This key research priority addresses processes of negotiating political, social and cultural basic concepts in the history of transcontinental spaces and empires in the nineteenth and twentieth century, with a special focus on East Asia, Europe, the Near East and North America. By using approaches of cultural studies, history of ideas and conceptual history we explore by what practices, actors and channels assumingly European basic concepts of modernity (such as progress, freedom, power, labor, economy, property, family, sovereignty, but also the concept of modernity itself) are translated and disseminated. We analyze how and in what way these concepts are received and rejected, adapted and changed, disseminated and re-imported globally as heuristic categories to understand societies. The main goal of this research field is to generate fundamental insights in the transcontinental circulation of concepts and to differentiate them in their linguistically and culturally specific historicity. By doing so it aims at transcending established disciplinary boundaries between the area studies and historical sciences, and at understanding the function and effect of basic concepts in the increasingly globalizing humanities.