New Research Project on Geography and Politics Between Northeast Africa and Europe

In this project, headed by Professor Iris Schröder, natural history-geographical and political spatial knowledge is examined on the basis of selected texts produced during travels. The project asks about the different actors, the forms and contents of collaborative knowledge production and thus about the genealogies of social and political spaces on site. It is based on notes, diaries, reports, letters and cartographic works that have been preserved in the Gotha Perthes Collection and that came to Gotha from the region, and it combines global-historically informed, knowledge-historical approaches with self-testimony research. Unlike the later published travelogues, these unpublished sources change the view of the local political conditions in Northeast Africa in the 1860s to 1880s as well as of the Europeans and Africans travelling there. The aim of the project is to develop a more differentiated understanding of European-African spatial knowledge and to profile a new approach to a relational history between Africa and Europe.