Research Interests

David Motadel works on the history of modern Europe and Europe’s global entanglements. He has a particular interest in international history and the history of empire.

He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2014; translated into ten languages), ranging from North Africa and the Balkans to the Caucasus and the Crimea, and the editor of a volume on Islam in the European empires (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Among his current projects is a global history of Europe’s empires in the era of the Second World War, 1935-1948, which is under contract with Penguin Press (Allen Lane) in the UK and with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US. Some first results were published in ‘The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire’ in the American Historical Review.

His other research field is the history of global political relations and the world order in the age of empire. He is the author of The Shah’s Great Tour: Global Monarchy in the Imperial Age (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2026), which traces the story of two Persian monarchs who roamed the courtly world of the fin de siècle, from the Ottoman borderlands to the shores of Scotland, to offer insights into the relationships between the world’s sovereigns in an age of European domination. Building on this work, he wrote a more general monograph on royal encounters and world order in the age of empire (Wallstein, 2024). It emerged from the Ernst Kantorowicz Lecture which he was invited to give in 2023. He also co-edited a volume, Unconquered States: Non-European Powers in the Imperial Age (Oxford University Press, 2025), which examines the struggles for sovereignty of the few nominally independent non-Western states – China, Ethiopia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Siam – in the age of empire.

Taken together, David Motadel’s work seeks to study European history comparatively and to enhance our understanding of the history of Europe’s relations with the wider world, drawing on archival research in different continents and sources in different languages. Based on this broader interest in Europe’s global entanglements, he edited an article forum, entitled European History after the Global Turn, which was published in the Annales (French and English editions). An extended version of the forum, a book entitled Globalizing Europe: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2025; translations are in production), followed.

David Motadel also has a more general interest in global history. His co-authored article ‘The Futures of Global History’, published in the Journal of Global History in 2018, led to a lively debate in the field. He is the co-editor of The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton University Press, 2019), the editor of Revolutionary World: Global Upheaval in the Modern Age (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of Global Social History (Special Issue of The Historical Journal, 2024).

Finally, like most historians, he has a more general interest in the philosophy of history. His essay ‘The Political Role of the Historian’, published in 2023, which offers thoughts on the value of historical studies to society, has been widely discussed.

Research Prizes

∙ Philip Leverhulme Prize, 2018
∙ Fraenkel Prize, 2014
∙ Walter Laqueur Prize, 2014
∙ Prince Consort Prize and Seeley Medal of the University of Cambridge, 2011
∙ Doctoral Dissertation Prize of the British International History Group, 2011
∙ Doctoral Dissertation Prize of the German Historical Institute London, 2011
∙ Essay Prize of the German History Society and the Royal Historical Society, 2007

Media

David Motadel regularly writes on history and current affairs for newspapers and magazines. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and Literary Review, among others. From 2005 to 2010, he also acted as an advisor on international affairs for Der Spiegel.