(Visiting Doctoral Student)

Biography:

Pierre Pfister is since 2022 PhD-candidate and researcher in History and Civilization at EHESS – the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Paris). At the same time, he works as a certified teacher (CAPES) of History and Geography in a public school near Fontainebleau in France.

He got a double bachelor’s degree in History and German LLCE (foreign languages, literatures and civilizations) from the University Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) in 2016, and then a Master MEEF (Teaching, Education and Training) at ESPE-Paris in the Sorbonne-University in 2018.

Today, he studies the life of a German mercenary, having made his fortune in the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, whose name is Walter Reinhardt Sombre, alias Mirza Samru Sahib, or Zafaryab Khan.

From very diverse and varied archive funds (France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Mauritius & India), the study of the life of the adventurer Sombre or Samru has a major historical interest in understanding the role of the mercenaries as cultural couriers and the regionalization of the Mughal Empire at the beginning of the colonization of India in the second half of the 18th century, while focusing attention on the politico-military strategies of resilience, that have been put in place by the Indian princes.  Based on an itinerant micro-historical approach (cf. Ginzburg Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms, 1976), the objective of the thesis is to follow the journey of this mercenary, while describing a Mughal India in crisis in front of pressure from European companies, while undoing the many legends surrounding this character.