Matthias Middell, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Leipzig, spent a semester at NIAS in 2010/11, exploring the role of technology in the interaction between European and non-European societies from 1850 to the present. One of the resulting edited volumes, Cultural Transfers, Encounters and Connections in the Global 18th Century, was published in 2014.
About the Book
For a long time the 18th century as the period of the Enlightenment and revolutions was considered as origin of the dominance of Europe and its settlers beyond the Atlantic. Recent research on Global History has broadened the picture significantly. The articles in this book take a look at the development of Russia, India, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and China. They discuss the 18th century as a time of global experience with the modernization of empires, as a time of a worldwide competition between the British and the French for the hegemony by land and by sea, but also as a time of a growing importance of national debt and internationally operating financiers. The articles which arose from a close cooperation of French, Italian and German researchers prove that traditional eurocentric narratives are subject to review, also and especially for the 18th century.