Mikko Toivanen is a research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, specialising in global and colonial history. His work deals with the Dutch and British empires in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia and the global cultures of imperialism, with a current focus on developing ideas of urbanity and the changing uses of public space in colonial contexts. His wider research interests include the global circulations of colonial knowledge and the history of Nordic colonial entanglements.