History and Theory 55 (May 2016), 290-301 © Wesleyan University 2016 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10802

CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM

German Colonialism in a Global Age. Edited by Bradley Naranch and Geoff

Eley. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 419.

ABSTRACT

The contributions to the collection under review offer a wide range of treatments of ways
in which German colonialism intersected with aspects of domestic German culture and
politics, with particular attention to the larger global setting in which the German colonial
empire existed between 1884 and 1918—or was remembered up to 1945. The review situ-
ates and critiques the contributions in interpretive contexts based on general suggestions
by one of the editors, Geoff Eley. These include a context in which “colonialism” and
“imperialism” are recognized as specific discursive constructions of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, another in which the causal focus in interpreting colonial
phenomena is placed on exchanges that constituted an accelerating globality with which
available conceptual modes (including colonialism and imperialism) could not keep pace,
a third that complicates the categorical distinctions usually made between types of impe-
rial program, and a fourth that aims at replicating on a much broader and more flexible
basis something like the concept of “social imperialism” that forty years ago dominated
interpretations of German imperialism. The essay ends with a view of how such an inter-
pretive framework might be constructed.

Keywords: colonialism, discourse, Germany, globalism, imperialism, Third Reich

Since the 1960s, Germany’s colonial experience has attracted the attention of
successive wavelets of historians, and more recently of scholars in cultural stud-
ies and of at least one historical sociologist. Nevertheless, as Bradley Naranch, an
editor of the volume under review, points out (1-18), German colonial history has
not become an established, distinct field of study. It possesses few characteristic
theoretical constructs or definitive research questions. Certain questions, often
reflecting issues in the contemporary German public sphere, have been foci of
debate for a short while but then have receded from center stage. In recent years,
German colonial history has even lost its earlier appearance of temporal and geo-
graphical coherence. The years 1884–1918 in which Germany actually possessed
a formal overseas colonial empire no longer circumscribe the object of study or
provide a “before, during, and after” framework. Colonialism is now seen as a
heterogeneous entity inhabiting many corners of German society and involving
not just specific colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, but also a wide spec-
trum of German relationships with Eastern Europe and much of the rest of the
world. This reflects a general trend in colonial studies.
 CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM 291
Naranch and his co-editor, Geoff Eley, suggest that its lack of definition is
actually one of the attractions of studying the German colonial experience. It
is possible to look at colonial phenomena in Germany from a wide range of
perspectives—national, comparative, and global—and to explore connections
without having to adopt a position on any standard issue in the field. Moreover,
because the measurable economic value of the German colonies was never very
impressive and because they were demonstrably central to German politics only
for very brief periods, some of the presuppositions that have confined colonial
studies of other empires and other eras to a conceptual iron cage can be at least
partly avoided: in particular the old view that colonialism represented some sort
of disembodied capitalist imperative to expand markets and the contemporary
one (especially popular in Britain) that colonial empire was fundamental to prac-
tically every aspect of life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If we
want to understand colonialism as a general phenomenon of the modern world,
we would do well, so it is implied, to look at Germany rather than the special
case of Great Britain. In any case, this collection demonstrates that significant
matters can be revealed by adopting a broad and undogmatic perspective on Ger-
man colonialism.
The individual contributions to the volume demonstrate the accuracy of the
editors’ characterization of German colonial studies: they do not collectively dis-
play an underlying pattern of concern or central conceptual focus, although most
of them offer significant insights into a variety of topics. One of the reasons that
this book stands out among the several collections of essays on German colonial
themes that have been published in recent years is that the two introductory
chapters by the editors (one from each) constitute major contributions in their
own right. Instead of trying to force a linking thread through the other chapters,
the editors describe different ways in which the investigation of German colonial
themes can be pursued in contexts that transcend Germany. Most of the other
chapters can be placed in one or more of these contexts, with results that are
likely to interest readers who are not specialists in German history (as well as
those who are). For purposes of discussing the significance of the book as a whole
and drawing out some of the implications of the individual chapters, we can use
Eley’s list of four “larger contexts that best illuminate German colonialism” (25).
The first context Eley identifies is “competitive globalization” (26-29), the
importance of which is highlighted in the title of the collection. “Globalization”
could mean a great many things, most of them implicitly defined by reference
to present-day claims about transnational economic phenomena advanced in
the course of debates about policy. Eley’s context, however, is unusual and
overtly discursive: what he calls the “empire-talk” of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, which was built around distinctive ideological forma-
tions that emphasized the exercise of national power—through empires, navies,
colonies, trade policy, and state-coordinated financial and cultural influence—as
the appropriate means of operating in a globalizing world. This context, too, has
a contemporary counterpart: the resuscitation in the early 2000s of “empire” as
a proposal for establishing global order. Contemporary “empire-talk” seems to
have gone out of fashion fairly quickly, but that of the nineteenth century had
292 WOODRUFF D. SMITH

