German Historical Institute London Podcast

public_relations@ghil.ac.uk

Welcome to the podcast of the German Historical Institute London, a research centre for German and British academics and students in the heart of Bloomsbury. The GHIL is a research base for historians of all eras working on colonial history and global relations or the history of Great Britain and Ireland, and also provides a meeting point for UK historians whose research concerns the history of the German-speaking lands. In each podcast episode, ranging from interviews to lecture recordings, we take a look at historical research from different periods and areas. Subscribe to our podcast and visit our website at www.ghil.ac.uk to learn more about our research and work at the GHIL.

  1. 13 OCT

    Local Modernity: Agency, Entanglement, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

    Current critical scholarship tends to cast the colonial West as the prime actor in shaping the non-Western world, ‘producing’ types of knowledge specific to itself and alien to others, ‘inventing’ not just tradition(s) but entire religions, and imposing boundaries premised on colonial knowledge and interest. The insight gained from this scholarship is deeply important. But it also carries the risk of overrating the power of imperial world-making. In large parts of the non-Western world, the formation of modern subjectivity and statehood drew on concepts, practices, and institutions that predated the colonial era and informed what was understood as articulations of local, or rather alternative, modernity. A look at the Middle East reveals that these processes of creation and contestation were driven by a complex interplay of political, socio-cultural, and religious factors which did not revolve exclusively around the colonial Other. The project of Islamic modernity, based on the education of the modern Muslim subject and the establishment of an Islamic state and society, as propagated by Hasan al-Banna and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s and 1940s, exemplifies these processes. The project was specifically Islamic in form and outcome, yet the combination of ideas, mechanisms, and institutions understood as either part of the ‘authentic’ tradition or European in origin is characteristic of attempts to create an alternative, non-colonial modernity in general. For this reason, these endeavours invite comparison well beyond the Middle East and Islam at large.

    58 min

  2. 5 SEPT

    What is a fever?: Examining illness, 1770-1830

    Chills, aches and hot flushes. What exactly were people describing when they complained of fever around 1800? In this episode, host Kim König and GHIL Research Fellow Pascale Siegrist talk to Stefanie Gänger, Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University. They discuss the research behind her lecture on the history of fever and febrile diseases in the French, Iberian and British Empires from the 1770s to the 1820s, a period during which these diseases were widely considered to be the world's most common and fatal.

    18 min

  3. 5 SEPT

    ‘The Most Common and Fatal of All Diseases’: Histories of Fever, 1770-1830

    The talk is concerned with the history of fever and febrile diseases in the French, Iberian, and British empires, from the 1770s to the 1820s, a time when these were widely considered the most common and fatal diseases afflicting mankind. Emphasizing the historicity and cultural contingency of fever and the febrile experience, the presentation explores the concept of disease in the period in question, this ailment’s unusual prevalence at the time, sufferers’ sensory experience of it, and the commonness of ‘sequelae’, that is, of fevers which left sufferers with longer-term damage to their health. Stefanie Gänger is Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University. She is a historian of science and knowledge in the long nineteenth century and has published widely on issues including antiquarianism and collecting, self-medication and fever remedies, and the theory of (global) history.

    47 min

  4. 8 AUG

    Urban issues: Social problems in late 20th-century European cities

    In this episode, host Kim König and Research Fellow Ole Münch are joined by Christiane Reinecke, Professor of Modern European History at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, to discuss her research on notions of urban problems in late 20th-century European cities. Drawing on Christiane’s GHIL lecture, they discuss the shift in urban policy discourse from class-based concerns to issues of migration, race and ethnicity, and explore the role of social science in shaping these developments. Our conversation covers comparative European approaches to diversity and integration, from Germany and France to Britain and the Netherlands.

    30 min

  5. 8 AUG

    Picturing working class communities

    In this episode, we talk about working-class communities. Or rather: ideas about the working-class, some of which are quite romanticised. Joining host Kim König and Research Fellow Ole Münch to discuss the topic of his GHIL lecture is Jon Lawrence, Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter. Together, they explore how these ideas have influenced scholarly discourse and political imagination in post-war Britain, as well as the tension between lived experience and intellectual frameworks when it comes to understanding working-class life. Drawing on field notes from post-war social science projects, Jon's research uncovers surprising patterns in how researchers approached working-class culture and reveals why certain perspectives became more prominent than others. We also consider the enduring power of ideas about community and why these scholarly frameworks continue to be important for understanding Britain today.

