Mikko Toivanen
 PhD


mikko.toivanen@utu.fi




ORCID identifierhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0831-1359





Areas of expertise
global and colonial history; Southeast Asia; Dutch imperialism; history of knowledge; urban history; cross-cultural exchanges; travel and mobility; Nordic colonial entanglements

Research community or research topic
Current project "Trees and the travels of knowledge: making modern (trans)imperial forestry from the margins, 1917–1939" (Finnish Cultural Foundation, 2025–2027)

Biography
I am a research fellow at the University of Turku, where my work is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. I specialise in the colonial history of modern Southeast Asia, with a current focus on the transimperial history of forestry and the global (co-)production of environmental knowledge. My earlier work has dealt with a range of topics related to the manifestations of imperialism in the Asian context, including colonial urbanism and public spaces in nineteenth-century Singapore and Batavia (now Jakarta); the development of travel infrastructure and leisure practices in the Indian Ocean region; and the global histories of Nordic colonial entanglements.

I have previously been employed as an assistant professor at the Centre for Global History of the University of Warsaw and held visiting fellowships at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, among others. I defended my PhD, on colonial tourism in Southeast Asia, at the European University Institute in 2019.


Research

My monograph Empire, Tourism, and Colonial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka is coming out with Leiden University Press in September 2025. The volume Integration and Collaborative Imperialism in Modern Europe: At the Margins of Empire, 18001950 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), co-edited with Bernhard Schär, is now available in open access through the publisher's website.

I have also published in journals including the Historical Journal, Urban History and the Journal of Imperial and Commonweath History. For details see my ORCID profile, linked above.




Last updated on 2025-18-06 at 17:28