German Historical Institute London Podcast public_relations@ghil.ac.uk

Money doesn’t stink – or so the famous phrase goes. So, what did peasants in the Middle Ages mean when they complained about bad coin? Can a focus on monetary issues shed new light on the Peasants' War?

In this GHIL Podcast interview, Research Fellow for Medieval History Marcus Meer and PR Officer Kim König are joined by Philipp Rössner, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, to talk about the research behind his lecture on ‘Peasants, Wars, and Evil Coins: Towards a “Monetary Turn” in Explaining the Revolution of 1525’.

The ‘Great German Peasant War’ of 1524–6 has quietly slipped off the historian’s agenda. Structural-materialist interpretations have waned since the fall of the Iron Curtain, giving rise to several ‘cultural’ and other ‘turns’, most of which have also passed. One phenomenon, however, has been missed completely, in older as well as more recent historiography: the monetary problem. Monetary issues—relating to currency and how different coins were used to pay fines, dues, and tithes—featured in most known medieval peasant grievances up to the Peasant War proper, significantly contributing to the peasants’ economic cause for revolt. This paper suggests how a ‘monetary turn’ may shed new light on Germany’s first modern revolution.

Why did people in Imperial Germany became increasingly interested in their personal performance? Was there a link between global entanglements of Imperial Germany on the one hand and a rise in personal achievement culture on the other?

Within a few decades, people in Imperial Germany witnessed a dramatic rise in global exchange, as well as an increased public interest in personal achievement. Work performance, intelligence, sporting achievements, and so on were measured, standardized, optimized and—above all—cherished. This lecture scrutinizes the link between both of these trends. It highlights two aspects: on the one hand, global exchange allowed and helped certain people in Germany to achieve new and sometimes outstanding things, but on the other, the idea of a purely personal achievement made the global factors behind such achievements invisible. In other words, the fin de siècle cult of personal achievement relied on global interactions and at the same time concealed them.

Between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the British transported over a quarter of a million convicts to colonies and settlements including in Australia, the Andaman Islands, Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. About one percent of the approximately 167,000 convicts shipped to the Australian colonies (1787-1868) were of Asian, African or Creole heritage; convicted either in Britain or British colonies. Most of the c. 108,000 convicts sent to penal settlements in Penang, Mauritius, Singapore, Malacca, Burma, and the Andamans (1789-1945) were from British India or Ceylon.

This paper will explore some of the histories and aftermaths of these convict flows, including their relationship to experiences and legacies of enslavement and other forms of imperial labour, and to Indigenous dispossession. It will draw on research in archives and with descendants and communities in Australia, Mauritius, Penang, and the Andamans to show how over time penal transportation broke and remade families, and to think through the ways in which economic, social, and cultural factors relating to race, ethnicity, religion and (for Hindus) caste, social background, education, and status intersected in the formation of convict and convict-descended societies. It will suggest that through genealogical research in recent years these societies have become connected to sending (and origin) locations and to sites of onward migration in Britain and the settler world. In some cases, descendants o

The issue of restitution is an ongoing topic of public debate in both European and African societies. In this GHIL podcast interview, GHIL Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König talk to Kokou Azamede, Associate Professor at the Department of German Studies at the University of Lomé, about his work with local communities in the former German colony of Togo, which assesses their knowledge and perception of colonial cultural goods and human remains from their region. Azamede’s research shows new pathways to understanding and cooperation with a view to possible restitution.