Helge Wendt

My main research interest is history of globalization. I received my PhD from the University of Mannheim in 2009 with a transnational, trans-confessional, and diachronic study on Christian colonial mission enterprises in different parts of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I considered, from a cultural history perspective, how missionaries conceived a social and territorial order in different colonial contexts. The role and the future of historiography of Europe in a context of globalized historiographical discourse is one important aspect of my research: in publications I continue to elaborate my ideas to reassess local and interlocal histories in a globalized world. One of my MPIWG projects is "Convivencia. From Iberian to Global Dynamics (500–1750)," where I investigate encounters between members of indigenous communities and Catholic missionaries. 

My main research project is on mineral coal and the transformation of energy systems. I study changes in knowledge, politics, economy, and society during the period between 1700 and 1920. Coal is the main agent of energy and resource transformations in the industrialization process and shaped patterns of energy provision and consumption for the past 300 years—this is why I explore how coal mining and the use of coal developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.