Sebastian Conrad
Biographic Data
| ID | 299877 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sebastian Conrad |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sebastian |
| FAMILY NAME | Conrad |
| SIGNATURE | CONRAD S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Freie Universität Berlin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8366-4210 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Two German Memory Regimes: Conflicts About the Past in a Globalizing World
Since around 2020 Germany has been witnessing fierce conflicts over public memory. The memory of the Holocaust, a defining feature of Germany’s postwar self-fashioning, is increasingly being complemented—or, as some fear, challenged—by a new awareness of German atrocities during its colonial past. This conflict is best understood as a transition from one memory regime to another: from a regime that corresponded to the process of European integrat…
The Making of a Global Icon: Nefertiti’s Twentieth-Century Career
The characteristic image of Nefertiti is known all over the world. Discovered in 1912 and first exhibited in 1924, her bust has turned into an icon of universal beauty that is globally recognised. How did this transformation happen, from ancient queen to modern beauty standard? How can we explain her worldwide resonance – in places like Germany and Britain, Brazil and Egypt, Bengal and the United States, places with vastly different aesthetic tra…
Globalizing Europe: A History
Globalizing Europe explores modern Europe's myriad entanglements with the wider world, considering the continent not only as an engine but also as a product of global transformations. It looks at the ways in which the global movements of peoples and ideas, goods and raw materials, flora and fauna have impacted life on the continent over the centuries. Bringing together a group of leading historians, the book shows how the history of Europe can be…
Comment by Sebastian Conrad
Eingegangene Bücher
Analytical Concepts for Transcultural Settings: Pathways in Global Intellectual History
In global intellectual history, there exists a tension between analytical concepts often carrying a Western or colonial pedigree andtheir ability to capture the multifaceted reality of historical actors who cannot be placed in one language or culture alone. The thematic section titled ‘Analytical Concepts for Transcultural Settings’ highlights the role of global intellectual historians as mediators who balance local realities with global narrativ…
Rethinking Nationalism
This forum, curated by Michael Goebel (Freie Univ. Berlin), brings together twelve historians who draw on their own areas of specialization to rethink how we conceptualize the history of nationalism in our present moment of reactivated and often militant nationalist rhetoric
Settler Colonialism and Financial Imperialism: The German and United States Empires in a Global Age
Perspectivas en Diálogo
En su nueva edicin de 2021, Perspectivas en Dilogo ofrece a sus lectores un nuevo debate enfocado en la Historia Global como perspectiva de anlisis histrico. En este caso, Juan Pablo Scarfi y Eduardo Zimmermann dialogan con Sebastian Conrad sobre su libro What Is Global History
Conjonctures mondiales: La Nouvelle Fabrique De L’histoire Politique Européenne
Conjonctures mondiales : la nouvelle fabrique de l’histoire politique européenne Au cours des dernières décennies, l’écriture de l’histoire européenne – qu’il s’agisse de l’histoire de l’Europe ou de celle des pays d’Europe – a connu des transformations fondamentales. Le tournant global, bien qu’il ait été adapté de différentes manières, a profondément affecté l’historiographie produite dans de nombreux pays européens. D’une part, des moments cha…
Memórias entrelaçadas: Versões do passado na Alemanha e no Japão, 1945-2001
Mesmo em nossa era da globalização, os estudos de história da memória tendem a reforçar a categoria de nação. Isso vale também para as interpretações das diferentes maneiras pelas quais a Alemanha Ocidental e o Japão lidaram com suas próprias atrocidades e derrotas na Segunda Guerra Mundial. Frequentemente, os historiadores opõem o engajamento crítico com o passado recente na Alemanha à recusa japonesa em reconhecer, no pós-guerra, suas próprias …
Greek in Their Own Way: Writing India and Japan into the World History of Architecture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
At the turn of the twentieth century, two architects-Itō Chūta in Japan and Rajendralal Mitra in Bengal-sought to counter Eurocentric accounts of aesthetic modernity by insisting on the inclusion of Japanese and Indian building traditions in the world history of architecture. In different and indeed opposing ways, they mobilized the idea of classical Greece; while Itō saw ancient Japanese buildings as directly influenced by Greek models, Mitra de…
Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s
Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s D.Sachsenmaier & S.Conrad PART I: CONCEPTIONS OF WORLD ORDER AND GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE IMPERIALIST AGE Global Civil Society and the Forces of Empire: The Salvation Army, British Imperialism and the Pre-history of NGOs (ca. 1880 - 1920) H.Fischer-Tine The Common Grounds of Conflict: Racial Visions of World Order 1880-1940 C.Geulen World Orders in World Histories Befo…
Nothing Is the Way It Should Be”: Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century
When European clocks first arrived in seventeenth-century Japan they generated a commotion. The highly complex but also very precise instruments had been brought to Nagasaki by the Dutch East India Company that monopolized the sparse and highly regulated trade between Japan and Europe for more than two centuries. As an expression of the technological sophistication achieved in early modern Europe, mechanical clocks were hi-tech products of their …
Wolfgang Behringer. Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer: Wie ein Vulkan die Welt in die Krise stürzte
When Stamford Raffles, the British governor of Java, heard a sudden rumble on April 5, 1815, and the sound of explosions that would last for hours, he suspected a French military attack. As it turned out, the origin of the blast was eight hundred kilometers away and not at all related to warfare or battle. Its cause was the explosion of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, the largest volcanic eruption in human history in the past f…
Geschichte der Welt Wege zur modernen Welt: 1750-1870
What Is Global History?
