Lecture by Anka Steffen

15 January 2020 - 13:34

'A Cloth That Binds – New Perspectives on the 18th-century Prussian Economy'

  • 4 February
  • 15.30 hrs
  • Max Nettlau Room, IISH

The active participation of Eastern European lands in the European overseas expansion lacks fundamental analysis. This lecture, therefore, sets its focus on the province of Silesia and its highly productive rural household linen processing.

Special attention is given to the mutual impact between the trade in Silesian linen fabrics and the Atlantic slave-related markets during the long eighteenth century. The endogenous and exogenous factors which shaped the specific economic development of the Silesian linen region will be identified. Concluding it will present an approximate calculation of the share of slave-based activities in the economic performance of Silesia and Prussia respectively, during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Bio: Anka Steffen is a historian of Silesian (and Prussian) long-term socio-economic history, of early modern Atlantic trade and of processes of globalization in an entangled world. She is interested in the integration of (East-)Central Europe into broader narratives of Atlantic and Global history.
Anka Steffen was born in Leipzig (Germany), but grew up in Poland. She studied Cultural and Social Sciences (BA), before she completed her MA-degree in European Cultural History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/O. (Germany). She is pursuing her PhD within a broader research project financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) “The Globalized Periphery: Atlantic Commerce, Socioeconomic and Cultural Change in Central Europe (1680-1850)”. Her doctoral research emphasizes questions of interconnectedness, making (East-)Central Europe in general, and the Silesian linen production area specifically, visible as regions tightly interwoven into the very fabric of the early modern Atlantic and global economy. She addresses the interdependency of developments that took place overseas with those that happened on a local level. She uses sources in multiple languages discovered mainly in archives in Poland, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands.   
Anka Steffen’s research has been funded by numerous bodies, such as the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (Poland) and Washington D.C. (USA) She was awarded a scholarship of the Viadrina International Program for Graduates (financed by the German Academic Exchange Service -DAAD - and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research) for a stay the University of Hertfordshire and archival research in London (UK). She previously received a fellowship at the Leibniz-Institute of European History in Mainz (Germany).

IISH Seminar: This lecture is part of the monthly IISH Seminar series. In principle, seminars take place every first Tuesday of the month. The seminar is open to the public, but with regard to accommodation, we would like you to register, jacqueline.rutte@bb.huc.knaw.nl.

Anka Steffen