considerable staying power. Framing the relationship between globalization and

imperialism in this way suggests that the intersection among domestic politics,
private economic interests, foreign and commercial policy, and popular culture
that constituted “modern” colonialism lay mainly in a discursive field, one that
became increasingly pervasive and insistent up to 1914, although never without
substantial dissent. This is an extremely useful insight, one that can be applied to
most instances in which “imperialism” or “colonialism” were conscious, named
aspects of national policy—as for example in the United States during the 1890s
and early 1900s.
The topics of several of the contributions to the volume fall at least partly into
Eley’s category of discursive competitive globalization. Three address the inter-
section between “empire-talk” and scientific discourse. Deborah J. Neill discuss-
es German participation in the well-publicized enterprise of applying Western
science to the “conquest” of tropical diseases, which also involved the imperialist
discourse commonly called the “civilizing mission” (74-92). The enterprise was
competitive in that each nation taking part tried to demonstrate the superiority of
its contribution to the field. At the same time, it was also transnational and global
because scientists in all countries—particularly ones with colonies—paid close
attention to developments in other countries and cooperated with one another in
what they portrayed as a humanitarian activity transcending imperial boundar-
ies. Colonial subjects were portrayed mainly as beneficiaries, but they were not
entirely passive ones since the suppression of tropical diseases required disci-
pline and acquiescence in cultural change on their part—very much an aspect
of the civilizing mission. The research done by German scientists on diseases in
colonial and semi-colonial contexts was extensive, but Neill emphasizes its dis-
cursive and ideological construction. The global discourse of tropical medicine
was restructured after the First World War around the justification adopted in the
Versailles Treaty for depriving Germany of its colonies: that the Germans had
been “inhumane” colonial administrators who had not played their proper role in
the transnational civilizing mission. This change had significant practical effects.
Cooperation with Germans in tropical medicine became unfashionable and was
officially discouraged in Britain, France, and Belgium. However, German con-
tributions to tropical medicine were represented in Germany as giving the lie to
the Versailles provisions and demonstrating that it was Germany, not the other
powers, that was the true instrument of the civilizing mission.
Andrew Zimmerman also writes about constructions of scientific activity in
German colonies and the impact of the First World War on them (93-108). His
particular point of focus is the research station at Amani in German East Africa,
which was internationally recognized before the war as the model institution for
research in tropical agriculture, at least in Africa. Zimmerman concerns himself
not with the specifics of the work that was actually done at Amani but with its
placement in a number of global phenomena. Some of these can be regarded as
discursive constructions. For one thing, Amani figured within the structure of
global scientific humanitarianism that Neill describes. When German East Africa
became the British protectorate of Tanganyika after 1918, the Amani station was
subject to the same kind of discursive devaluation as German research in tropical
 CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM 293
medicine (some of which had been conducted at Amani). After considering dis-
establishing the station, however, the British decided that it was too useful not to
retain. Part of the decision was based on practical considerations, but the interest-
ing ones had to do with the way in which research conducted there fit into larger
constructions of science, colonial rule, and economic development.
According to Zimmerman, science in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies was a central element of sovereignty, not only in colonies but in “modern”
states in general. Deploying science was more than something that states did to
legitimate themselves or to support specific functions such as defense; it was,
Zimmerman says, fundamental to the nature of the modern state itself. Science
at Amani became part of a specific German performance of sovereignty through
science: a policy enunciated in 1907 that was called “scientific colonialism.”
“Scientific colonialism,” which resembled constructions in most other empires,
brought together discourses of modernization, overseas economic development,
humanitarian intention, and power deployed to achieve a range of goals. The
object of the policy, as stated by Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg, was to
muster science and technology in modernization programs that would develop the
German colonies as successful participants in the global economy, for the benefit
both of Germany and the peoples of the colonies. Although Dernburg had to
make gestures toward economic nationalists who saw colonial economies largely
as markets and sources of materials for Germany, his actual policies looked
toward expanded global trade.
Zimmerman interprets both scientific colonialism and the Amani institute as
part of an international discussion in the early twentieth century that revolved
around a constructed figure generally called the “negro.” The model for the
“negro” was the kind of person whom the Tuskegee Institute in the United States
aimed to produce: a modern—and modernizing—agricultural worker, economi-
cally rational and able to provide white employers with the labor they needed
without challenging them economically or politically. In the German case, the
idea was to use both Amani and a plantation project in the West African colony of
Togo as centers for creating “negroes” from the actual inhabitants of the colonies.
The idea did not bear substantial fruit, but Zimmerman’s treatment of it (more
fully developed in a book-length study1 ) and his attempt to place it in a context of
global discourse provide a fascinating example of what Eley means when he sug-
gests that we look at empires as discursive constructions. Zimmerman employs
a conceptual framework derived from early twentieth-century (mainly German)
Marxist theories of labor under capitalism to make sense of German scientific
colonialism. The fact that the formulators of those theories directly addressed
German colonial issues suggests yet another kind of global, or at least transna-
tional, discourse involving Amani. In the short space of his chapter, Zimmerman
tends to conflate one of scientific colonialism’s aims—producing modern plan-
tation workers—with another: generating modern, individual small farmers in
African societies.2 The latter strategy was also part of a global discourse, one that

1. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the
Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
2. He deals with this more satisfactorily in his book.
294 WOODRUFF D. SMITH

would be well worth pursuing as part of a reassessment of “peasantization” as an

aspect of modernization and imperialism.
One other contribution to the collection touches on the relationship of scientific
discourse to colonies and empires. George Steinmetz discusses four sociologists
(or in two cases, anthropologists with sociological leanings) who wrote about
matters of empire: Max and Alfred Weber, Richard Thürnwald, and Wilhelm
Mühlmann. Steinmetz is principally concerned with the “scientific autonomy” of
these people, by which he means mainly their willingness to avoid letting their
scientific views be influenced by factors external to the academic “field” (in
Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology) and their ability to practice scientific objectivity
in the manner classically prescribed by Max Weber himself. Each of the four
individuals, although in different ways and to different degrees, compromised his
scientific autonomy in the course of engaging with German imperialism. Stein-
metz’s main focus is on explaining the differences. The chapter does not deal
substantially with issues of globalization, whether in the sense of “empire-talk”
or in any other way. It advances instead a theoretical framework for explaining
how the relationship of individuals to the structure of careers in their academic
fields influences the extent and nature of their scientific autonomy. The frame-
work could be applied transnationally, although Steinmetz does not do so. More
important, it provides at least the outline of an interesting way to explain how and
why “empire-talk” and social science intersected with each other—an approach
that is less dependent on the formal content of either than on the institutional,
generational, and class structure of the society in which social scientists operated.
Several of the other contributions also touch on Eley’s context of competitive
colonialism or empire-talk. Jennifer Jenkins writes about how changing groups
of Germans or people of German descent came to be classified as members of a
German “colony” in Iran during the first third of the twentieth century, thereby
highlighting the discursive variability of the term “colony” and the diversity of
the ways it could be used in twentieth-century German politics. Sebastian Conrad
focuses on the relationships among schemes for German “inner colonization” in
Eastern Europe, overseas colonization, and the policies of the Nazi regime. This
requires him to consider discourses of imperialism as means of addressing issues
of globalization. Dennis Sweeney looks at the demands for overseas and conti-
nental expansion developed by the Pan-German League. Sweeney portrays these
demands as products of a comprehensive strategic view of Germany’s place in a
globalizing world. They are probably better analyzed as discursive constructions
intended to amalgamate divergent interests within the German political right:
“empire-talk,” not practical planning for empire.
Eley calls his second context “Global Germany?”—the question mark pre-
sumably indicating that a central feature of the context is an interrogation of
Germany’s relationship to increasingly complex global networks of economic,
intellectual, and demographic movement that operated across (or around) the
boundaries of states (29-33). Those interrogating the relationship are both the
people under study and contemporary historians who confront the shortcomings
of methods focused on nation-states to analyze global phenomena. The emphasis