What Is Global History
1 Introduction 1 2 A short history of thinking globally 17 3 Competing approaches 37 4 Global history as a distinct approach 62 5 Global history and forms of integration 90 6 Space in global history 115 7 Time in global history 141 8 Positionality and centered approaches 162 9 World-making and the concepts of global history 185 10 Global history for whom?
German Colonialism
Andrew E. Barshay. The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956
Journal Article Andrew E. Barshay. The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956. Get access Andrew E. Barshay. The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 239. $65.00. Sebastian Conrad Sebastian Conrad Freie Universität Berlin [email protected] Search for othe…
The Dialectics of Remembrance: Memories of Empire in Cold War Japan
Between 1895 and 1945 Japan assembled one of the largest empires in modern world history. It vanished abruptly in the summer of 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and seemed to leave no trace in public consciousness. Historians, too, have portrayed postwar Japan as characterized by a virtual erasure of the imperial past. This article draws on recent scholarship to argue that things were more complicated than that. While references to the im…
Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age
Recent years have seen a sudden upsurge of scholarly interests in German colonialism. The German overseas empire, founded in 1884 and defunct in 1915, lasted a mere 30 years, and was thus one of the most short-lived of all modern colonialisms. Consequently, it has not occupied centre-stage in most accounts, either of European imperialism or of German history itself. The colonial experience was deemed marginal and insignificant, compared to the lo…
Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique
THE ENLIGHTENMENT HAS LONG HELD a pivotal place in narratives of world history. It has served as a sign of the modern, and continues to play that role yet today. The standard interpretations, however, have tended to assume, and to perpetuate, a Eurocentric mythology. They have helped entrench a view of global interactions as having essentially been energized by Europe alone. Historians have now begun to challenge this view. A global history persp…
The Colonial Ties are Liquidated: Modernization Theory, Post-War Japan and the Global Cold War
From 29 August to 2 September 1960, thirty-one eminent scholars congregated for the ‘Conference on Modern Japan’ in Hakone, a small hot-springs resort town just outside Tokyo, in the vicinity of Mount Fuji. The event was organized by the University of Michigan historian John W. Hall and others, and it included many prominent names in the contemporary Japanese humanities and social sciences, and their counterparts from other countries, mainly the …
German Colonialism: A Short History
Germany was a latecomer to the colonial world of the late nineteenth century but this history of German colonialism makes clear the wide-reaching consequences of Germany's short-lived colonial project. Sebastian Conrad charts the expansion of the empire from its origins in the acquisition of substantial territories in present day Togo, Cameroon, Namibia and Tanzania to new settlements in East Asia and the Pacific and reveals the colonialist cultu…
Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945—2001
In the history of memory, the national paradigm continues to reign supreme. This may come as a surprise at a time when the historical profession is beginning to discard the category of the nation and starting to produce transnational work. International comparisons and relational histories, and also the larger frameworks of European, post-colonial, or world history gradually seem to be replacing the narrow confines of the nineteenth-century parad…
Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age
Recent years have seen a sudden upsurge of scholarly interests in German colonialism. The German overseas empire, founded in 1884 and defunct in 1915, lasted a mere 30 years, and was thus one of the most short-lived of all modern colonialisms. Consequently, it has not occupied centre-stage in most accounts, either of European imperialism or of German history itself. The colonial experience was deemed marginal and insignificant, compared to the lo…
Nothing Is the Way It Should Be”: Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century
When European clocks first arrived in seventeenth-century Japan they generated a commotion. The highly complex but also very precise instruments had been brought to Nagasaki by the Dutch East India Company that monopolized the sparse and highly regulated trade between Japan and Europe for more than two centuries. As an expression of the technological sophistication achieved in early modern Europe, mechanical clocks were hi-tech products of their …
The Colonial Ties are Liquidated: Modernization Theory, Post-War Japan and the Global Cold War
From 29 August to 2 September 1960, thirty-one eminent scholars congregated for the ‘Conference on Modern Japan’ in Hakone, a small hot-springs resort town just outside Tokyo, in the vicinity of Mount Fuji. The event was organized by the University of Michigan historian John W. Hall and others, and it included many prominent names in the contemporary Japanese humanities and social sciences, and their counterparts from other countries, mainly the …
