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CHAIRPERSON

Dr Creighton Connolly, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In 1840, Theodor August Behn and Valentin Lorenz Meyer, two merchants from Hamburg, founded in Singapore what is now regarded ‘the oldest Germany company in this part of the world’ (Khoo 2006, 51). Having developed into ‘a specialty supplier for a wide variety of industries across Southeast Asia’ (behnmeyer.com), Behn Meyeroperates six subsidiary companies in Singapore today. The headquarters of the holding company have been shifted to Hamburg in1906, adding to the hanseatic city’s significance in a rapidly expanding and unequal network of trade relations.

While Hamburg’s role as an economic hub in the late nineteenth century is widely acknowledged, the activities of Bremen, another hanseatic city in the North of Germany, have rather gone unnoticed. Strangely hidden under the discursive umbrellas of ‘Hamburg’ (and ‘Germany’ more general), Bremen profited considerably from colonial expansion and exploitation, frequently trying to demonstrate ‘superiority over its maritime rival to the rest of Germany and the world’ (Ciarlo 2011, 30). Despite experiencing industrial decline and economic restructuring from the mid-1970s onwards, it can be argued that the city’s imaginations reflect the supposed glory of its ‘venerable trading houses’ until today.

Against such a background, this paper explores the imprint Bremish engagement left, and continues to leave, on the translocal development of Singapore. In order to do so, it sheds exemplary light on the economic activities of three firms headquartered in Bremen: shipping company Norddeutscher Lloyd, trading company C. Melchers GmbH & Co, and construction company Vector Foiltec. How do their decision-makers network translocally, how they negotiate the relationships of the local to the global, and how do their entrepreneurial efforts materialize in the built landscape of Singapore? By preliminary answering these questions this paper aims at reconstructing Bremen’s contribution to the making of Singapore.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Julia Lossau is Professor of Urban Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Bremen. Her research focuses on the symbolic production of places and spaces, particularly in the context of postcolonial discourses. At present she is particularly interested in how ontologies of late modernism are translated into ontologies of the Anthropocene, and how interconnectivity, transnationalism, questions of belonging etc. are being reframed by – and rematerialise in – society. Previous research examined the uses of art in public spaces as well as social-material relations in urban infrastructures. Books include Infrastrukturen der Stadt (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2017, co-edited with Michael Flitner and Anna-Lisa Müller) and The Uses of Art in Public Space (London, New York: Routledge, 2014, co-edited with Quentin Stevens).

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