Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften

“The Flower of Eastern and Western Europe” British Travellers, Czech Go-Betweens, and the Temporal Culture of Nineteenth-Century Prague

2023-12-19T21:16:15+00:00

Throughout the nineteenth century, published British travelogues revered Prague, bringing the city to the attention of the rest of Europe. Tropes and motifs predicated on German, Oriental, and classical imagery filled the pages of British travelogues, which were, in turn, entertained by Czech go-betweens in their own texts. This article explores the circulation of knowledge in compelling narratives between the travel writers and go-betweens who mapped out temporal representations of the city. A time-knowledge framework not only reveals how Prague’s temporal culture manifested itself in literary narratives and exchanges, but starts to rethink the development of the cultural, political, and social knowledge of the city, by demonstrating how different actors contributed to its production.

Negotiating Balkan Alterity. Representation and Knowledge of Southeast Europe in the Work of the Balkan Committee1

2023-12-19T21:24:07+00:00

The Balkan Committee was founded in London in 1902 in response to growing British concerns about unrest in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Its key objective was to monitor local events and inform the British public about regional developments. The Committee claimed to be a hub of valid, reliable, and expertly processed knowledge about the region. In this paper I attempt to reconstruct how the members of the Balkan Committee interpreted political developments in Southeast Europe and how they circulated knowledge through various British social organisations. I show that the knowledge disseminated by the Balkan Committee was a resource that fuelled and mobilised British public opinion and political and economic interest in the region. At the same time, the efforts of the Committee members resonated with their historical and social anxieties: the better they understood the Balkans, the better the chances of avoiding a European conflagration in particular, and the easier they would be able to facilitate the progress of the local population in general. I argue that the Balkan Committee framed the information and facts at their disposal in accordance with British travel writing traditions, which fundamentally influenced the way they represented the Balkans.

Nineteenth-Century Co-Production of Knowledge about West Africa. The Case of D’Escayrac and West African Pilgrims

2023-12-19T21:28:42+00:00

Focusing on the cross-cultural interaction between a French traveller and pilgrims from West Africa, this study analyses the actors involved in the construction of European knowledge about West African societies in the mid-nineteenth century. It stresses the role of pilgrims, actors that were often considered peripheral to European knowledge production. The use of the concept of knowledge circulation allows me to explore dimensions of knowledge production such as power relations, resistance, or negotiation, described in the travel account. The paper argues that despite the asymmetries in the pilgrim-traveller relationship, pilgrims co-produced the traveller’s knowledge about West Africa.

Vom „Streben zu gerechter Beurteilung des Fremdartigen, ja Abstoßenden“. Trans- und intranationale Wissenszirkulation in John Jewitts captivity narrative

2023-12-19T21:33:53+00:00

Captivity narratives and their inherent knowledge production played a crucial role in the construction of Indigenous peoples as others. The reception of such texts in different geographical and historical spaces was often characterised by interventions that enabled their incorporation into diverging discursive formations. This makes such texts suitable sources for the analysis of knowledge circulation as a productive process. This article shows this by analysing two German adaptations of John Jewitt’s "Narrative" (1815), a highly influential North American captivity narrative. Through a comparative approach, different productive strategies of dealing with knowledge are made visible. Particular attention is paid to the specific image of the “Indianer” that was prevalent in the German context.

Empire and its Discontents. Circulation of Knowledge and the Emergence of Eugenics in the Late Habsburg Empire

2023-12-19T21:39:48+00:00

The circulation of knowledge poses new questions to the scholarship on eugenics in the Habsburg Empire. Focusing on imperial networks and the cognitive management of imperial diversity, this paper analyses three cases of imperial circulation of eugenic knowledge. It shows that the actors, institutions, and geographies of such circulation varied substantially, depending on the practices out of which the particular type of eugenic knowledge emerged and the functions it served.

