ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Scientific Internationalism under National Agendas: The German Hindu Kush Expedition (1935) and the Politics of Crop Origins

• In Event: Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis 1

English Abstract

This paper examines the 1935 German Hindu Kush Expedition as a case study in the power dynamics of interwar scientific internationalism. Initiated by Theodor Roemer and Wilhelm Troll under the auspices of the German Research Foundation (DFG), the expedition was inspired by Soviet agronomist Nikolai Vavilov’s influential theory of the “centers of origin” of cultivated plants, first articulated at the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin in 1927. While officially aligned with international studies on plant breeding, the project simultaneously pursued the Third Reich’s goals of agricultural self-sufficiency, racial ideology, and geopolitical influence in the borderlands between British-India and Afghanistan.
Drawing on archival sources from Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, the paper situates the expedition within a broader network of international scientific conferences, associations, and exchanges that linked and divided experts across national boundaries. It argues that the Hindu Kush Expedition illuminates how international cooperation in agronomy, anthropology, and geography often served as an arena for negotiating power, access, and prestige between unequal partners. The expedition’s scientific rhetoric of universality masked deep asymmetries—between Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan—and reveals how science operated simultaneously as a diplomatic resource and a tool of competition. By tracing these entanglements, the paper makes a contribution to the rethinking of 'scientific internationalism' as a field that was structured by both collaboration and conflict prior to World War II.

Author

• Johannes Mattes, Austrian Academy of Sciences