This collection provides a comprehensive treatment of the German colonial empire and its significance. Leading scholars show not only how the colonies influenced metropolitan life and the character of German politics during the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine eras (1871–1918), but also how colonial mentalities and practices shaped later histories during the Nazi era. In introductory essays, editors Geoff Eley and Bradley Naranch survey the historiography and broad developments in the imperial imaginary of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors then examine a range of topics, from science and the colonial state to the disciplinary constructions of Africans as colonial subjects for German administrative control. They consider the influence of imperialism on German society and culture via the mass-marketing of imperial imagery; conceptions of racial superiority in German pedagogy; and the influence of colonialism on German anti-Semitism. The collection concludes with several essays that address geopolitics and the broader impact of the German imperial experience. Contributors. Dirk Bönker, Jeff Bowersox, David Ciarlo, Sebastian Conrad, Christian S. Davis, Geoff Eley, Jennifer Jenkins, Birthe Kundus, Klaus Mühlhahn, Bradley Naranch, Deborah Neill, Heike Schmidt, J. P. Short, George Steinmetz, Dennis Sweeney, Brett M. Van Hoesen, Andrew Zimmerman

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire. Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

Carl Peters (1856-1918) ranked among Germany's most prominent imperialists in the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine periods. In the 1880s he emerged as a leader of the colonial movement and became known as the founder of Deutsch-Ostafrika, a region many Germans regarded as the pearl of their overseas possessions. In Nazi Germany he was revered as a precursor of Hitler and ascended retrospectively to new glory as a pioneer in the struggle for Lebensraum. This scholarly biography examines Peters's nationalist agenda and sheds light on his colonial expeditions into East Africa. It seeks to explain how this young academic who had written about Schopenhauer and metaphysics eventually became a skilful agitator for a German world empire.

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

Originally published in 1984 this volume presents the first systematic analysis of the cultural sources of the Pan German League’s appeal and influence in Imperial Germany. It focuses on the symbolic dimensions of the League’s literature and activities, in order to explain the attraction of the League’s aggressive ideology to certain social groups. In addition it examines the relationship between the League and other patriotic societies in Imperial Germany and analyses the processes by which the organization succeeded, on the eve of the First World War, in mobilizing a broad ‘national opposition’ to the German government. The study draws on concepts from psychology and anthropology, and its documentary foundation includes archival material from both the former East and West Germany.

This is an important book. It is a reprint of the first detailed study of how Pacific Islanders responded politically and economically to their rulers across the German empire of the Pacific. Under one cover, it captures the variety of interactions between the various German colonial administrations, with their separate approaches, and the leaders and people of Samoa in Polynesia, the major island centre of Pohnpei in Micronesia and the indigenes of New Guinea. Drawing on anthropology, new Pacific history insights and a range of theoretical works on African and Asian resistance from the 1960s and 1970s, it reveals the complexities of Islander reactions and the nature of protests against German imperial rule. It casts aside old assumptions that colonised peoples always resisted European colonisers. Instead, this book argues convincingly that Islander responses were often intelligent and subtle manipulations of their rulers’ agendas, their societies dynamic enough to make their own adjustments to the demands of empire. It does not shy away from major blunders by German colonial administrators, nor from the strategic and tactical mistakes of Islander leaders. At the same time, it raises the profile of several large personalities on both sides of the colonial frontier, including Lauaki Namulau’ulu Mamoe and Wilhelm Solf in Samoa; Henry Nanpei, Georg Fritz and Karl Boeder in Pohnpei; or Governor Albert Hahl and Po Minis from Manus Island in New Guinea.

Re-assesses Germany's relationship with the wider world before 1914 by examining the connections between nationalism, transnationalism, imperialism and globalization.