German Colonialism in a Global Age

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 diverse particular aspects, 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 Bonker, Jeff Bowersox, David Ciarlo, Sebastian Conrad, Christian S. Davis, Geoff Eley, Jennifer Jenkins, Birthe Kundus, Klaus Muhlhahn, Bradley Naranch, Deborah Neill, Heike Schmidt, J. P. Short, George Steinmetz, Dennis Sweeney, Brett M. Van Hoesen, Andrew Zimmerman

Bradley Naranch is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Montana.

Geoff Eley is the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–1945, and A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society.