Foreign coins from India, Japan, or Arabia hold a mysterious allure. How did they find their way to Europe? What do the inscriptions and symbols on them mean? And who were the people who used to pay with them? In this richly illustrated cultural-historical essay, Martin Mulsow tells the story of numismatic research using a wealth of previously unknown materials from archives across Europe, thereby drawing attention to an early chapter of globalization. It is the story of what is known as the so-called intellectual encirclement of Asia. A group of scholars in the 17th and early 18th centuries explored the Near and Far East from their armchairs with the help of these coin impressions: Arabia was captured on cardboard, China was recorded in notebooks, and the Mughal emperor in India came to life through the decipherment of convoluted Persian inscriptions. They shaped the coins once again with their research and their projections.
Non-fiction
Martin Mulsow is a professor of knowledge cultures at the University of Erfurt and director of the Gotha Research Center. Prior to that, he was a professor of history at Rutgers University, USA, until 2005, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2002/3) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2012/13), and is a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Academy Prize, the Thuringian Research Prize and the Anna Krüger Prize.
“A masterful blend of exemplary case studies on largely unknown scholars with a deftly written sweeping narrative” – Markus Friedrich, FAZ
