Biography

Before joining the EUI, Andreas Greiner was a research assistant at the Chair of Modern History at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) and a fellow at the University of Bern. His research interests include East African history, the history of the German Empire, and global history.

His PhD thesis (submitted August 2019 at ETH Zurich), explores the history of human porterage and the caravan trade under colonial rule in German East Africa (c. 1880–1918). The thesis seeks to connect infrastructure and the agency of East African transport workers with questions of colonial state formation.

His new research project sets out to explore the maritime logistical networks of European imperial states and their global flows in the long nineteenth century. After c. 1860, swift and reliable communication between metropole and colony seemed possible for the first time. As a consequence, European empires rationalized transport and introduced mail services, such as the German ‘Reichspostdampfer’ or the British ‘P&O’. The project explores the effects these logistics and their coordination had on shaping and re-structuring imperial spaces. It argues that it was particularly the new possibility to schedule and coordinate maritime flows that altered imperial overseas rule and led to significant changes in the policing of global empires.

At ETH Zurich he has taught a course in (post-)colonial history and co-taught an introductory course in historical research.