Casper Andersen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3672942 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Casper Andersen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Casper |
| FAMILY NAME | Andersen |
| SIGNATURE | ANDERSEN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8572-0469 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Eurocentrism and Decolonisation in the Unesco History of Mankind 1944-1976
The History of Mankind-project (HoM) was carried out from 1944–76 under the auspices of UNESCO with the aim of producing a non-eurocentric history of the world from prehistory to the present. The article analyses how the mid-century wave of independence changed the HoM-project. In hindsight a trajectory can be identified from decolonisation as a marginal concern to a new situation where decolonisation as political process and epistemological agen…
Becoming Independent: Institutions and Epistemologies of History Writing in the Age of Decolonisation
This special issue analyses how formal independence from colonial rule has impacted institutions and epistemologies of history writing in different parts of the world after 1945. The integrated collection of articles focuses on the transitions and ruptures of knowledge production taking place in the wake of states gaining their formal independence. It explores how different types of decolonisation led to different engagements with history writing…
Udforskningen af det koloniale arkiv i Danmarks Nationale Herbarium
I denne artikel viser vi, hvordan innovative tilgange udviklet i Lorraine Dastons forskning inspirerer igangværende studier af Danmarks Nationale Herbarium (DNH), der har til huse ved Danmarks Naturhistoriske Museum i København. Artiklen inddrager især Dastons begreb om ‘arkivet’ som sted og praksis i videnskaben og hendes arbejde specifikt med botanikkens historie og epistemologi. Herbariet er særligt rigt på planter fra Danmarks tidligere kolon…
Interregional networks in the late Viking Age? Insights from a burned pit house in the Viking-Age town of Aros, present-day Aarhus, Denmark (ca. 980 CE)
The Viking Age was a dynamic period, with local centres and urban sites engaging to varying degrees in local, regional and interregional networks. While the role of certain northern towns in these networks is relatively well-known and the related knowledge up to date, other towns appear to have received comparatively little recent attention. This study aims to investigate the role of the Viking-Age town of Aros, present-day Aarhus, situated on th…
Reimagining a Nexus Between Seaport and National Development: Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Ghana’s Port of Tema
This article explores the evolving sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs) shaping Ghana’s Port of Tema, revealing how national development goals and global trade imperatives intersect in African port governance. Through analysis of policy documents, media discourse, and interviews, it identifies four overlapping phases in the evolution of these imaginaries: the industrial gateway era, neoliberal globalization, the rise of a transshipment hub, and the …
A Flexible Blending: Cultural Heritage and the Concept of Cultural Diversity in Unesco
In this paper, I follow the concept of cultural diversity within UNESCO and explore how and why it has filtered into heritage discourse, initiatives, and cultural conventions. The paper makes two main contributions. Firstly, I start out by presenting data on the historical use of the concept of cultural diversity within UNESCO since 1945, based on the organization’s comprehensive online database and archive. Using the organization’s digital archi…
Mesterlige Galilei
Med udgivelsen af Galileo Galileis Samtale om de to hovedsystemer for verden, det ptolemaeiske og det kopernikanske er et af den vestlige idhistories absolutte hovedvaerker for frste gang blevet tilgaengelig p
Metal-for-Amber in the European Bronze Age
Baltic amber is often considered the principal Scandinavian commodity exchanged for metal from ore-rich regions in Europe. If correct, this may explain the astonishing metal wealth of the Nordic Bronze Age and the modest social consumption of amber locally. The hypothesis of a metal-for-amber principle behind the trade is here for the first time assessed on scales from micro to macro. Amber finds were charted across Europe, and the result was the…
Keeping the Port of Tema afloat during Covid-19: Media responses to user informational and conversational needs
Two different media platforms played a key role in keeping Tema Port in Ghana afloat during the period immediately leading up to and during the three-week COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdown in late March–April of 2020. The one media platform, Eye on Port , is a weekly broadcast television show by the port’s authorities, which caters primarily to external commercial stakeholders of the port. The other platform is a closed WhatsApp forum used by st…
Experten der Erschließung: Akteure der deutschen Kolonialtechnik in Afrika und Europa 1890–1943 [Experts in development: German colonial technologists in Africa and Europe 1890–1943] by Sebastian Bees…
Reviewed by: Experten der Erschließung: Akteure der deutschen Kolonialtechnik in Afrika und Europa 1890–1943 [Experts in development: German colonial technologists in Africa and Europe 1890–1943] by Sebastian Beese Casper Andersen (bio) Experten der Erschließung: Akteure der deutschen Kolonialtechnik in Afrika und Europa 1890–1943 [Experts in development: German colonial technologists in Africa and Europe 1890–1943] By Sebastian Beese. Paderborn:…
William Beinart and Saul Dubow. The Scientific Imagination in South Africa: 1700 To the Present
Heritage and interculturality in EU science diplomacy
In recent years, culture and heritage have explicitly entered into science diplomacy debates and initiatives within the EU system and in EU’s foreign policy. For EU’s external relations heritage offers opportunities for developing partnerships based on shared, entangled histories but also challenges posed by dealing with difficult pasts of domination and colonialism. The paper, therefore, presents a new conceptual model for European science diplo…
Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford
The article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places – a …
A riverbank of science
Bernard Lightman, A companion to the history of science . Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History. Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, 2016. Pp. xvi + 601. £120.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-118-62077-9. Assembling a one-volume companion to the history of science across ages, scientific disciplines and global space is a particularly daunting task. The editor has approached this challenge in a somewhat unconventional way, as the companion is not organize…
Internationalism and Engineering in Unesco during the End Game of Empire, 1943-68
When UNESCO was founded in 1945 the organization aimed to become a pivotal player in international collaboration in the field of engineering. UNESCO based its engineering initiatives on the World Engineering Conference, an organization espousing a politically motivated "technocratic internationalism" and on the World Power Conference, an organization promoting a business-friendly stance of "engineering internationalism." These competing models fo…
The Economic Normativity of British Fiscal Administration in Egypt and Nigeria, 1882–1914
Andersen analyses moral and fiscal discourses in British colonial administration. Focusing on tax policies in Egypt and Nigeria, the chapter demonstrates that entangled moral and economic vocabularies were crucial in the arguments British colonial administrators made for establishing colonial rule and for making the case that colonial tutelage would be long-lasting. The administrators saw themselves as safeguards against what they considered an i…
“Scientific independence”, capacity building, and the development of Unesco’s science and technology agenda for Africa
This article analyses the shifting rationales for scientific collaboration in the work of the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the science sector in Africa from the late colonial period through to the era of capacity building. Focusing on the late colonial period and the post-independence decades of “national science” in Africa, it analyses UNESCO’s role in science policy, engineering training, and natural…
Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime by Lino Camprubí (review)
Reviewed by: Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime by Lino Camprubí Casper Andersen (bio) Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime. By Lino Camprubí. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Pp. 224. $40. This book analyzes the coevolution of the early Francoist state and its technoscientific structures. As the title suggests, the main argument is that engineers were central to the making of Francoism. Rather than merely finding a place…
British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914
Using a wide range of primary sources that include correspondence, diaries, technical reports, institutional minutes and periodicals, Andersen reconstructs the networks and activities of Britain’s engineers while focusing on London as a centre of imperial expansion
Geographical imagination and technological connectivity in East Africa
This paper analyses and compares two transformative moments of technologically mediated change in East Africa, the construction of the Uganda railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria (1896–1903) and the introduction of fibre‐optic cables that landed into the ports of Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa in 2009. The paper uses discourse analysis to examine how technologically mediated connectivity has been represented by political and economic actors durin…
The Money Trail: A New Historiography for Networks, Patronage, and Scientific Careers
Money is everywhere in science. Yet historians have only rarely placed the money trail at the center of their analyses. The essays in this Focus section demonstrate that following the money offers a historiographical path for investigating a number of key issues across disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on cases and materials relating to a number of scientific fields, including electrical engineering, aeron…
The Philae Controversy-Muscular Modernization and Paternalistic Preservation in Aswan and London
In 1882, the British occupied Egypt. A decade later British Egyptologists successfully spearheaded an international campaign against a scheme to dam the Nile at Aswan—a project that would result in the flooding of the Island and Temples of Philae. The article analyses the campaign to preserve Philae as it unfolded at the Foreign Office in Downing Street, in Egyptologists circles in Britain, among British administrators in Cairo, and in public sph…
Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford
The article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places – a …
Geographical imagination and technological connectivity in East Africa
This paper analyses and compares two transformative moments of technologically mediated change in East Africa, the construction of the Uganda railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria (1896–1903) and the introduction of fibre‐optic cables that landed into the ports of Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa in 2009. The paper uses discourse analysis to examine how technologically mediated connectivity has been represented by political and economic actors durin…
The Money Trail: A New Historiography for Networks, Patronage, and Scientific Careers
Money is everywhere in science. Yet historians have only rarely placed the money trail at the center of their analyses. The essays in this Focus section demonstrate that following the money offers a historiographical path for investigating a number of key issues across disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on cases and materials relating to a number of scientific fields, including electrical engineering, aeron…
British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914
Using a wide range of primary sources that include correspondence, diaries, technical reports, institutional minutes and periodicals, Andersen reconstructs the networks and activities of Britain’s engineers while focusing on London as a centre of imperial expansion
