Edward Said very deliberately excluded Germany from his enormously influential study of Western Orientalism, stating that Germany lacked a sustained national interest in the East. However, German-speaking merchants and agents were present at the very outset of Europe’s encounter and engagement with Asia: a presence that laid the foundations for a very specific German Orientalism. In 1505, the German merchant representative Balthasar Sprenger travelled to Asia as part of the Portuguese fleet commanded by Francisco d’Almeida. He recorded his observations in a text known as Die Merfart (“The Sea Voyage”), which was accompanied by a series of woodcuts prepared by the renown Renaissance artist Hans Burgkmaier the Elder. Springer’s Merfart became a primary vehicle through which intelligence of the newly-accessible Orient reached German-speaking lands—and, in numerous translations and pirated copies, far beyond. It represents the fusion of a proto-ethnological fascination with the exotic and a mercantile attention to the riches of India within the new medium of the printed book. This paper offers a close and critical reading of both the text as well as the images of Die Merfart, which are situated against both Portuguese and Asian sources from that period. It then considers the popularity, influence, and afterlife of the early editions of Springer’s text to argue that Die Merfart forms an important trajectory in how the German-speaking world came to understand India—and, vis-à-vis these new global horizons, also came to understand itself.

Carl Schmitt is one of the most important political and constitutional theorists of the twentieth century. The aim of this essay is to examine the relationship between Schmitt and Latin America on three levels. First, the paper shows Schmitt's constant interest in Latin American topics, which focused primarily on his reading of the history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru. This theme was fundamental to the development of his political theory of the “Nomos of the Earth.” Secondly, an important finding is shown for the first time in this work: Schmitt's correspondence with Latin American professors and scholars. I have discovered letters from which it emerges that Schmitt was invited to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the early 1950s to lecture on his theories of international law. He accepted the invitation, but this visit did not materialize. I found out that this was not the only case of invitations, because the Argentine consulate also offered Schmitt a visa to move to that country. By examining this correspondence, I show Schmitt's constant interest in visiting Latin America for the first time. Finally, this study shows how Schmitt advised a dissertation on political theology by an Argentinean theologian in the 1960s. This is the only dissertation that Schmitt supervised transatlantically. The dissertation dealt with the political theology of Juan Donoso Cortés, a subject in which Schmitt was interested throughout his life. My study concludes that this is an important case for the global history of dialogue between German and Latin American legal and political scholars.

During the scientific voyage around the world commissioned to the French naval officer Comte de Lapérouse, in September 1786 the expedition reached the remote Spanish settlement Monterrey, founded just sixteen years earlier. This made Lapérouse the earliest non-Spanish observer of the colonizing efforts in this isolated settlement at the north end of the Spanish Empire, with insights into early colonial life in the ranchos and the missions, the Spanish settlements policies and their impact on the native population. This paper looks at the encounter of interests between the French explorers and the Spanish officials and the way their strategic endeavors were connected to the pursuit of knowledge. The French visitors to Spanish colonial pursuits in the West did not remain unnoticed by Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. Minister to France based in Paris. His fear of a strong European power becoming interested in the Pacific area was alerted and spurred him to outline ideas regarding an early U.S. exploration voyage, under the guidance of John Ledyard, to “the South Sea” – an effort that did not proceed. The proposed presentation will discuss both the entanglements between European powers in California and the impact those endeavors had in the political center of the young United States.

Recently, practices and discourses of extraction have received renewed interest, with “extractivism” being identified as the “dominant paradigm of contemporary capitalism” and neocolonialism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017). Relatedly, the extraction (and subsequent combustion) of geological resources constitutes a major source of anthropogenic climate change, or, as Phillip John Usher puts it, “if we have stumbled into the Anthropocene […], it is not only because we emit but first and foremost because we extract.” (2019) While several studies look at the cultural history of geology and extraction (Ziolkowski 1990; Braungart 2009; Heringman 2004; Groves 2020), the underlying nexus between the formation of geology as scientific discipline and the consolidation of colonialism through practices of exploration and extraction has not yet received adequate attention.
Looking at the interplay of 19th-century literary and non-literary texts in Hindi, Urdu, English, and German, the proposed paper focuses on the close interaction between literature and the formation of geological science in Germany on the one hand and indigenous forms of earthly and mineral knowledge in colonial India on the other. Both contexts are connected through a shared history of geological knowledge formation as well as through a common discourse of exploitation and extraction – be it from stones, minerals, and other earthly (re)sources or from native informants and the vocational knowledge of miners.