Michael Rösser is going to present a working paper on 'Colonizing Leisure? Labour, Force and Leisure at the Central Railway’s Construction Site'

This Paper has been very much inspired by the Summer Academy I am going to attend in Mombasa/ Nairobi in Kenya in September. As the Summer Academy organized by Humboldt University’s re:work – Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History attempts to integrate leisure and non-work more systematically into the global historiography of labour, this paper tries more or less the same. Not neglecting (forced) labour practices, the paper tries to identify the leisure activities of the various protagonists of labour present at the central railways construction site. Apart from (African) work(wo)men’s, also boys’ and European engineers’ and/ or Holzmann employees’ leisure activities are addressed. Although labour and leisure appear to be separate spheres at the first glance, taking a closer look reveals that labour and leisure can hardly be separated from one another. As I am using the Ego-Documents of the former ‘Cosmopolitan’ Anglo-German railway engineer Clement Gillman to deal with the relationship of labour and leisure, a comparatively large part of the paper is devoted to discuss how these sources can be addressed adequately. In this respect, I try to fuse trans-imperial
and triangular approaches with the concept of global biography.