Cartographies of Africa and Asia (1800–1945).
A Project for the Digitization of Maps of the Perthes Collection Gotha
The cartouche of the Colonial Wall Map, which was first produced by the Justus Perthes publishing house in 1909, is artistically drawn.1 A black-and-white frame surrounds several colourful maps showing the Pacific Ocean regions that were part of the German colonial empire between 1899 and 1914. The drawings depict several raw materials that were found in and exported from the...
Headrests have been used for thousands of years in different regions around the world. Therefore, it is not surprising that they can be found in various shapes and sizes in many German ethnographic collections, many of which are from Ethiopia. There, headrests have not merely been functional objects, but have also held different symbolic and social meanings. On 24 June...
On a winter morning in 1875, the geographer Johannes Justus Rein was staying at the German Legation in Tokyo. For over a year, Rein had been conducting field research in Japan under the auspices of a government-sponsored expedition. In a letter to August Petermann (10 January 1875), he outlined his plans for the scholarly evaluation of his fieldwork upon return...
The Russian campaign in Central Asia can be viewed as an episode in the long history of this territory. Claiming the city of Tashkent in 1865, the fortress of Samarkand in 1868 and the Khanate of Khiva in 1873 were all ground-breaking events of Central Asia’s incorporation into the Russian Empire (cf. fig. 1), impulsive and unsystematic as it was....
In 1903 a complaint by a British official about “leaking German-Cameroonian borders” (Weiss 2000: 168) reached Garoua, the centre of German colonial administration in German-Adamawa, Cameroon. More complaints from the British Protectorate of Nigeria followed but German officials rejected the accusations although they were aware of the ongoing slavery and cross-border slave trade (ibid.: 167–172). Why did the colonial border...
For many years I have undertaken extensive research on the maps in the British Library’s Wise Collection – showing the route between Lhasa in Central Tibet and Ladakh in the Western Himalayas over a length of more than ten metres (Lange 2020). They were made in the late 1850s by a Tibetan lama who was commissioned by a British official...