Perthes colonial: Mapping Africa, Latin America und Oceania as a business (1871-1945)

Debates about colonial history move science, society and politics. Since March 2026, researchers at the Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection at the University of Erfurt have been investigating how the map publisher Justus Perthes Gotha processed knowledge from contexts of colonial conquests and land acquisitions in the 19th and 20th centuries. One focus of the research is on the associated business strategies: with maps of, for example, deposits of raw materials in colonies, the publisher sought to gain trading houses, shipping companies and schools as customers, among others. The Gotha Perthes Collection – the publishing house's collection in Gotha, which has been preserved by the University of Erfurt – is one of only a few collections of its kind in the world that makes it possible to trace this entrepreneurial dimension of colonial cartography.

Unlike most map collections, the Gotha Perthes Collection also documents the production, distribution and, in some cases, the reception of maps. As a result, the records in Gotha allow rare insights into the business of colonial cartography, for example into the economic success and failure of publishing products or the scope of distribution. In the "Perthes colonial" project, questions about such aspects of economic and business history are related to the overarching context of the development of a colonial knowledge of culture in Europe.

^{Image: Bruno Hassenstein, Special map of the Damara country. According to the latest sources, 1:1,750,000, 50 x 39 cm, Justus Perthes' Kolonien-Karten No. 2, Gotha 1885, Gotha Research Library, Perthes Collection, SPA lg2° 00332 (53).}