The Dialectics of Remembrance: Memories of Empire in Cold War Japan
Between 1895 and 1945 Japan assembled one of the largest empires in modern world history. It vanished abruptly in the summer of 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and seemed to leave no trace in public consciousness. Historians, too, have portrayed postwar Japan as characterized by a virtual erasure of the imperial past. This article draws on recent scholarship to argue that things were more complicated than that. While references to the im…
What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography
Rather than reflect on the process of an alleged "modernization" of historical scholarship, an intercultural comparison of historiography should take the European origins of academic history as its starting point. The reason, as this article argues, is that in non-European countries the European genealogy of the discipline of history continued to structure interpretations of the past. Both on the level of method, but more importantly on the level…
Perspectivas en Diálogo
En su nueva edicin de 2021, Perspectivas en Dilogo ofrece a sus lectores un nuevo debate enfocado en la Historia Global como perspectiva de anlisis histrico. En este caso, Juan Pablo Scarfi y Eduardo Zimmermann dialogan con Sebastian Conrad sobre su libro What Is Global History
Conjonctures mondiales: La Nouvelle Fabrique De L’histoire Politique Européenne
Conjonctures mondiales : la nouvelle fabrique de l’histoire politique européenne Au cours des dernières décennies, l’écriture de l’histoire européenne – qu’il s’agisse de l’histoire de l’Europe ou de celle des pays d’Europe – a connu des transformations fondamentales. Le tournant global, bien qu’il ait été adapté de différentes manières, a profondément affecté l’historiographie produite dans de nombreux pays européens. D’une part, des moments cha…
Globalization effects: Mobility and nation in Imperial Germany, 1880–1914
The trajectories of German nationalism in the late nineteenth century were deeply affected by the process of globalization. While the literature on the subject has largely remained within the confines of a national history paradigm, this article uses the example of mobility and migration to show to what extent German nationalism was transformed under the auspices of global integration. Among the effects of cross-border circulation were the emerge…
Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation: Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan, 1945-1960
What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography
Rather than reflect on the process of an alleged "modernization" of historical scholarship, an intercultural comparison of historiography should take the European origins of academic history as its starting point. The reason, as this article argues, is that in non-European countries the European genealogy of the discipline of history continued to structure interpretations of the past. Both on the level of method, but more importantly on the level…
Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States
The Anatomy of an Age: Interpretations of Modern History in Postwar Germany and Japan
Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945—2001
In the history of memory, the national paradigm continues to reign supreme. This may come as a surprise at a time when the historical profession is beginning to discard the category of the nation and starting to produce transnational work. International comparisons and relational histories, and also the larger frameworks of European, post-colonial, or world history gradually seem to be replacing the narrow confines of the nineteenth-century parad…
La constitution de l’histoire japonaise: Histoire comparée, transferts, interactions transnationales
Vorwort: «Europa» aus der Sicht nichtwestlicher Eliten, 1900–1930
Introduction: «Europe», and the Politics of Non-Western Elites, 1900–1930 «Europe» played an important role in the politics of non-western elites in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These introductory remarks sketch the historiographical frame within which the following articles should be situated. They deal particularly with the concept of «Occidentalism» and the appropriation of «Europe» that transcends simple notions of reception and im…
Transnationale Erinnerung? ›Vergangenheitsbewältigung‹ in Japan«
Competing Visions of World Order
Bringing together scholars from around the world, this first book in the Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series raises the question of how we can get away from the contemporary language of gl
Global Mobility and Nationalism: Chinese Migration and the Reterritorialization of Belonging, 1880–1910
Globalization is not only the catchword of the day. At the same time, it refers back to a longer history, and historians have in recent years begun to analyze its genealogy. The years between 1880 and 1914, in particular, have caught the attention of recent scholarship as a high time of global exchange and cross-border interaction.1 The integration of the international economy, the political and imperial expansion of the West, and the increase in…
Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s
“Education for Work” in Colony and Metropole
The rejection of compulsion was the guiding principle of the “education for work”. The ‘education of the Negro for work’ had been a central project of state and particularly church policy since the annexation of the first colonies in 1884. The missions saw their task as that of gradually educating “the idle native to voluntary labor” and to enable him “unobtrusively” to achieve “an existence worthy of a human being.” Posing questions such as thes…
Globalization effects: Mobility and nation in Imperial Germany, 1880–1914
The trajectories of German nationalism in the late nineteenth century were deeply affected by the process of globalization. While the literature on the subject has largely remained within the confines of a national history paradigm, this article uses the example of mobility and migration to show to what extent German nationalism was transformed under the auspices of global integration. Among the effects of cross-border circulation were the emerge…
Entries
Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien
The Quest for the Lost NationWriting History in Germany and Japan in the American Century
This is a chronicle of Germany's and Japan's struggles to reclaim a defeated national past. The author compares the ways German and Japanese scholars revised national history after World War II in the shadows of fascism, surrender, and American occupation. Defeat in 1945 marked the death of the national past in both countries, yet, as the author proves, historians did not abandon national perspectives during reconstruction. Quite the opposite—the…
The quest for the lost nation: Writing history in Germany and Japan in the American century
Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective
Remembering Asia: History and Memory in Post-Cold War Japan
‘Asia’ has returned to Japan, and Japan to ‘Asia’. For about one-and-a-half decades, intellectuals and politicians have been trying to redefine Japan’s place in the global order. Until 1990, the country’s primary orientation had been towards America. Under the umbrella of the security treaties with the US, Japan had defined herself essentially as part of the ‘West’. Asia, on the other hand, was virtually absent from Japanese discourse. The situat…
Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories
A significant contribution to memory studies and part of an emergent strand of work on global memory. This book offers important insights on topics relating to memory, globalization, international pol
German Colonialism: A Short History
Germany was a latecomer to the colonial world of the late nineteenth century but this history of German colonialism makes clear the wide-reaching consequences of Germany's short-lived colonial project. Sebastian Conrad charts the expansion of the empire from its origins in the acquisition of substantial territories in present day Togo, Cameroon, Namibia and Tanzania to new settlements in East Asia and the Pacific and reveals the colonialist cultu…
Dekolonisierung in den Metropolen
The postwar decolonisation process has not only transformed the former colonies, but has also affected the colonial metropolises inWestern Europe, the United States, and Japan. This introductory survey charts the terrain and discusses the effects - political, economic, social, and cultural - that the loss of empire had on the former colonising societies.While some of these effects were palpable, most prominently as a result of postcolonial migrat…
Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique
THE ENLIGHTENMENT HAS LONG HELD a pivotal place in narratives of world history. It has served as a sign of the modern, and continues to play that role yet today. The standard interpretations, however, have tended to assume, and to perpetuate, a Eurocentric mythology. They have helped entrench a view of global interactions as having essentially been energized by Europe alone. Historians have now begun to challenge this view. A global history persp…
The Colonial Ties are Liquidated: Modernization Theory, Post-War Japan and the Global Cold War
From 29 August to 2 September 1960, thirty-one eminent scholars congregated for the ‘Conference on Modern Japan’ in Hakone, a small hot-springs resort town just outside Tokyo, in the vicinity of Mount Fuji. The event was organized by the University of Michigan historian John W. Hall and others, and it included many prominent names in the contemporary Japanese humanities and social sciences, and their counterparts from other countries, mainly the …
Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age
Recent years have seen a sudden upsurge of scholarly interests in German colonialism. The German overseas empire, founded in 1884 and defunct in 1915, lasted a mere 30 years, and was thus one of the most short-lived of all modern colonialisms. Consequently, it has not occupied centre-stage in most accounts, either of European imperialism or of German history itself. The colonial experience was deemed marginal and insignificant, compared to the lo…
History (27 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Japanese History and Culture (13 works) · Ancient history (11 works) · Economic history (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Art (9 works)