in this context is not on “talk,” on discourse, but on actions and practices. This
 CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM 295
distinction is not, however, straightforward. Actions can be construed as dis-
courses, especially when we attempt to take the consciousness of historical actors
into account. Often the task of a global historian is to explain why the discourse
of a particular era did not represent global phenomena explicitly, even though
they clearly existed and people were aware of them in practical terms. It could
be argued that a substantial part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism
resulted from employing ways of thinking appropriate to the nation-state in order
to comprehend perceived global phenomena for which an adequate conceptual
apparatus did not exist. Along with epistemological issues, there are matters
that pertain to locating the origins of historical phenomena. Eley, citing Isabel
Hofmeyr citing Arjun Appadurai, notes that an essential feature of global analysis
is that one looks primarily to the connections among physically separated places
and the nature of the items that flow between them for causes and for working
definitions of the things one studies (29-30). The focus is on dynamic linkages
treated as primary subjects in themselves.
As it happens, few of the contributions to the book fit the description of
Eley’s second category, and none does so exactly. Eley refers at some length
(and rightly) to the work of Andrew Zimmerman as a model of global historical
analysis, but the reference is to Zimmerman’s book cited above, not to his chapter
in German Colonialism in a Global Age. Highlighting a single country, as this
collection does, is not entirely incompatible with a global analysis of the kind
Eley describes, but it does encourage a tendency to frame discussions around fac-
tors present in that country or around the reception within the country of factors
impinging from outside. Instead of emphasizing flows and connections as causes
or treating consciousness of globality as a researchable problem, historians often
employ broad generalizations about metaphenomena (“the first age of globaliza-
tion,” for instance) or revert to comparison—neither of which really catches the
essence of the kind of global approach to which Eley refers.
Among the contributions that do to some extent correspond to Eley’s second
category, one that stands out is the chapter by Klaus Mühlhahn on the small Ger-
man colony in China that the Germans called Kiaochow, of which the capital was
the port of Qingdao (129-146). Mühlhahn shows that Kiaochow cannot be under-
stood in terms of most of the standard modes of representing colonies. Some of
this is due to Qingdao’s unusual status as a possession run by the German Navy
to enhance the Navy’s public image within Germany, but that was only part of the
story. Mühlhahn argues that these standard modes cannot capture the complicated
interactions that took place within a dynamic colonial node of several intersect-
ing currents of change—cultural and political as well as economic—in East Asia
and Germany. The main point he wants to make is that Kiaochow represented
a “new” type of colony, in which both colonizers and colonized (and others
who fell into neither category, such as the Imperial government of China and its
Republican successors) adapted their actions to the intersecting currents whether
they intended to do so or not. It is the secondary feature of the argument—the
emphasis on such currents possessing dynamics of their own—that connects
Mühlhahn’s chapter to Eley’s second context. Other chapters that display at least
296 WOODRUFF D. SMITH

