Mischa Suter (Geneva Graduate Institute): Geld an der Grenze: Koloniale Strukturen und kollidierende Temporalitäten

The lecture takes the example of a colonial currency as an opportunity to explore theoretical possibilities for writing global history. Taking the social life of the so-called German rupee in present-day Tanzania as a starting point, the question is how structural interdependencies in the age of imperialism can be approached analytically. Imperialism depended on making different forms of value with different cultural origins comparable, measurable and commensurable. This role was assigned to money. According to John Maynard Keynes, money is nothing other than “a subtle device for linking the present to the future”: a medium that shapes social temporalities. The German rupee, as can be demonstrated by a socio-historical exploration, constituted an infrastructure of German rule whose temporal structure was built on constitutive asynchrony: structure did not work here with or despite contradictions, but through its contradictions.

Mischa Suter is a Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Research Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. He is the Principal Investigator of a research project on the history of ethnopsychology. He received his PhD from the University of Zurich in 2014 and his Habilitation in Modern and Contemporary History from the University of Basel in 2022. He had visiting scholarships in New York, Berlin, Vienna, Durham, Chicago and Ann Arbor.

Publications (selection):

• Ed.: Traverse 2 (2025): Dépendance économique (with Sabine Pitteloud, Juan Flores Zedeja and Daniel Allemann)
• Geld an der Grenze. Souveränität und Wertmaßstäbe im Imperialismus 1871–1923. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2024
• Koloniale Währungen: Medium der Macht, in: Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 887
  (2023), 32–43
• Rechtstrieb – Schulden und Vollstreckung im liberalen Kapitalismus 1800–1900. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press 2016
• Ed.: Histories of Productivity: Genealogical Perspectives on the Body and Modern Economy. New York: Routledge 2016 (with Peter-Paul Bänzinger)
• Ed.: Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 37.2 (2014): Wissensgeschichte ökonomischer Praktiken (with Monika Dommann and Daniel Speich-Chassé)

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