Harald Fischer-Tiné
Biographic Data
| ID | 369148 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Harald Fischer-Tiné |
| GIVEN NAMES | Harald |
| FAMILY NAME | Fischer-Tiné |
| SIGNATURE | FISCHER-TINÉ H |
| AFFILIATIONS | ETH Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0373-8866 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 110 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
‘Liberating Technology’ or Two-Wheeled ‘Tool of Empire’? The Social Lives of the Bicycle in Colonial India (c. 1870–1920)
This article explores the social lives of the bicycle under the British Raj by bringing together the history of technology with cultural history and gender history. It first examines the discursive dimension of the bicycle and cycling in India, demonstrating that the new mobility technology was celebrated as an emblem of techno-modernity and, by extension, European superiority. The second part concentrates on analysing the practical uses of the ‘…
Pedal Power
Man-making and World-making on Two Wheels
Around 20 cyclists from India embarked on long and arduous intercontinental journeys between 1923 and 1942 individually or in groups. Many of these ‘globe cyclists’, as they were often referred to by the Indian press, later wrote media articles and longer travelogues about their expeditions. This article examines the narratives of these long-distance cycling expeditions to argue that these journeys can illuminate new histories of the bicycle’s so…
The Ymca in Late Colonial India
This book explores the history and agendas of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) through its activities in South Asia. Focusing on interactions between American ‘Y’ workers and the local population, representatives of the British colonial state, and a host of international actors, it assesses their impact on the making of modern India. In turn, it shows how the knowledge and experience acquired by the Y in South Asia had a significant i…
Cosmopolitan, Bridge-Builder and Missionary
On 9 March 2020, Dietmar Rothermund, one of the leading historians of South Asia, passed away at the age of 87 at his residence near Heidelberg, Germany. He will be remembered by his friends, colle
Introduction
This introductory essay provides an overview of the main subfields of research into the histories of foodstuffs, diet and nutrition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia, thus situating the contributions to this themed special section in wider historiographical debates and controversies. It argues that the bulk of existing research has focused either on the conflictual role of food and diet in the colonial encounter, or on the emergence…
Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia
Recruiting, retaining and disciplining military labour was crucial to the expansion of British colonial power in South Asia, as it had been in preceding centuries. The ability of the East India Company to monopolise the India’s existing military labour markets, and then to nurture new ones, secured colonial rule in the subcontinent and ensured that millions of colonised Indians fought in the global wars of the twentieth century
Third-Stream Orientalism
This article reconstructs the history of the Indian YMCA's Orientalist knowledge production in an attempt to capture a significant, if forgotten, transitional moment in the production and dissemination of scholarship on the religions and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. The YMCA's three Orientalist book series examined here flourished from the 1910s to the 1930s and represent a kind of third-stream approach to the study of South Asia. Inspire…
Fitness for Modernity? The Ymca and physical-education schemes in late-colonial South Asia (circa1900-40)
Focusing particularly on the Madras College of Physical Education opened in 1919, this article reconstructs the role of the United States of America-dominated Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in the spread of physical-education schemes in South Asia between the beginning of the century and the outbreak of the Second World War. American YMCA secretaries stressed the scientific, liberal, and egalitarian character of their 'physical p…
Unparalleled Opportunities’
The present article aims to contribute to the global history of the First World War and the history of ‘imperial humanitarianism’ by taking stock of the Indian Young Men's Christian Association's Army Work schemes in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The outbreak of the war was hailed by some American secretaries of the Y.M.C.A. working in India as presenting overwhelming opportunities for their proselytising agenda. Indeed, the global conf…
The Ymca and Low-Modernist Rural Development in South Asia, c.1922–1957
This article explores the North America-dominated YMCA as an influential agent promoting ‘rural reconstruction’ schemes on the Indian subcontinent from the 1920s to the 1950s. During that period, religiously inclined civil society actors from the United States played a crucial role in shaping reform programmes designed to improve South Asian agriculture and educate the ‘backward’ village population. It sheds light on the global history of ‘sustai…
Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950
As this edited volume makes clear, vice makes the world go round. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a variety of people from across the globe were linked through the underworld of international trade and through efforts to contain it. From communes to colonies, from West Africa to China, people with different motivations and working in diverse contexts consumed and combated drink, drugs, and sex trafficking. Finding a common t…
Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War
Introduction
Mass-Mediated Panic in the British Empire? Shyamji Krishnavarma’s ‘Scientific Terrorism’ and the ‘London Outrage’, 1909
Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950
Vice was one of the primary shared interests of the global community at the turn of the twentieth century. Anti-vice activists worked to combat noxious substances such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, and 'immoral' sexual activities such as prostitution. Nearly all of these activists approached the issue of vice by expressing worries about the body, its physical health, and functionality. By situating anti-vice politics in their broader historic…
Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings
This book argues that the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment as well as by the regular occurrence of pani
Colonial Switzerland
States without former colonies, it has been argued, were intensely involved in colonial practices. This anthology looks at Switzerland, which, by its very strong economic involvements with colonialism
A History of Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia
Introduction: Indian Anomalies? - Drink and Drugs in the Land of Gandhi Jana Tschurenev and Harald Fischer-Tine Part 1: Trajectories: reconstructing the history of intoxicants in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods 1. Alcohol in Pre-Modern South Asia James McHugh 2. Opium, the East India Company and the 'Native' States Amar Farooqui Part 2: Cultural Encounters: European alcohol and drug consumption in the situation coloniale 3. 'What shal…
Aparna Vaidik. Imperial Andamans
ISSN:0002-8762
The drinking habits of our countrymen’
Drinking did not only play an important role in the social life of the Raj, it also provides a useful lens to look at the structure of British colonial presence in the Indian subcontinent and the ideological constructs designed to legitimise it. The article looks specifically at the patterns of alcohol consumption of the middle and lower social classes of Europeans in India during the period between the suppression of the 'Mutiny' and the outbrea…
Imagining Asia in India
Asianisms, that is, discourses and ideologies claiming that Asia can be defined and understood as a homogenous space with shared and clearly defined characteristics, have become the subject of increased scholarly attention over the last two decades. The focal points of interest, however, are generally East Asian varieties of regionalism. That 'the cult of Asianism' has played an important role on the Indian subcontinent, too-as is evident from th…
Hierarchies of Punishment in Colonial India
After being treated rather indifferently for decades, issues of crime and punishment have aroused the interest of historians of South Asia during the last twenty years to an astonishing degree. Instead it would be expected to demonstrate such features as the possession of a penal system that was overseen by an enlightened bureaucratic rationalism and precluding punishments to the human body. A completely separate punishment for Europeans would al…
Empires and boundaries
List of Figures. 1. Introduction: Empires, Boundaries and the Production of Difference. Harald Fischer-Tine and Susanne Gerhmann. 2. Education for Work in Colony and Metropole: The Case of Imperial Germany, c. 1880-1914. Sebastian Conrad. 3. Hierarchies of Punishment in Colonial India: European Convicts and the Racial Dividend (c. 1860-1890). Harald Fischer-Tine. 4. Boundaries of Race: Representations of Indisch in Colonial Indonesia Revisited. V…
Global Civil Society and the Forces of Empire
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)1 play a pivotal role in the current debate on globalization. Particularly, critics of the asymmetrical economic and political relationships ensuing from the processes of intensified communication and exchange on a global scale warn of the new forces of Empire—that is, the hegemonic role of the United States and multinational trusts—in a new postcolonial and post-cold war world order.2 The establishment of a gl…
Indian Nationalism and the 'world forces
The present article takes a global perspective on the diasporic networks of Indian revolutionaries that were emerging on the eve of the First World War. It looks particularly at three important headquarters of their activities, namely London, New York and Tokyo. The narrative is centred on the 'India Houses' that were opened in these three cities and served as the institutional umbrella units for the revolutionary schemes. Finally, the political …
Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings
This book argues that the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment as well as by the regular occurrence of pani
White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths
The international traffic in European prostitutes to South Asia became a matter of political debate both in Britain and India from the 1880s onwards. After discussing briefly the metropolitan obsession with the so-called 'White Slave Traffic', this article reconstructs the spread of the prostitution networks until WW I, gives a short account of the working conditions of the European prostitutes, and analyses the discourse it provoked around the t…
The drinking habits of our countrymen’
Drinking did not only play an important role in the social life of the Raj, it also provides a useful lens to look at the structure of British colonial presence in the Indian subcontinent and the ideological constructs designed to legitimise it. The article looks specifically at the patterns of alcohol consumption of the middle and lower social classes of Europeans in India during the period between the suppression of the 'Mutiny' and the outbrea…
Britain's other civilising mission
This article reconsiders the policies applied by the colonial state with regard to European ‘loafers’ or vagrants in colonial India, thereby raising a number of questions about the relationship between the categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’ in colonial settings. It starts with a discussion of the intellectual roots of the class prejudices towards working–class Europeans dating back to the Company era, and offers a brief survey of the economic and d…
The Ymca and Low-Modernist Rural Development in South Asia, c.1922–1957
This article explores the North America-dominated YMCA as an influential agent promoting ‘rural reconstruction’ schemes on the Indian subcontinent from the 1920s to the 1950s. During that period, religiously inclined civil society actors from the United States played a crucial role in shaping reform programmes designed to improve South Asian agriculture and educate the ‘backward’ village population. It sheds light on the global history of ‘sustai…
A History of Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia
Introduction: Indian Anomalies? - Drink and Drugs in the Land of Gandhi Jana Tschurenev and Harald Fischer-Tine Part 1: Trajectories: reconstructing the history of intoxicants in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods 1. Alcohol in Pre-Modern South Asia James McHugh 2. Opium, the East India Company and the 'Native' States Amar Farooqui Part 2: Cultural Encounters: European alcohol and drug consumption in the situation coloniale 3. 'What shal…
Imagining Asia in India
Asianisms, that is, discourses and ideologies claiming that Asia can be defined and understood as a homogenous space with shared and clearly defined characteristics, have become the subject of increased scholarly attention over the last two decades. The focal points of interest, however, are generally East Asian varieties of regionalism. That 'the cult of Asianism' has played an important role on the Indian subcontinent, too-as is evident from th…
Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia
Recruiting, retaining and disciplining military labour was crucial to the expansion of British colonial power in South Asia, as it had been in preceding centuries. The ability of the East India Company to monopolise the India’s existing military labour markets, and then to nurture new ones, secured colonial rule in the subcontinent and ensured that millions of colonised Indians fought in the global wars of the twentieth century
Fitness for Modernity? The Ymca and physical-education schemes in late-colonial South Asia (circa1900-40)
Focusing particularly on the Madras College of Physical Education opened in 1919, this article reconstructs the role of the United States of America-dominated Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in the spread of physical-education schemes in South Asia between the beginning of the century and the outbreak of the Second World War. American YMCA secretaries stressed the scientific, liberal, and egalitarian character of their 'physical p…
Introduction
This introductory essay provides an overview of the main subfields of research into the histories of foodstuffs, diet and nutrition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia, thus situating the contributions to this themed special section in wider historiographical debates and controversies. It argues that the bulk of existing research has focused either on the conflictual role of food and diet in the colonial encounter, or on the emergence…
Third-Stream Orientalism