some connections include the contributions of Zimmerman and Jenkins that have
already been discussed.
Eley’s third context, “Empire by Sea or by Land?” is more narrowly conceived
than the others (33-36). It refers specifically to a controversy among German
imperialists before, during, and after the First World War about whether an
expanded German sphere of control should be imagined primarily as a continen-
tal or as an overseas empire. It is an interesting controversy, in part because it has
engendered differences of interpretation among historians that parallel the dis-
agreements of their subjects, and in part because it has relevance to the question
of colonialism’s links to the Nazi regime. Several of the contributions to German
Colonialism in a Global Age deal with these matters, especially the chapters by
Conrad and Sweeney previously mentioned. Another, an essay by Dirk Bönker
comparing naval planning before 1914 in the United States and Germany, dis-
cusses a parallel controversy: between strategists who saw the naval war of the
future as a conflict between capital ships in home waters and those who saw it as
commercial warfare employing cruisers (283-301). Interestingly, Bönker, Con-
rad, and, in a way, Sweeney come to a similar conclusion: the classic terms of
policy disagreement do not account for the positions actually taken by the groups
these authors are writing about. Naval staffs and commentators in Germany and
the United States favored both kinds of warfare, although in varying combina-
tions; many, although not all, imperialists in Germany tended to see overseas
commercial and colonial expansion as compatible with expansion of German
influence and control in Eastern Europe, although with varying priorities. Swee-
ney shows that the Pan-Germans eventually developed a platform that combined
almost all geographical emphases featured in German imperialism. The impli-
cation that we might draw from this is that we should not take simple, starkly
differentiated categories of proposals for Germany’s future global engagements
(or probably any other country’s) too seriously—that is, to the extent of treating
them as the operative existential categories of a phenomenon, whether we call it
colonialism, imperialism, or “navalism.” They appear to be something rather dif-
ferent: sets of statements intended to convey the logical consistency of positions
taken by participants in public discourse, usually under particular circumstances
of conflict between groups over matters like parliamentary appropriations or
control of interest organizations. It is not that the people making the statements
did not believe what they were saying (although that may occasionally have been
true.) It is rather that the bases of their beliefs lay in less well-defined aggrega-
tions of images, discursive constructions, perceived interests, unperceived social
motivations, and so forth, and also that under changed circumstances (the unfore-
seen character of the First World War, for example), they could often accede
to restructuring their positions, usually as long as they could imagine that they
were maintaining fidelity to their beliefs. “Classic” statements of imperialist con-
cepts denote real things. They are important objects of historical study as partial
guides to the actions of real people and as contributions to evolving discursive
and ideological formations, but to employ them as the fundamental categories of
“imperialism” is problematical.
 CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM 297
A somewhat different, more basic, although not unrelated instance is provided
by a thought-provoking chapter in which Birthe Kundrus attempts to answer the
question “How imperial was the Third Reich?” (330-345). The question obvi-
ously presumes that a working definition of “imperial” can be postulated and
that a standard can be identified for purposes of measurement. It is not the sort
of question with which historians tend to be comfortable, but it is of a type that
arises frequently in contemporary colonial studies and in discussions of global-
ization. Kundrus acknowledges the obligation to pay attention to definitions and
standards and also to broader questions of categorization. She does an excellent
job of reviewing many of the meanings that “colony,” “colonial,” “empire,” and
“imperialism” have borne in contemporary colonial studies and the wide range
of implicit meanings that can be found in the writings of advocates of German
expansion up to 1945. She cites Jürgen Osterhammel’s effort to enunciate a
single, universal definition of an “empire,” but finds that although the Third
Reich appears to meet most of the criteria advanced by Osterhammel, the intent
behind Nazi rule outside of Germany, by seeking not to incorporate other peoples
into an imperial system but to exterminate them, disqualifies Nazi Germany from
being an empire. It had, she says, many of the characteristics of an empire and
incorporated elements of modern imperialism practiced by other states, but in the
end it was fundamentally unique.
Two questions arise. One is why it should matter whether the Third Reich
was a “real” empire—that is to say, whether it corresponded either to an abstract
model of “empire” or to the specific characteristics of an actual empire. (In the
modern era, the latter effectively means the British Empire.) It can matter if you
have an agenda: if, for example, you want to argue in favor of the idea that, on
balance, “real” empires like the British one were a benefit to the world and there-
fore want to exclude the Nazi one from the calculation. Otherwise, it is difficult
to see what is gained by deciding “how imperial” the Third Reich was. The other
question is whether Kundrus’s mode of reasoning about the Third Reich would
yield a different conclusion about any other empire, given the immensely varied
character of imperial phenomena in the modern world. It is difficult to think of
any other major structure of organized expansion that does not display such varia-
tion from abstract models that part of it, at least, could be declared nonimperial.
An interesting chapter by Heike I. Schmidt (109-128) on concepts of honor and
manliness as revealed in legal disputes in a particular location in German East
Africa is difficult to place in any of Eley’s contexts, but because it touches on
the issue of applying explanatory constructions to historical interpretation, it can
be mentioned here. Schmidt uses the idea that there was a “crisis of masculinity”
in Germany in the late nineteenth century centering on the idea of male honor to
explain the behavior (which might otherwise appear to be petty and idiosyncratic)
of the white litigants in a series of suits lodged with colonial authorities. The
interpretation is plausible and the cases are fascinating, although their extremely
limited geographical and personal range restricts the extent to which generaliza-
tion from them can be supported. If the cases had been used to interrogate the
explanatory concept itself (the crisis of masculinity) or as a basis for comparison
298 WOODRUFF D. SMITH

