Zweisprachige Ausgabe Englisch - Deutsch The Thyssen Lectures are a continuation of a
tradition that the Fritz Thyssen Foundation initiated in 1979 first at various institutions
throughout Germany and then at several universities in Czechia Israel the Russian Federation
Turkey and most recently Greece. The series in the United Kingdom and Ireland will be held ove
a period of four years. Spearheaded by Prof. Christina von Hodenberg director of the German
Historical Insitute London it will be dedicated to the overarching theme of Science Knowledge
and the Legacy of Empire. Colonial Times Global Times: History and Imperial World-Making
Colonial hierachies were constituted not by military and economic power alone but also by
imperial worldviews. Chief among their ingredients was a particular temporality. The expansion
of the European (and soon American and Japanese) empires and the grafting of imperial
structures onto colonized communities confronted large groups of people with new temporal
norms. This temporal invasion found expression in the proliferation of clocks as levers of
punctuality and temporal discipline the alignment of calendars and the concomitant
synchronization of the globe and the dissemination of History as the privileged form of
linking past present and future. Consequently historians emerged as imperial agents in their
own right. They helped introduce historical time and a cosmology that redefined narratives
about the past the trajectories into the future in the colonizing colonial world. The lecture
discusses how historians achieved this revolutionary form of world-making. It argues that this
was not only a colonial imposition but must it be seen as a repsonse to global conjunctures.