This article reconstructs the history of the Indian YMCA's Orientalist knowledge production in an attempt to capture a significant, if forgotten, transitional moment in the production and dissemination of scholarship on the religions and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. The YMCA's three Orientalist book series examined here flourished from the 1910s to the 1930s and represent a kind of third-stream approach to the study of South Asia. Inspire…
Deep Occidentalism›? Europa und ‹der Westen› in der Wahrnehmung hinduistischer Intellektueller und Reformer ca.1890–1930
‹Deep Occidentalism›? Europe and the ‹West› in the Perception of Hindu Intellectuals and Reformers 1890–1930 The present article seeks to understand the counter-hegemonic politics pursued by Hindu elites around the turn to the 20th century. It argues that the West certainly played a central role as a point of reference, but that there have always been successful attempts at contesting its project of cultural hegemony. The first part looks at the …
Character Building and Manly Games
Character Building and Manly Games
White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths
The international traffic in European prostitutes to South Asia became a matter of political debate both in Britain and India from the 1880s onwards. After discussing briefly the metropolitan obsession with the so-called 'White Slave Traffic', this article reconstructs the spread of the prostitution networks until WW I, gives a short account of the working conditions of the European prostitutes, and analyses the discourse it provoked around the t…
Colonialism as civilizing mission
Britain's other civilising mission
This article reconsiders the policies applied by the colonial state with regard to European ‘loafers’ or vagrants in colonial India, thereby raising a number of questions about the relationship between the categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’ in colonial settings. It starts with a discussion of the intellectual roots of the class prejudices towards working–class Europeans dating back to the Company era, and offers a brief survey of the economic and d…
Deep Occidentalism›? Europa und ‹der Westen› in der Wahrnehmung hinduistischer Intellektueller und Reformer ca.1890–1930
‹Deep Occidentalism›? Europe and the ‹West› in the Perception of Hindu Intellectuals and Reformers 1890–1930 The present article seeks to understand the counter-hegemonic politics pursued by Hindu elites around the turn to the 20th century. It argues that the West certainly played a central role as a point of reference, but that there have always been successful attempts at contesting its project of cultural hegemony. The first part looks at the …
Global Civil Society and the Forces of Empire
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)1 play a pivotal role in the current debate on globalization. Particularly, critics of the asymmetrical economic and political relationships ensuing from the processes of intensified communication and exchange on a global scale warn of the new forces of Empire—that is, the hegemonic role of the United States and multinational trusts—in a new postcolonial and post-cold war world order.2 The establishment of a gl…
Indian Nationalism and the 'world forces
The present article takes a global perspective on the diasporic networks of Indian revolutionaries that were emerging on the eve of the First World War. It looks particularly at three important headquarters of their activities, namely London, New York and Tokyo. The narrative is centred on the 'India Houses' that were opened in these three cities and served as the institutional umbrella units for the revolutionary schemes. Finally, the political …
Hierarchies of Punishment in Colonial India
After being treated rather indifferently for decades, issues of crime and punishment have aroused the interest of historians of South Asia during the last twenty years to an astonishing degree. Instead it would be expected to demonstrate such features as the possession of a penal system that was overseen by an enlightened bureaucratic rationalism and precluding punishments to the human body. A completely separate punishment for Europeans would al…
Empires and boundaries
List of Figures. 1. Introduction: Empires, Boundaries and the Production of Difference. Harald Fischer-Tine and Susanne Gerhmann. 2. Education for Work in Colony and Metropole: The Case of Imperial Germany, c. 1880-1914. Sebastian Conrad. 3. Hierarchies of Punishment in Colonial India: European Convicts and the Racial Dividend (c. 1860-1890). Harald Fischer-Tine. 4. Boundaries of Race: Representations of Indisch in Colonial Indonesia Revisited. V…
The drinking habits of our countrymen’
Drinking did not only play an important role in the social life of the Raj, it also provides a useful lens to look at the structure of British colonial presence in the Indian subcontinent and the ideological constructs designed to legitimise it. The article looks specifically at the patterns of alcohol consumption of the middle and lower social classes of Europeans in India during the period between the suppression of the 'Mutiny' and the outbrea…
Imagining Asia in India
