Welcome!
Welcome to the conference Mapping Asia. Cartography and the Construction of Territoriality in November 2022, 24th–25th, at the Centre for Transcultural Studies in Gotha.
The conference is part of the project Cartographies of Africa and Asia (1800–1945). A Project for the Digitization of Maps of the Perthes Collection Gotha (KarAfAs). KarAfAs is a co-authored endeavour of the Centre for Transcultural Studies at Gotha and the Perthes Collection of the Gotha Research Library, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. By digitising the maps of the Perthes collection in Gotha, we intend to inspire future projects which see questions of territoriality and spatiality in a fresh light, utilising the source material held at the Perthes Collection. Participants will be invited to a tour of the highlights of the collection’s cartographic material on Asia.

The Centre for Transcultural Studies in Gotha is part of Schloss Friedenstein, the palace in the centre of the city.
The Perthes Collection comprises the holdings of the publishing houses Justus Perthes Gotha, Justus Perthes Darmstadt and the VEB Hermann Haack Gotha. It is one of the most significant archives of a map publishing house in continental Europe. A remarkable part of the holdings is the map collection, which consists of around 200 000 sheets of cartographic material. Since it contains maps in all stages of their development that were produced in Gotha, from draft maps to the finalized printed product, as well as maps the publishers purchased internationally since the beginning of the 19th century, the map collection presents a mesmerizing opportunity for researchers of historical cartography. Thanks to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s (BMBF) financial support, a significant part of the map collection will now be made available online: Within two years, more than 35 000 of the collection’s maps of Africa and Asia from 1800 to 1945 will be catalogued, digitized and made available to the scientific community. All digitized items will be published at the Digital Historical Library Erfurt/Gotha (DHB), hosted by the Thuringian University and State Library (ThULB) Jena. A selection of the project’s first finds and findings is presented on our blog Mapping Africa and Asia (which you are visiting right now, by the way!).