Geography and Politics between North Africa and Europe. Ego-Documents as an Approach to a Relational History of Knowledge

The research project focuses on journeys from Europe to Northeast Africa before colonial land appropriation. It examines natural-scientific-geographical and political spatial knowledge based on selected texts produced during travels and explores different actors, forms, and contents of collaborative knowledge production, thereby investigating the genealogies of social and political spaces on-site.

The project relies on notes, diaries, reports, letters, and cartographic works preserved in the Perthes Collection (Research Library Gotha), which originated from the region and made their way to Gotha. It combines globally informed, knowledge-historical approaches with self-testimonial research. Unlike later published travel reports, these unpublished sources alter the perspective on local political conditions in Northeast Africa in the 1860s to 1880s, as well as on the Europeans and Africans traveling there. The goal of the project is to develop a more nuanced understanding of European-African spatial knowledge and to profile a new approach to a relational history between Africa and Europe. This project is also being realised in the course of a working group with the Ethiopian fellows working in Gotha. In the working group, researchers work together on a specific thematic complex of the project and contribute their respective expertise.

^{Picture: August Petermann, draft of a map. East Africa between Chartúm & the Red Sea to Sauakin & Massua, 1:1,000,000, Gotha 1860/61, SPK 40.19.01 C (01), Gotha Perthes Collection of the Gotha Research Library}