Asianisms, that is, discourses and ideologies claiming that Asia can be defined and understood as a homogenous space with shared and clearly defined characteristics, have become the subject of increased scholarly attention over the last two decades. The focal points of interest, however, are generally East Asian varieties of regionalism. That 'the cult of Asianism' has played an important role on the Indian subcontinent, too-as is evident from th…
Aparna Vaidik. Imperial Andamans
ISSN:0002-8762
A History of Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia
Introduction: Indian Anomalies? - Drink and Drugs in the Land of Gandhi Jana Tschurenev and Harald Fischer-Tine Part 1: Trajectories: reconstructing the history of intoxicants in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods 1. Alcohol in Pre-Modern South Asia James McHugh 2. Opium, the East India Company and the 'Native' States Amar Farooqui Part 2: Cultural Encounters: European alcohol and drug consumption in the situation coloniale 3. 'What shal…
Colonial Switzerland
States without former colonies, it has been argued, were intensely involved in colonial practices. This anthology looks at Switzerland, which, by its very strong economic involvements with colonialism
Introduction
Mass-Mediated Panic in the British Empire? Shyamji Krishnavarma’s ‘Scientific Terrorism’ and the ‘London Outrage’, 1909
Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950
Vice was one of the primary shared interests of the global community at the turn of the twentieth century. Anti-vice activists worked to combat noxious substances such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, and 'immoral' sexual activities such as prostitution. Nearly all of these activists approached the issue of vice by expressing worries about the body, its physical health, and functionality. By situating anti-vice politics in their broader historic…
Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings
This book argues that the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment as well as by the regular occurrence of pani
Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950
As this edited volume makes clear, vice makes the world go round. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a variety of people from across the globe were linked through the underworld of international trade and through efforts to contain it. From communes to colonies, from West Africa to China, people with different motivations and working in diverse contexts consumed and combated drink, drugs, and sex trafficking. Finding a common t…
Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War
Unparalleled Opportunities’
The present article aims to contribute to the global history of the First World War and the history of ‘imperial humanitarianism’ by taking stock of the Indian Young Men's Christian Association's Army Work schemes in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The outbreak of the war was hailed by some American secretaries of the Y.M.C.A. working in India as presenting overwhelming opportunities for their proselytising agenda. Indeed, the global conf…
The Ymca and Low-Modernist Rural Development in South Asia, c.1922–1957
This article explores the North America-dominated YMCA as an influential agent promoting ‘rural reconstruction’ schemes on the Indian subcontinent from the 1920s to the 1950s. During that period, religiously inclined civil society actors from the United States played a crucial role in shaping reform programmes designed to improve South Asian agriculture and educate the ‘backward’ village population. It sheds light on the global history of ‘sustai…
Fitness for Modernity? The Ymca and physical-education schemes in late-colonial South Asia (circa1900-40)
Focusing particularly on the Madras College of Physical Education opened in 1919, this article reconstructs the role of the United States of America-dominated Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in the spread of physical-education schemes in South Asia between the beginning of the century and the outbreak of the Second World War. American YMCA secretaries stressed the scientific, liberal, and egalitarian character of their 'physical p…
Third-Stream Orientalism
This article reconstructs the history of the Indian YMCA's Orientalist knowledge production in an attempt to capture a significant, if forgotten, transitional moment in the production and dissemination of scholarship on the religions and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. The YMCA's three Orientalist book series examined here flourished from the 1910s to the 1930s and represent a kind of third-stream approach to the study of South Asia. Inspire…
Cosmopolitan, Bridge-Builder and Missionary
On 9 March 2020, Dietmar Rothermund, one of the leading historians of South Asia, passed away at the age of 87 at his residence near Heidelberg, Germany. He will be remembered by his friends, colle
History (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Colonialism (18 works) · Law (17 works) · History (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Ancient history (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Archaeology (9 works)