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Cartographies of Africa and Asia (1800–1945).
A Project for the Digitization of Maps of the Perthes Collection Gotha

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Workshop: “The Ethiopian Pillow” – Towards a New Cultural Mapping of Headrests

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...

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From Fieldwork in Japan to Print: The Reciprocal Relationship between Johannes Justus Rein and the Perthes Publishing House

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...

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The Turkestan Album: War and Peace of Maps and Photographs

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....

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A Colonial Demarcation Process. Investigating the Formation of the British-German Border between Nigeria and Cameroon

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...

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Josef Menges and the Early Mapping of Somaliland

Josef Menges and German Exploration in the Horn of Africa Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the coastal territories of the Horn of Africa became the focus of increasing interest by foreign powers, agencies, and individuals, who were attracted by the logistical, commercial, and geopolitical potential of these territories. Josef Menges (1850–1910), a Hessian, was one of...