Moritz von Brescius is a research professor at the University of Basel and the principal investigator (PI) of an SNSF Consolidator Grant project at the Institute for European Global Studies. Previously, he was an SNSF Ambizione Fellow in Bern and a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, where he was also affiliated with the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. He has studied in Berlin, Oxford, Florence, and Cambridge, UK. His doctoral thesis won several awards. It was published as German Science in the Age of Empire: Enterprise, Opportunity, and the Schlagintweit Brothers (Cambridge University Press, 2019; paperback, 2020). He has published articles in Modern Asian Studies, Comparativ, and other journals. He is also a contributor to The Oxford World History of Empire (2020) and the Oxford Handbook of Modern Transimperial History (2026). His research interests include the global history of science and empire, the environmental and economic history of plantation economies, and the acclimatization of cash crops as part of the global expansion of commodity frontiers. His current book project examines colonial capitalism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Assam, the relationship between commodity frontiers and imperial governance, and the intersection of structures of investment and property formation with colonial conservation ambitions. His next project is a bold new account of the Great Acceleration through the lens of the twentieth-century industrial “battle of materials”.