On 2-3 June 2022, the two-day conference occurred at the University of Innsbruck to discuss the global potential for Habsburg history among a community of leading expert scholars. In total, eighteen papers were presented on themes ranging from transimperial encounters such as Austrian Jesuit imaginaries of Japan to Austria’s role in the definition of the Australian continent to orientalism in the Austrian expeditions to Turkestan or the materiality of museum collecting and royal gift exchanges to the emergence of economic ties from Ostend—once a part of the Austrian Netherlands—and the Atlantic slave trade.
Two keynote speakers, Dr. Alison Frank Johnson from Harvard and Prof. Walter Sauer from the University of Vienna, provided exemplary talks on the Austria’s role in Indian cocaine epidemics and in European colonials respectively. A former host partner of BritInn, Dr. William O’Reilly from the University of Cambridge was invited to present a paper on political economic ideas between Spain and Austria during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
"The aim as we go forward is to continue the dialogue on Habsburg Global history as we fashion a new, wider appreciation for the worldwide impact from and on the Habsburg lands in central Europe." summarises Dr. Jonathan Singerton.
BritInn supported this event with a fund and is happy to have helped making this important dialogue among scholars possible.
Read Dr. Singerton's report here: Report on the International Conference - Global Approaches to Habsburg History: Perspectives, Potentials, Payoffs, and Pathways