The series Studies on Modern Orient provides an overview of religious, political and social phenomena in modern and contemporary Muslim societies. The volumes do not only take into account Near and Middle Eastern countries, but also explore Islam and Muslim culture in other regions of the world, for example, in Europe and the US. The series Studies on Modern Orient was founded in 2010 by Klaus Schwarz Verlag.

The German lacuna in Edward Said’s 'Orientalism' has produced varied studies of German cultural and academic Orientalisms. So far the domains of German politics and scholarship have not been conflated to probe the central power/knowledge nexus of Said’s argument. Seeking to fill this gap, the diplomatic career and scholarly-literary productions of the centrally placed Friedrich Rosen serve as a focal point to investigate how politics influenced knowledge generated about the “Orient” and charts the roles knowledge played in political decision-making regarding extra-European regions. This is pursued through analyses of Germans in British imperialist contexts, cultures of lowly diplomatic encounters in Middle Eastern cities, Persian poetry in translation, prestigious Orientalist congresses in northern climes, leveraging knowledge in high-stakes diplomatic encounters, and the making of Germany’s Islam policy up to the Great War. Politics drew on bodies of knowledge and could promote or hinder scholarship. Yet, scholars never systemically followed empire in its tracks but sought their own paths to cognition. On their own terms or influenced by “Oriental” savants they aligned with politics or challenged claims to conquest and rule.

Studien zur Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur der Turkvölker was founded in 1980 by the Hungarian Turkologist György Hazai. The series deals with all aspects of Turkic language, culture and history, and has a broad temporal and regional scope. It welcomes manuscripts on Central, Northern, Western and Eastern Asia as well as parts of Europe, and allows for a wide time span from the first mention in the 6th century to modernity and present.

The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that the Armenians were restless under Ottoman rule, they were a problem for Germany too. From the 1890s onward Germany became accustomed to excusing violence against Armenians, even accepting it as a foreign policy necessity. For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians’ Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the “Jews of the Orient.” As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans’ longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks’ wartime program of extermination. After the war, in what Ihrig terms the “great genocide debate,” German nationalists first denied and then justified genocide in sweeping terms. The Nazis too came to see genocide as justifiable: in their version of history, the Armenian Genocide had made possible the astonishing rise of the New Turkey. Ihrig is careful to note that this connection does not imply the Armenian Genocide somehow caused the Holocaust, nor does it make Germans any less culpable. But no history of the twentieth century should ignore the deep, direct, and disturbing connections between these two crimes.

The phenomenon of labour takes the character of a prism. Labour is thereby always context dependent and constituted through the actions of all protagonists involved in any labour relationship. On the basis of three case studies in colonial German East Africa - the construction of the Central Railway (1905-1916), the Otto Plantation in Kilossa (1907-1916) and the palaeontological Tendaguru Expedition (1909-1911) - labour and labour relations are analysed. The focus lies on hitherto neglected actors and groups of actors of labour in the colonial context of East Africa. These were especially German companies and their staff, white subaltern railway sub-contractors and labour recruiters, Indian skilled workers and (qualified) East African workers. Furthermore, all three sites of labour proved to have their individual logics and characteristics. But all of them were in tension between the 'global' and the 'local', coercion and voluntariness, machine and manual labour, skilled and unskilled labour, reproductive and wage labour, as well as between black and white. Michael Rösser's dissertation has been awarded with 'honorary distinction' by the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH).

With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage Worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants, and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered. Examining the multifaceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, this volume offers historians and anthropologists clear evidence of the complexity of the colonial frontier and frontier zone encounters. It poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.

International Arms Trade has always been a powerful and multi-functional constituent of world politics and international diplomacy. Sending military advisors abroad and promoting arms sales, each legitimizing and supporting the other, became indispensable tools of alliance-making starting from the eve of the First World War until today. To the German Empire, as a relative latecomer to imperialistic rivalry in the struggle for colonies around the word in the late 19th century, arms exports performed a decisive service in stimulating and strengthening the German military-based expansionist economic foreign policy and provided effective tools to create new alliances around the globe. Therefore, from the outset, the German armament firms' marketing and sales operations to the global arms market but especially to the Ottoman Empire, under the rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II, were openly and strongly supported by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Bismarck and the other decision-makers in German Foreign Policy. Based on extensive multinational archival research in Germany, Turkey, Britain and the United States, Arming the Sultan explores the decisive impact of arms exports on the formation and stimulation of Germany's expansionist foreign economic policy towards the Ottoman Empire. Making an important contribution to current scholarship on the political economy of the international arms trade, Yorulmaz's innovative book Arming the Sultan reveals that arms exports, specifically under the shadow of personal diplomacy, proved to be an indispensable and integral part of Germany's foreign economic policy during the period leading up to WW1.