’s driver, were apprehended. During their interrogation, they revealed their identity to be Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Beit Tzuri, Jewish inhabitants of Palestine in their early twenties. They declared themselves members of the militant underground organization Lehi—the Hebrew acronym for Loḥamey Ḥerut Isra’el or Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.

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.

Ian Brown, The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning (Cambridge, 2016). [↩]

‘More a denial than a safeguard of rights’: Law, Politics, and Constitutional Discussions in Mandatory Palestine

In the autumn of 1930, a long memorandum landed on the desk of Lord Frederick Lugard, the British representative to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. It had been sent by Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization, with whom Lugard was in close contact over the affairs of Palestine, then a British mandate. At the time, Weizmann was working intensively to mitigate the implications of the statement of policy by the British Government, the ‘Passfield White Paper’, published in October of that year. This statement, which came about following reports on the causes of inter-communal violence in the summer of 1929 and the conditions of land available for settlement and development in Palestine, confirmed the government’s intention to limit Jewish immigration and land purchases. It also reaffirmed its plan to establish self-governing institutions in Palestine, as stipulated in the Mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations in the summer of 1922.¹

‘Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom’, Oct. 1930, 3692, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, at [https://palestinianmandate.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/cm-3692.pdf], accessed 14 Nov. 2024. [↩]

Visualizing Labour in German East Africa: Photographic Images and their Circulation

Thirty years ago, in 1993, Cambridge University Library acquired a substantial quantity of materials from the Commonwealth and Britain’s former colonial territories. This repository originally came from the Colonial Society, which over the decades became the Royal Colonial Institute, then the Royal Empire Society, and finally the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS).¹ This institution had begun collecting and archiving these documents around 1868, when it received funding to rent a suite in the Westminster Palace Hotel, and did so more intensively after 1900, as the collection grew and moved to larger premises. By the time the RCS library was integrated into the special collections of Cambridge University Library, it housed extensive and invaluable archives, including ancient texts in cuneiform script dating back to around 2200 BCE, as well as documents from the twentieth century.² Among the latter were ten boxes of postcards from different regions of the former British Empire, printed between 1890 and 1969.³

See the history of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) collection, (accessed 5 Jan. 2024). [↩]
See the RCS Library, (accessed 5 Jan. 2024). [↩]
Cambridge University Library, GBR/0115/RCS/PC, Postcard Collection. [↩]