Lecture | Annual Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture
Discovering Europe through Coins: The Contact Zone of Nagasaki around 1800
- Date
- Monday 8 December 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- KITLV Room 1.30
The 2025 Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture in Colonial and Global History/Global Knowledge History
By Professor dr. Martin Mulsow, University of Erfurt / Gotha Research Center
Discussants: dr. Richard Calis (Utrecht University) and dr. Shiru Lim (Leiden University)
Lecture
Around 1780, two remarkable men met in Japan: the learned merchant and head of the trading post at Dejima, Nagasaki, Isaac Titsingh, and the equally erudite daimyō Kutsuki Masatsuna. Both shared an interest in coins: Kutsuki supplied Titsingh with Japanese specimens, while Titsingh provided Kutsuki with European ones. It is fascinating to reconstruct the practices through which Kutsuki sought to grasp the origins and meanings of the European coins. His 1787 book Seiyō senpu is the first non-European work devoted to ‘Western coins.’ Using this example, I wish to explore what entangled history can mean for numismatics, and how global intellectual history can be written on the basis of material culture— namely coins as ‘travelling objects.’
Speaker
Martin Mulsow is professor of intellectual history at the University of Erfurt and director of the Gotha Research Center. From 2005-2008 he was professor at Rutgers University, USA. His research topics are Renaissance philosophy, libertinism, enlightenment, history of scholarship, oriental studies, alchemy, numismatics and Global intellectual history. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Among his publications are Knowledge Lost. A New View of Early Modern Intellectual History (2022), Überreichweiten. Perspektiven einer globalen Ideengeschichte (2022) and Fremdprägung. Münzwissen in Zeiten der Globalisierung (2023).
Registration
Registration is not needed for this lecture or location.
Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture
The annual Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture is organized by the research group Colonial and Global History (COGLO)/Global Knowledge History of the Institute for History at Leiden University and has the aim to explore the historiographical frontiers of the field of colonial and global history. Previous Terra Incognita speakers were Pekka Hämäläinen (2019), Cyrus Schayegh (2021), Kapil Raj (2022), Emma Flatt (2023), and Ruth Bush (2024).