    25 min

  6. 8 AUG

    Sociology and the Urban Experience: Double lecture

    Jon Lawrence: Shifting Visions of Working-Class Community in Post-War Britain The idea that the British working class had its own distinctive way of life and culture can be traced back to at least the 1880s, but in the wake of the Second World War it became common to argue that urban working-class life was marked by dense networks of reciprocal social relationships and shared norms worthy of the term ‘community’. Out of this came Michael Young’s influential engagement with working-class culture and ‘community’ in the early 1950s, especially Family and Kinship in East London (1957), which became a classic text for social workers. Working-class writers like Delaney and Sillitoe pushed back at middle-class romanticization, but ultimately, an anachronistic vision of ‘traditional’ working-class community emerged, with serious consequences for both class politics and social cohesion in modern Britain. Jon Lawrence is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter and author of Speaking for the People (1998), Electing Our Masters (2009) and most recently Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-War England (2019). He is currently working on a new history of working-class everyday (or ‘vernacular’) politics since the 1880s. Christiane Reinecke: Of Ghettos and Segregations: Making Sense of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Late Twentieth-Century Cities In the latter half of the twentieth century, migration and racial diversity came to be seen as major social problems in many Western European cities. This talk aims to make sense of this development by exploring how social scientists (and the data and narratives they produced) impacted on urban debates and policies in postcolonial France and the Federal Republic of Germany. As part of a double lecture, it discusses whether there was a shift from ‘class’ to ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in the construction of social problems in late twentieth-century Western European cities. Christiane Reinecke is Professor of Modern European History at the Europa-Universität Flensburg in Germany. Specializing in migration history, urban history, and the history of the social sciences, she mostly focuses on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century French, German, and British history, examining these Western European histories as part of global processes such as decolonization.

    55 min

  7. 15 JUL

    Mind the void: The importance of empty spaces in early modern Europe

    In this episode, host Kim König is joined by Ole Münch, Research Fellow for Modern History, and Achim Landwehr, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Konstanz. Together, they discuss the research behind Achim Landwehr's GHIL Lecture, which examined the constitutive role of voids in European early modernity. Their conversation moves from information-rich early modern calendars to the significance of gaps in our past, exploring how these influence the way we teach and write about history.

    25 min

  8. 15 JUL

    The Hole Story: Voids and their Constitutive Role in European (Early) Modernity

    European cultures tend to overlook voids, or, at best, see them as unpleasant phenomena. Yet voids are not only unavoidable, but actually constitutive in the emergence of European-Western modernity over the last four hundred years—which might now be coming to an end, possibly due to the excessive production of voids. Although the meaning of emptiness was certainly not first conceived in the seventeenth century, empty spaces took on a new role in this early modern period. There were of course the well-known vacuum experiments, but other voids were gaining in importance too: white spots in cartography, the concept of ‘terra nullius’, speculative bubbles, and the technical-military possibilities of extensive destruction, for instance. Voids are thus not only disturbing phenomena or regrettable losses, but crucial constitutive elements in European modernity. Achim Landwehr is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Konstanz. In his research, he has investigated questions of early modern statehood and aspects of time and the present in the seventeenth century, but has also repeatedly worked on questions of historical theory.

    46 min
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About

Welcome to the podcast of the German Historical Institute London, a research centre for German and British academics and students in the heart of Bloomsbury. The GHIL is a research base for historians of all eras working on colonial history and global relations or the history of Great Britain and Ireland, and also provides a meeting point for UK historians whose research concerns the history of the German-speaking lands. In each podcast episode, ranging from interviews to lecture recordings, we take a look at historical research from different periods and areas. Subscribe to our podcast and visit our website at www.ghil.ac.uk to learn more about our research and work at the GHIL.

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