On Wednesday, Lasse Heerten presented from his habilitation thesis Water and Stone. Hamburg, its Port and the River Elbe in the Age of Global Empire at a very well-attended working lunch. His talk discussed Hamburg’s relationship with the river Elbe, its entanglements as an imperial city state with transimperial networks, as well as the place of Hamburg within imperial Germany. Fears of siltation motivated steam-powered intervention in the Elbe, creating new, self-reinforcing dependencies on dredging infrastructure. In an age of unfolding German nationalism, Hamburg cultivated a distinct Hanseatic patriotism and identity, and built a global diplomatic infrastructure, which served primarily economic interests. Hamburg’s trade was in many ways entwined with slave economies and Africa and the Caribbean, which furnished capital for new investments. Changes in the relationship with the newly created German Empire drove massive infrastructure projects with the construction of the free port.

Many of these themes were more closely discussed on Thursday, during a workshop hosted by Dr. Lasse Heerten together with Prof. Laura Rischbieter and Prof. Corey Ross on the subject of Writing Histories of Commodity Capitalism in the Anthropocene. The participants debated how and to what extent concepts from philosophical and sociological literature can fruitfully be applied to commodity histories, particularly against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. After a discussion of texts by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, the workshop turned to a paper by Lasse Heerten, on the Hamburg free port as a nexus of commodity histories.