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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

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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.

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  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. []

‘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

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  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. []

‘No Shows’ and Other Forms of Refusal: Reading Missionary Letters about the Loyalty Islands

As part of my PhD study, I am investigating and tracing the history of the island communities of the Ruapuke Mission Station in the Foveaux Strait in southern New Zealand and of the Loyalty Islands north-east of New Caledonia.

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The German Revolution of 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses

The German Revolution of 1918–19 brought an abrupt end to more than a thousand years of monarchical history in Central Europe. The revolution led to a state-of-the-art liberal democracy and the first ever socialist government of an advanced industrial economy. But it is seldom regarded as belonging in the same company of epoch-defining revolutions as those in France (1789), Mexico (1910), Russia (1917), China (1949), or Iran (1979). On the contrary, Germany’s first successful democratic revolution so disappointed generations of historians that they competed to award it negative epithets such as ‘stalled’, ‘aborted’, or ‘betrayed’.1 The eventful history and disastrous end of the Weimar Republic still cast a long shadow over the revolution that brought it to life. The 1918–19 revolution is examined in a diagnostic mode, with historians searching for ominous pathologies in a newborn democratic patient. This preoccupation with 1918–19 as a possible prefiguration of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933–4 has inescapably come at the cost of attention to the German Revolution as a lived event. Our edited volume Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses, published with Oxford University Press in the series ‘Studies of the German Historical Institute London’, redresses this by focusing on the synchronicity of the revolution and its contemporary construal by a diverse cast of social groups.

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  1. Eberhard Kolb, ‘1918/19: Die steckengebliebene Revolution’, in Carola Stern und Heinrich August Winkler (eds.), Wendepunkte deutscher Geschichte 1848–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), 87–109; Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866–1945 (Oxford, 1979), 397–433; Sebastian Haffner, Die verratene Revolution: Deutschland 1918/19 (Frankfurt am Main, 1969). []

A Short Walk through London’s History during the Second World War: Financial Experts in Exile

It is a great source of satisfaction to me to feel that we are taking advantage of the wonderful opportunity which fate has afforded us of getting to know and understand each other better. We are meeting as a family. Family discussions can be pointed, but often that spirit strengthens the family.1

This quote stems from a speech given by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Howard Kingsley Wood, to a group of Continental European financial policymakers and central bankers in London in 1942, including the finance ministers of the Allied governments in exile, their principal advisers and secretaries of state, and the governors of the central banks in exile. What had happened? Why had the leaders of European economic and financial policy come together in the midst of the Second World War, and why did the British Chancellor of the Exchequer speak of a ‘wonderful opportunity’ in this context?

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  1. National Archives, T 172/2015, Speech at Lunch to Allied Finance Ministers, 22 Feb. 1942. []

Sing a Line with Coca Wine: The European Rediscovery of Coca

‘Cocaine flashed like a meteor before the eyes of the medical world.’1

The discovery of cocaine turned out to be an exceptional novelty in the medicinal and pharmaceutical world of the late nineteenth century but the history of the raw material of the drug, however, went far back in the originating countries. For millennia, coca had been the ‘sacred plant of the Inca’, who regarded it as a gift from the gods, and their priests used it first and foremost in ancient rituals.2 There was a brief caesura in the use of coca when the conquistadores considered coca consumption an indigenous vice, but they soon changed their minds, and the habit spread among all social classes and became a cultural marker for the native population.3 The drug enjoyed popularity in western South America due to it alleviating altitude sickness in the Andes and suppressing hunger, but it also had pain-relieving properties.4 Convinced by the plant’s marvellous effects on the human body, the conquistadores contemplated the introduction of coca into the European market, but they failed in their plan because of underdeveloped means of transport and a lack of knowledge about proper storage, which impacted coca’s potency.

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  1. ‘Cocaine’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 3/114 (6 March 1886), 147. []
  2. Joseph Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies, trans. E. G. (London, 1604), 273; Joseph Kennedy, Coca Exotica. The Illustrated Story of Cocaine (London, 1985), p. x. []
  3. ‘Some Popular Remedies’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Art, 12/577 (19 January 1895), 44; Kennedy, Coca Exotica, 15, 26, 27. []
  4. J. J. von Tschudi, Travels in Peru, During the Years 1838–1842, on the Coast, in the Sierra, across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests, trans. Thomasina Ross (London, 1847), 452, 453, 454. []

The Postcolonial Nation in the Museum: World Appropriation and National Identity at the Humboldt Forum and British Museum

… the great increase in the medieval and ethnographical collections, and the great interest taken by the public in the British antiquity most especially, render it highly desirable, or rather quite necessary that a separate department should be created for them. The necessity for adopting this course seems self-evident to Mr Panizzi, and he thinks therefore that he need not dwell upon it.1

On 9 March 1866, the director of the British Museum, Anthony Panizzi, used these words to appeal to the trustees of the museum for the creation of a ‘Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography’. Two months later, the founding of the department was approved. Along with Romano-British antiquities, medieval objects, and the ethnological holdings, it also housed the collection of European prehistory. While the quotation and the department name might initially suggest that the merging of these seemingly disparate holdings was an administrative decision guided by pragmatism, a closer look reveals that the contemporary social penetration of an evolutionist model of human cultural development formed its actual basis: the ethnological collections had been brought together with the British European archaeology collections ‘as materials for reconstructing the lost portions of European history’,2 as the newly appointed Keeper of the Department Augustus Wollaston Franks had said a little earlier about the central Christy holdings within the collection.

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  1. British Museum Central Archives, CE5/77, 9 March 1866 (Officers’ Reports to General Meetings and Standing Committee, 1805–69), cited in David M. Wilson, The British Museum. A History (London 2002), 142. []
  2. British Museum Central Archives, CE4/84, 7 November 1865, Document C (Officers’ Reports to General Meetings and Standing Committee, 1805–69. []

A View of Europe through the Prism of the Rhine

Journeying down the river Rhine and diving into its past reveals a new endeavour in European history. The Rhine basin demarcates and crosses the borders of nine European states, creating a need for cooperation, posing an inherent risk of conflict, and calling static ideas of space into question. From its source down to its estuary, it inspires various images and definitions of a Europe on the one hand, and different understandings of water management issues on the other, as well as informing how these two dimensions come together. These ideas about Europe may be geographical, based on organizational structures, or charged with symbolism.

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Essays and Reviews: The ‘Greatest Religious Crisis of the Victorian Age’?

One of the best-known controversies in nineteenth-century Britain revolved around the publication of a collection of theological writings in March 1860 titled Essays and Reviews. The book, edited by John William Parker, consisted of seven essays that explored various topics, such as the evidence for Christianity, religious thought in England, and—perhaps most controversially—the interpretation of scripture. The underlying theme behind these essays was theological methodology—namely, the exploration of German-speaking Protestant theological discussions within Anglican theological thought. Essays and Reviews was a cautious, partly implicit acknowledgement of scientific findings and historical–philological methods.

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