with domestic instances, it might have been relevant to the discussion that fol-
lows. As it is, the chapter stands more or less by itself.
Eley calls his fourth context “Social imperialism once more?” (36-37). In this
case, the question mark denotes a problem of nomenclature that Eley poses for
historians rather than a current controversy, but the implications of the problem
are significant. More than forty years ago, “social imperialism” was the leading
mode of interpreting German colonialism. (It was tried with other countries,
but never took hold as fully as with Germany.) According to its best-known
employer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Germany’s move to seize overseas colonies in
the 1880s was the result of Bismarck’s attempt to manipulate the class conflicts
created by rapid economic modernization in order to keep the established upper
classes in power.3 Bismarck used the idea that a colonial empire would protect
the German economy against foreign competition and the buffets of global fluc-
tuations to perform a double deception: to convince middle-class voters that they
should back parties loyal to Bismarck rather than left-liberal parties that were
mostly anti-colonial, and to convince at least some working-class voters not to
support the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The two deceptions were
connected: part of Bismarck’s ploy was to try to persuade the bourgeoisie that
the working class would respond favorably to colonial expansion that protected
jobs, thereby assuaging bourgeois fears of social revolution. It is not clear how
much of the argument for empire Bismarck really believed. He adopted it from
recently formed imperialist pressure organizations, and he certainly did his best
to limit overseas expansion after declaring the first German “protectorates” in
Africa and the Pacific.
Wehler’s interpretation of the origins of Germany’s overseas empire was
part of a much broader movement in German historiography that placed class
conflict, modernization, and the timing of German industrialization at the center
of explanations of German politics and external policies up to and including the
First World War—and in Wehler’s view, through the Third Reich. The concept
of social imperialism framed much of the work on German colonialism and on
individual colonies in the 1970s and early 1980s, and then rapidly lost favor. In
part, the decline of the social imperialism paradigm resulted from its inability
to accommodate the full range of evidence available about the varied intentions
of imperialist actors. The whole genre to which it belonged underwent devas-
tating criticism in the late 1970s and early 1980s (by Eley, among others) of
some of its central premises about the relationship between modernization and
class outlooks in Germany.4 In particular, imperialism and colonialism could no
longer be treated as means by which traditional agrarian and bureaucratic elites
manipulated the bourgeoisie in order to head off the consequences of modern-
ization; the thoroughly bourgeois (and “modern”) character of much of German
imperialism and the fact that radical versions of it were overtly directed against
traditional elites came to be generally accepted. At the same time, the change

3. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch,
1969).
4. Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after
Bismarck (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980).
 CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM 299
in intellectual climate that shifted historical interpretation toward modes of dis-
course analysis and cultural criticism drove concepts like social imperialism and
its Marxian cousins to the margins of the academic enterprise. (It should be noted,
however, that although Wehler did not use the term, he was clearly describing
German imperialism as an imaginary constructed by imperialists and employed
by Bismarck not as a comprehensive framework for German global policy, but
as political discourse.)
In his discussion of his fourth context, Eley suggests that it might now be time
to resurrect something like “social imperialism” as an approach to the history of
colonialism, German or otherwise. He does not, however, mean that historians
should adopt the narrowly class-based kind of analysis that characterized the
earlier versions, with their assumptions about the predominance of collective
responses to modernization in shaping political aims and actions. Instead, he
points out the need for an interpretive framework that can accommodate the wide
range of interesting research being done on the ways in which aspects of colonial-
ism were embedded in domestic culture, politics, and social relations, and that
can also incorporate connections between these aspects and global phenomena
that transcended the colonial sphere.
This is a tall order. That such a framework would be useful is demonstrated
by German Colonialism in a Global Age. A majority of the contributions address
topics that fall at least partly within the boundaries of Eley’s fourth context. Sev-
eral are excellent essays, on a par with the best contemporary work on domestic
features of colonial phenomena in other countries. Like the latter, however, they
lack a shared, comprehensive interpretive construct to which their authors might
refer—whether to situate their research in a larger enterprise or to problematize
features of the construct itself. In addition to chapters already cited, several are
of particular interest.
Two contributions focus on graphic imagery to investigate aspects of colonial-
ism within Germany and to suggest their long-term implications. Brett M. Van
Hoesen analyzes racialist images used to attack the presence of African troops in
the French army of occupation in the Rhineland after the First World War (302-
329). She connects the meanings constructed around these images to longstanding
elements of colonialist thinking and argues that the effects of the occupation were
prolonged well past its end in 1923, as an element of the “postcolonial” condition
of Weimar Germany. David Ciarlo writes about the advertising in Germany of
colonial products (Kolonialwaren, a general term for tropical goods that predated
the colonial empire), emphasizing the increasing use of highly exaggerated racial
images to sell such commodities to a mass public (187-209). Ciarlo interprets this
development as evidence of loss of control over the public face of colonialism by
the elites who had led the organized colonial movement since the 1880s and its
appropriation by the mass media. The racial imagery, he suggests, was a signifi-
cant factor in creating the Third Reich. Both are fascinating chapters, but both
deal with phenomena that were clearly transnational in scope (mass advertising
and the political use of racial stereotyping, among others) without paying more
than passing attention to that dimension. Their perspective is determined largely
by questions of German historical interpretation. They take novel approaches to
300 WOODRUFF D. SMITH