The Philae Controversy-Muscular Modernization and Paternalistic Preservation in Aswan and London
In 1882, the British occupied Egypt. A decade later British Egyptologists successfully spearheaded an international campaign against a scheme to dam the Nile at Aswan—a project that would result in the flooding of the Island and Temples of Philae. The article analyses the campaign to preserve Philae as it unfolded at the Foreign Office in Downing Street, in Egyptologists circles in Britain, among British administrators in Cairo, and in public sph…
Metal-for-Amber in the European Bronze Age
Baltic amber is often considered the principal Scandinavian commodity exchanged for metal from ore-rich regions in Europe. If correct, this may explain the astonishing metal wealth of the Nordic Bronze Age and the modest social consumption of amber locally. The hypothesis of a metal-for-amber principle behind the trade is here for the first time assessed on scales from micro to macro. Amber finds were charted across Europe, and the result was the…
Internationalism and Engineering in Unesco during the End Game of Empire, 1943-68
When UNESCO was founded in 1945 the organization aimed to become a pivotal player in international collaboration in the field of engineering. UNESCO based its engineering initiatives on the World Engineering Conference, an organization espousing a politically motivated "technocratic internationalism" and on the World Power Conference, an organization promoting a business-friendly stance of "engineering internationalism." These competing models fo…
The Philae Controversy-Muscular Modernization and Paternalistic Preservation in Aswan and London
In 1882, the British occupied Egypt. A decade later British Egyptologists successfully spearheaded an international campaign against a scheme to dam the Nile at Aswan—a project that would result in the flooding of the Island and Temples of Philae. The article analyses the campaign to preserve Philae as it unfolded at the Foreign Office in Downing Street, in Egyptologists circles in Britain, among British administrators in Cairo, and in public sph…
The Money Trail: A New Historiography for Networks, Patronage, and Scientific Careers
Money is everywhere in science. Yet historians have only rarely placed the money trail at the center of their analyses. The essays in this Focus section demonstrate that following the money offers a historiographical path for investigating a number of key issues across disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on cases and materials relating to a number of scientific fields, including electrical engineering, aeron…
Geographical imagination and technological connectivity in East Africa
This paper analyses and compares two transformative moments of technologically mediated change in East Africa, the construction of the Uganda railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria (1896–1903) and the introduction of fibre‐optic cables that landed into the ports of Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa in 2009. The paper uses discourse analysis to examine how technologically mediated connectivity has been represented by political and economic actors durin…
Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime by Lino Camprubí (review)
Reviewed by: Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime by Lino Camprubí Casper Andersen (bio) Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime. By Lino Camprubí. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Pp. 224. $40. This book analyzes the coevolution of the early Francoist state and its technoscientific structures. As the title suggests, the main argument is that engineers were central to the making of Francoism. Rather than merely finding a place…
British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914
Using a wide range of primary sources that include correspondence, diaries, technical reports, institutional minutes and periodicals, Andersen reconstructs the networks and activities of Britain’s engineers while focusing on London as a centre of imperial expansion
The Economic Normativity of British Fiscal Administration in Egypt and Nigeria, 1882–1914
Andersen analyses moral and fiscal discourses in British colonial administration. Focusing on tax policies in Egypt and Nigeria, the chapter demonstrates that entangled moral and economic vocabularies were crucial in the arguments British colonial administrators made for establishing colonial rule and for making the case that colonial tutelage would be long-lasting. The administrators saw themselves as safeguards against what they considered an i…
“Scientific independence”, capacity building, and the development of Unesco’s science and technology agenda for Africa
This article analyses the shifting rationales for scientific collaboration in the work of the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the science sector in Africa from the late colonial period through to the era of capacity building. Focusing on the late colonial period and the post-independence decades of “national science” in Africa, it analyses UNESCO’s role in science policy, engineering training, and natural…
A riverbank of science
Bernard Lightman, A companion to the history of science . Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History. Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, 2016. Pp. xvi + 601. £120.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-1-118-62077-9. Assembling a one-volume companion to the history of science across ages, scientific disciplines and global space is a particularly daunting task. The editor has approached this challenge in a somewhat unconventional way, as the companion is not organize…
Internationalism and Engineering in Unesco during the End Game of Empire, 1943-68
When UNESCO was founded in 1945 the organization aimed to become a pivotal player in international collaboration in the field of engineering. UNESCO based its engineering initiatives on the World Engineering Conference, an organization espousing a politically motivated "technocratic internationalism" and on the World Power Conference, an organization promoting a business-friendly stance of "engineering internationalism." These competing models fo…
Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford
The article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places – a …
Heritage and interculturality in EU science diplomacy
In recent years, culture and heritage have explicitly entered into science diplomacy debates and initiatives within the EU system and in EU’s foreign policy. For EU’s external relations heritage offers opportunities for developing partnerships based on shared, entangled histories but also challenges posed by dealing with difficult pasts of domination and colonialism. The paper, therefore, presents a new conceptual model for European science diplo…
Experten der Erschließung: Akteure der deutschen Kolonialtechnik in Afrika und Europa 1890–1943 [Experts in development: German colonial technologists in Africa and Europe 1890–1943] by Sebastian Bees…
Reviewed by: Experten der Erschließung: Akteure der deutschen Kolonialtechnik in Afrika und Europa 1890–1943 [Experts in development: German colonial technologists in Africa and Europe 1890–1943] by Sebastian Beese Casper Andersen (bio) Experten der Erschließung: Akteure der deutschen Kolonialtechnik in Afrika und Europa 1890–1943 [Experts in development: German colonial technologists in Africa and Europe 1890–1943] By Sebastian Beese. Paderborn:…
William Beinart and Saul Dubow. The Scientific Imagination in South Africa: 1700 To the Present
Keeping the Port of Tema afloat during Covid-19: Media responses to user informational and conversational needs
Two different media platforms played a key role in keeping Tema Port in Ghana afloat during the period immediately leading up to and during the three-week COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdown in late March–April of 2020. The one media platform, Eye on Port , is a weekly broadcast television show by the port’s authorities, which caters primarily to external commercial stakeholders of the port. The other platform is a closed WhatsApp forum used by st…
Mesterlige Galilei
Med udgivelsen af Galileo Galileis Samtale om de to hovedsystemer for verden, det ptolemaeiske og det kopernikanske er et af den vestlige idhistories absolutte hovedvaerker for frste gang blevet tilgaengelig p
Metal-for-Amber in the European Bronze Age
Baltic amber is often considered the principal Scandinavian commodity exchanged for metal from ore-rich regions in Europe. If correct, this may explain the astonishing metal wealth of the Nordic Bronze Age and the modest social consumption of amber locally. The hypothesis of a metal-for-amber principle behind the trade is here for the first time assessed on scales from micro to macro. Amber finds were charted across Europe, and the result was the…
Udforskningen af det koloniale arkiv i Danmarks Nationale Herbarium
I denne artikel viser vi, hvordan innovative tilgange udviklet i Lorraine Dastons forskning inspirerer igangværende studier af Danmarks Nationale Herbarium (DNH), der har til huse ved Danmarks Naturhistoriske Museum i København. Artiklen inddrager især Dastons begreb om ‘arkivet’ som sted og praksis i videnskaben og hendes arbejde specifikt med botanikkens historie og epistemologi. Herbariet er særligt rigt på planter fra Danmarks tidligere kolon…
Interregional networks in the late Viking Age? Insights from a burned pit house in the Viking-Age town of Aros, present-day Aarhus, Denmark (ca. 980 CE)
The Viking Age was a dynamic period, with local centres and urban sites engaging to varying degrees in local, regional and interregional networks. While the role of certain northern towns in these networks is relatively well-known and the related knowledge up to date, other towns appear to have received comparatively little recent attention. This study aims to investigate the role of the Viking-Age town of Aros, present-day Aarhus, situated on th…
Reimagining a Nexus Between Seaport and National Development: Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Ghana’s Port of Tema
This article explores the evolving sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs) shaping Ghana’s Port of Tema, revealing how national development goals and global trade imperatives intersect in African port governance. Through analysis of policy documents, media discourse, and interviews, it identifies four overlapping phases in the evolution of these imaginaries: the industrial gateway era, neoliberal globalization, the rise of a transshipment hub, and the …
A Flexible Blending: Cultural Heritage and the Concept of Cultural Diversity in Unesco
In this paper, I follow the concept of cultural diversity within UNESCO and explore how and why it has filtered into heritage discourse, initiatives, and cultural conventions. The paper makes two main contributions. Firstly, I start out by presenting data on the historical use of the concept of cultural diversity within UNESCO since 1945, based on the organization’s comprehensive online database and archive. Using the organization’s digital archi…
Eurocentrism and Decolonisation in the Unesco History of Mankind 1944-1976
The History of Mankind-project (HoM) was carried out from 1944–76 under the auspices of UNESCO with the aim of producing a non-eurocentric history of the world from prehistory to the present. The article analyses how the mid-century wave of independence changed the HoM-project. In hindsight a trajectory can be identified from decolonisation as a marginal concern to a new situation where decolonisation as political process and epistemological agen…
Becoming Independent: Institutions and Epistemologies of History Writing in the Age of Decolonisation
This special issue analyses how formal independence from colonial rule has impacted institutions and epistemologies of history writing in different parts of the world after 1945. The integrated collection of articles focuses on the transitions and ruptures of knowledge production taking place in the wake of states gaining their formal independence. It explores how different types of decolonisation led to different engagements with history writing…
Political science (12 works) · History (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Geography (5 works) · History (5 works) · African history and culture studies (4 works) · Art (4 works)