Gewerkschaftshochschulen als Wissenszentren. Ein Fokus auf afrikanische Kursteilnehmerinnen als (Ko-)Produzentinnen von Wissen während der 1960er-Jahre des Kalten Krieges

2023-12-19T21:50:06+00:00

In this article, I argue that circulations were central to processes of knowledge production, adaptation, and dissemination at and between the two trade union colleges under investigation. By illuminating concrete knowledge transfers and circulations through the exchanges of experience, examination papers, correspondence, and book shipments, I make the case that knowledge circulation should not be understood as a one-way street of linear transfer, but rather as a concept characterised by multiple points of contact and exchange. These nodes of knowledge transfer were often located within the educational institutions themselves, which sought to become centres of knowledge in the field of trade union education for Africans. The practical and technical knowledge of African students was one of the key factors that enabled these pioneering institutions in Guinea and the German Democratic Republic to generate knowledge about the African trade union movement through intercultural interaction.

Among Traitors, Thieves, and Brokers. The Play of Intimacy in the Epistemic Economies of Cold War Intelligence Operations

2023-12-20T19:02:26+00:00

This article deals with the communicative interactions between actors as a crucial epistemological moment. In particular, it analyses the information exchanges and negotiations between the Polish section of the US-American Cold War broadcaster Radio Free Europe (RFE) and its Polish informants as go-betweens in the 1950s to the early 1970s. Framing these interactions as intimate epistemic economies, the author pays special attention to questions of intimacy, confidentiality, testimony, and trust as well as epistemic uncertainty regarding the identity of actors and the content of messages. Furthermore, following recent scholarship, I investigate the boundaries between the history of science and the history of knowledge by interrogating about the role of subjectivity, ignorance, error, and failure in knowledge making. Finally, two main case studies are used to exemplify the tension between different types of knowledge including rumour and gossip, in the light of the epistemic realm of un/knowledgeability in which the US and Polish secret services operated.

Was passiert, wenn Wissen nicht zirkuliert? ‚Demokratie‘ in den Zeitschriften der österreichischen Parteijugenden (1945–1955)

2023-12-20T19:06:55+00:00

An essential part of the Western Allies’ plans for the democratisation of Austrian society was to provide Austrian youth with political knowledge in order to entrench democracy in the coming generations and thus ensure its longevity. Political youth magazines were one of the media to support this process. Along with other educational offerings, they were to facilitate the circulation of political knowledge after its initially linear transfer from the Western Allies to the Austrian population. In this article, I use the example of Austrian party youths’ magazines to reflect on the obstacles to the transfer or circulation of political knowledge as envisaged by the Western Allies. Based on the analysis of selected issues of these magazines between 1945 and 1955 and of the metaphorical concepts used in them, I discuss what circulated when the intended political knowledge about democracy did not. I conclude that in the political magazines and the writings of party youths traditional party ideologies merged with democratic rhetoric, resulting in the circulation of competing concepts of democracy.

“To Cross a Surf Both Alarming and Dangerous”. An Exclusionary Knowledge of Motion in the Madras Surf Zone, 1755–1842

2023-12-20T19:11:42+00:00

Movement between ship and shore at the English East India Company port of Madras (modern Chennai) was mediated by local boatmen in locally designed and built masula boats from the founding of the city in 1639 through the end of the nineteenth century. Without the masulas and boatmen, Company officials had no alternative methods for landing cargo and passengers and as a result were fully dependent on the continued cooperation of the boatmen. Aware of their linchpin role in the continued operation of Madras as a trade hub, the boat people alternatively supplied and withheld their exclusive knowledge and skill in the surf zone as a means of increasing personal profit and in attempts to improve working conditions. This paper argues that the boatmen’s periodic withholding of expertise and technology allowed the community to assert group agency and limited company control over the system of ship to shore movement.

Frontmatter

2023-12-20T21:11:53+00:00

Applying “Knowledge Circulation” in Historical Research

2023-12-19T21:05:31+00:00

The history of knowledge pays increasing attention to questions of “how, when, and, if necessary, why a certain knowledge emerges – and disappears again”, and further to what effects it has, in which contexts it functions, and who its stakeholders are. Over the past decade, it has developed into a dynamic field, producing fruitful concepts that now need to be empirically reassessed. One of the key concepts within the field is the much discussed “knowledge circulation”. It implies that knowledge is not simply spread linearly from A to B, remaining unchanged. Rather, it suggests a multidirectional process in which knowledge is produced, mobilised, and always transformed. Understanding knowledge as the product of a circulation process allows for an analytical shift towards the process of knowledge production itself.