these questions, but (apart from Van Hoesen’s contribution to explaining what
“postcolonial” might mean), they do not say much about either of the key terms
in the title of the collection (“colonialism” and “global.”) An interpretive frame-
work that gave a significant role to the global nature of modern marketing and
suggested types of linkage to colonial phenomena in other countries with over-
seas empires would have been helpful to both authors.
Two other chapters describe relationships between aspects of German
colonialism and specific elements of Wilhelmine politics. John Phillip Short
discusses the response of SPD activists to reports of atrocities committed by
German colonial forces during the wars of 1904–1907 against the Herero and
Nama in Southwest Africa and to the party’s defeat in the Reichstag election
of 1907 that resulted from the refusal of several parties, including the SPD, to
authorize borrowing for the war (210-227). The election is usually represented
as a disaster for the SPD and for German anti-colonialism in general. Colonial
matters are seldom emphasized in accounting for the SPD’s startling rebound
in the election of 1912. Historical attention has focused instead on the theoreti-
cal debates within the party’s leadership over Revisionism—although a kind of
reformist colonialism did appear among the Revisionists. Short shows that at the
local level, party activists did not abandon anti-colonialism but rather developed
it as a major rallying strategy and a means of attracting voters away from other
parties. He suggests that it was a significant factor in the 1912 elections and
that, embedded in the thinking and practices of committed party members, the
grass-roots anti-colonialism of 1907–1912 became a permanent feature of orga-
nized German socialism. Christian Davis in his chapter looks at the relationship
between organized anti-Semitism and German colonialism in the Wilhelmine era,
and particularly at the dilemma faced by anti-Semitic colonial enthusiasts when
taking positions on people of Jewish descent (none of them observant Jews) who
were prominent figures in the colonial movement and the colonial administration
(228-245). The problem was particularly acute with regard to Colonial Secretary
Dernburg, a descendant of Jewish families, who was the proponent of a vigorous,
modern, “scientific” approach to colonial development that appealed to many
(not all) anti-Semitic colonialists. Davis shows that some anti-Semites adjusted
themselves flexibly to dealing with Dernburg, in part depending on which of the
many versions of ideological colonialism they subscribed to, but overall, the anti-
Semites’ dilemma prevented them from exerting much practical influence on the
colonial empire.
Both of these contributions are fine examples of their genre, demonstrating
in detail the complexity in specific cases of connections among colonialism,
organized domestic politics, ideology, and constructed social identity. They, too,
however, lack a larger conceptual framework that allows them to enter into a
discussion of “colonialism” as a whole (whether German or not) or about global
phenomena. The same could be said about the very interesting chapter by Jeff
Bowersox on colonialism in the textbooks and curricula of German schools,
which emphasizes the placement of colonial knowledge in larger contexts of
German cultural life (170-186). Bowersox shows that the presence of colonial
perceptions in textbooks was not a result of straightforward transmission from
 CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM 301
colonialist organizations to the educational system, but rather of a complex
conversation among many participants, with substantial variation in results. This
could be a useful contribution to a transnational discussion of ways in which
colonial knowledge interacted with other constructed knowledge to inform global
knowledge, but without a framework for such a discussion, it limits itself mainly
to addressing one of the ways in which colonial factors helped to shape German
national identity.
If there is a need to construct an up-to-date version of “social imperialism”
as Eley suggests, what should its features be? Eley, Naranch, and the authors
of several of the chapters in the book have provided strong hints of an answer
to this question. Of paramount importance are Eley’s first and second contexts.
All the contributions just discussed under his fourth context share an emphasis
on “empire-talk,” on the discourse of colonies and empire that constituted a
characteristic aspect of global political culture in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The discourse was quite distinctive, although it came in
several overlapping versions. It was closely bound up with arrays of images
and with ideological constructions deriving from the principal modes in which
Europeans had attempted to understand and negotiate national states, national
societies, and national economies: liberalism, conservatism, humanism, science,
and bureaucratic rationalism, among others. These were now applied to a world
in which global factors were crucially important and increasingly complex, in
the asserted belief that the government of a modern state could use its power to
make those factors conform to the perceived needs of the state’s citizens. The
replacement for social imperialism should focus not only on “empire-talk” but
also on Eley’s second context: phenomena arising in the multiplying economic,
cultural, social, demographic, and political interchanges among all regions of the
world that impinged on the lives of the same citizens and created opportunities
and problems for organized groups within the same states. It should highlight the
importance of looking at the ways in which empire-talk and its imaginary and
ideological correlates failed to represent global phenomena accurately, and also
at the consequences of such failures. Building an interpretive framework of this
kind would be a monumental task, but perhaps with the example of books such
as the one under review, someone will be encouraged to undertake it.

Woodruff D. Smith
University of Massachusetts,
Boston
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