This past Summer, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of the Ohio State University gave a workshop on global history at the University of Dundee. The workshop centred around the question to what extent global history requires adjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The workshop was co-organized by our associate editor Martine van Ittersum and co-sponsored by Itinerario. The final report, published in this issue, addresses methodological and other questions around global history as a fast-changing field.
This issue’s dossier, convened by Felicity Jensz of the University of Münster, focusses on non-European teachers within mission schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Teachers were central to the missionary project and helped to disseminate both Christianity and Western knowledge across the globe. Local teachers, alongside other mission assistants and helpers, also helped translate, transmit, and transform both Western and local forms of knowledge and contributed to broader discourse about knowledge, yet the importance of their work has often been overshadowed by the work undertaken in examining missionary elites. This dossier, with its extended introduction and three case studies from Africa, the Danish West Indies, and Bolivia, sheds light on the roles of non-European mission teachers as well as their recruitment, training, and self-representations. The articles focus on local teachers in Southern Tanzania (Richard Hözl), Bolivia (Hugh Morrison) and the Danish West Indies (Jan Hüsgen).
The research articles in this issue add to this global spread. Somewhat unusually for this journal, it includes an article on the northernmost regions of Fennoscandia. Magdalena Naum studies the modes of imagining Sápmi (Lapland) in early modern writing, and explores how these were intertwined with state programs in the region, and how the rhetoric and ideological underpinnings of the representations authored by the domestic authors differed from those produced by foreign travellers.
Kristie Flannery takes us to the invasion of Manila in 1762, during the height of the Seven Years’ War. Britain’s Royal Navy and East India Company mobilised a motley army of Europeans, South Asians, and Africans. The Spanish colonial government quickly raised militias of Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese mestizos, and indigenous Filipinos who ultimately defeated the British. Flannery’s article examines the ongoing bargaining that took place between imperial officials and soldiers, revealing the crucial role that negotiation played in eighteenth-century empire building beyond the Atlantic.
Finally, Erik Odegard examines the decision-making process for a new fort, which the Dutch West India Company proposed to build near Takoradi in present-day Ghana in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. By closely following the process of design, evaluation, and redesign of the fort, this article argues that the WIC was institutionally incapable of coordinating and carrying out such a complex project: the long, drawn-out process of design, evaluation, and redesign of what was a relatively small fort, show the institutional paralysis of the WIC in the years leading up to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84).
The Editors
