“Nepal is a closed country.” These were the first lines penned by Byodo Tsushō, a Japanese Buddhist monk who published an account of his travels in Nepal in the 1935 issue of the Pan-Asianist journal, Dai Ajiashugi.[1] Three years earlier, Byodo Tsushō was sponsored by the Hongan-ji sect of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism to study in India and traveled throughout Burma, … Read More

Born in 1885 into a modest Romanian-speaking family in Transylvania, Liviu Rebreanu needed to learn both Hungarian and German to acquire a basic education in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After getting higher education, he also learned the “foreign languages” taught through the imperial school system. To become a Romanian-language writer, he … Read More

With the end of the Second World War began the final stage of formal European colonialism – the age of decolonization. In the 1950s and 1960s, several states in Asia and Africa gained independence and European colonial empires began to crumble. By the mid-1960s, only Southern Africa seemed to have been forgotten by this development. In the Portuguese colonies of … Read More

This thematic issue developed in the midst of the pandemic. We, the co-editors of the issue, embarked on our respective PhD projects at the Chair for Global History at ETH Zurich in the fall of 2019. By summer 2020, we were trying to find ways to do advance in our research and work collaboratively despite Covid restrictions that hindered much … Read More

Die Erzählung des Scramble for Africa, der mit der Berliner Kongokonferenz 1884–85 begann, könnte vermuten lassen, dass auch die Erforschung des afrikanischen Kontinents dem Konkurrenzdenken folgte, welche die Politik der europäischen Nationalstaaten im späten 19. Jahrhundert häufig prägte. In diesem Essay will ich dagegen zeigen, dass die Erforschung Afrikas in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts vielfach in der Form … Read More