When was the employment contract introduced in India? The story of the forging of the Formal Employment Contract in the first decades of the twentieth century, of its tortuous career and eventual dismantling over the next hundred years, may give us a clue to the persistent paradoxes of India’s labouring landscape. My presentation will examine how the employment contract came into being in India, and how it was transformed and destroyed over the last century.

How have people experienced emotions in the past and how did their meanings differ from how we experience emotions today? What influence did emotions have on history?

GHIL Research Fellow for Modern History Ole Münch and PR Officer Kim König talk to Ute Frevert, the new president of the Max Weber Foundation, about the research behind her lecture on ‘The Power of Emotions in German History’.

Everyone knows from experience that emotions are powerful: they motivate us to act in a certain way, they colour our experiences and shape our memories. But what impact do they have on history? What do we learn about history from looking through the lens of emotions? And what do we learn about emotions by applying a historical perspective? The talk explores those questions with regard to Germany in the twentieth century, a period of dramatic changes that deeply affected people’s lives, mindsets, and feelings.

GHIL Research Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König speak to Carsten Jahnke (Copenhagen) about his research on the history of the Hanseatic League and how historians have used it to shape Germans’ historical understanding.

Today, the Hanseatic League is anchored in the general consciousness of Germans as the ‘secret superpower’. Around 1800, however, the Göttingen professor Sartorius chose it as the subject of a major work because he could find nothing more irrelevant than this ‘half-forgotten antique’. How could a half-forgotten antique become a superpower? The lecture will trace the mnemonic strategies which were used by historians from 1830 to anchor the Hanseatic League in the minds of the Germans, first as a history of the Third Estate and the Free Cities, then as a (proto-)Protestant unifier against the hated Habsburgs, and finally as a Germanic national maritime power against England.

It has gone largely unnoticed by musicologists and historians that the British composer, conductor, and music entrepreneur John Rutter has become a leading figure in popular music since the 1980s. Successful on the global music market, popular in the English-speaking world, and regularly topping the classical music charts with his Christmas carol compositions, Rutter embodies the opposite of commercial pop culture. He is the antitype of a pop star: he succeeds with sacred music, he addresses the middle class, and he personifies family values, community spirit, and the preservation of tradition. Using the example of Rutter, the lecture will demonstrate the importance of conservative pop cultures for the emergence and development of transnational conservatism in Europe and North America since the 1970s.

GHIL Research Fellow for Modern History Ole Münch talks to Martina Steber, Deputy Director of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), about her research on the British composer, conductor, and music entrepreneur John Rutter, Popular Classical Music, and Transnational Conservatism since the 1970s.

GHIL Research Fellow for Modern History Ole Münch and PR and Events Officer Kim König speak to photographer Maria Cardamone. Maria has curated an exhibition which is currently on display at the GHIL and which is organised in cooperation with the Prize Papers Project. The Project is part of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen. It’s based at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and the British National Archives in London. The funding is provided by the Academies Programme of the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.

There is a disconnection between, on the one hand, Europe regarding colonial history as ‘the past’ and of little consequence to its contemporary self-understanding and, on the other hand, formerly colonized countries and populations living with the ongoing legacies of that colonial past as a present reality. In this lecture, I argue for a decolonial project for Europe. This is a project that would acknowledge Europe’s past as one largely constituted by its colonial activities. Further, it would seek to rethink the idea of ‘Europe’, and its contemporary relations to the rest of the world, on that basis.

It is said that to be human is to be flawed, limited, and finite; however, the meaning of ‘flawed’ has changed over time. The lecture argues that in the nineteenth century a new conceptual framework for human deficiency emerged that compares humans with technology. This concept became ubiquitous in the twentieth century and still determines discourses on technology today. Unlike philosophical and anthropological theories of man as a deficient creature (Herder, Gehlen), I do not assume that human beings are biologically deficient by ‘nature’; instead, I examine the cultural construction of faultiness in different contexts such as work, mobility, love, and decision-making.