Yorim Spoelder is a Dutch historian affiliated with the Einstein Professorship in Global History at Freie Universität Berlin. Following studies in Maastricht, Taipei, Freiburg, Cape Town and New Delhi, he completed his PhD at Freie Universität Berlin (2020). Spoelder’s research focuses on the modern connected histories of Europe, South and Southeast Asia and his main interests include transimperial history, the history of knowledge, urban history, cultural history, critical heritage studies and international affairs. Spoelder previously held various fellowships at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg and IHEID Geneva, was a guest scholar at EHESS Paris, and affiliated as a researcher with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. In 2023-24, Spoelder was a visiting postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (UCL) and the German Historical Institute in London, and a Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow at the National Library Singapore. Spoelder regularly contributes to the Asian Review of Books.

In fall 2024, Spoelder will be a Leigh Fermor House Fellow and work on a comparative project which explores how notions of the classical, and the question of race/local genius in the creation of “colonial art”, featured in narratives of Hellenization and Indianization and shaped evaluations of the “cultural empires” of Greater India and Magna Graecia (and the Hellenistic outposts of Bactria and Gandhara in the Far East) during the heyday of colonial/classical archaeology (ca.1880-1930).

My first book Visions of Greater India: Transimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism, c. 1800-1960 appeared with Cambridge University Press (2023). The book brings together three stories usually told apart, namely the archaeological recovery of a ‘lost’ Buddhist past along the Silk Roads, the linked projects of colonial archaeology in Dutch and French Southeast Asia, and the intellectual history of anti-colonial nationalism and internationalism in interwar British India. Conceived as the first comprehensive study of the Greater India imagination, the book sheds new light on how Orientalist knowledge production along the Silk Roads and across the Dutch and French spheres in Southeast Asia energized anti-colonial nationalism and Asianist visions in British India. The book zooms in on the politics and implications of the interwar reframing of India as Asia’s ancient cultural and civilizational fount and shows its lasting impact on the ‘idea of India’, the study of ‘Indianized’ cultural heritage across the wider Asian sphere, and Indian foreign policy soft power repertoires from Nehru to Modi. First reviews and discussions of Visions of Greater India appeared in Asian Review of Books, la vie des idées, and The Literary Review. The book was awarded the EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize for best academic monograph on Southeast Asia (2024).

Second Book Project

My second book project, developed in dialogue with Michael Goebel’s SNFS-funded Patchwork Cities Project, explores the changing predicament of Eurasian communities and, more generally, investigates the transformation of colonial urban culture and dynamics of interracial sociality in British and Dutch South and Southeast Asia throughout the nineteenth and first of half of the twentieth century. The project, tentatively titled Mestizo Worlds, zooms in on the identity politics and socio-cultural history of Eurasian communities in the Dutch East Indies, British India, Ceylon and the Straits Settlements. Drawing on a wide range of textual and visual sources, the project foregrounds transimperial connections and comparisons. Caught between empire and nation, Indos, Anglo-Indians, Burghers, and Singapore’s Eurasians often acted as ‘cultural brokers’ and pursued very similar identity projects throughout the interwar period and the era of decolonization. Whereas the ‘Eurasian Question’ has been primarily studied through the lens of colonial governmentality, Mestizo Worlds explores processes of transculturation and political mobilization by zooming in on the lived experiences of Eurasians in the colonial metropolis, paying attention to community organizations, the home, gender, class, education, residential patterns, work, leisure and sartorial practices. Moving beyond narratives of exceptionalism reinforced by the compartmentalized study of European empires in Asia, the project highlights the role of Eurasians as transimperial actors, key drivers of regional integration and harbingers of a wide range of social and cultural processes associated with the advent of ‘colonial modernity’ in South and Southeast Asia.

Other Ongoing Research Projects

Drawing on archival sources collected in Berlin, London and Delhi, I am currently working on a book, tentatively titled A Prussian Prince in British India: Imperial Sightseeing, Colonial Learning and Anglo-German Relations on the Eve of the First World War. It uses the visit of the Prussian crown prince to British India and Ceylon in 1911 as an entry point to explore Anglo-German relations in Asia prior to the First World War.

I also have a longstanding interest in postal history, philately and aesthetics and recently gave talk at a symposium organized by the UPU in Bern on stamps and the iconography of globalization (my contribution starts at minute 25).

Publications

• Visions of Greater India: Transimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism c. 1800-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

•  “An ‘Indian Hermes’ between Paris and the Pacific: Kalidas Nag, Greater India, and the Quest for a Global Humanism”, in Elisabeth Leake & Bérénice Guyot-Réchard (eds.), South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent. Leiden University Press, 2023, pp. 167-186.

Essays and Reviews 

• “Archaeological Treasures of Uzbekistan: From Alexander the Great to the Kushan Empire (Exhibition at the James Simon Gallery, Berlin)”, Asian Review of Books (October 2023).

• Review of How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding, by Nile Green, Asian Review of Books (September 2023)

• Review of In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama, by Eric Tagliacozzo, Asian Review of Books (October 2022).
• Review of False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma, by Manu S. Pillai, Asian Review of Books (February 2022).
• “Letter from Berlin: The South Asian and Turfan Collections at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum,” Asian Review of Books (December  2021).
• Review of Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier, by Melissa Macauley, Asian Review of Books (October 2021).
• Review of India and the World. A History of Connections, c. 1750-2000, by Claude Markovits. Asian Review of Books (July 2021).
• Review of Gauging and Engaging Deviance 1600-2000, by A. Sitas et al. Transcience 7 (2016): 131-2.
• Review of The Edge of the World: How the North Sea made us who we are, by Michael Paye. Global Histories 1, no. 1 (2015): 101-3.
• “Flaneuring on the Marble: What are these new public spaces in Delhi?”, Global Urbanist (March 2014). 
• “Opposition to a Delhi Mega Mall shows that voice matters but that class matters equally”, Global Urbanist (February 2014).