Summer 1893. Chicago. While the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American history,” in the meeting of the American Historical Association, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show performed close by, packing audiences twice a day to an arena of eighteen thousand spectators. However, the main attraction in town was the World’s Columbian Exposition, a massive celebration of Columbus’ landing some 400 years earlier. The exposition covered around 600 acres, with nearly 200 new buildings, and drew millions of visitors. The exposition, Buffalo Bill’s show, and Turner’s paper were all big hits (in their respective ways), and they all symbolized and celebrated American exceptionalism. They inserted US history into a tight national framing. While the exposition lauded and featured examples of American technological progress, the dynamism of its civic society, and the prominence of its civilization, Turner’s famous “frontier thesis” offered an explanation of American identity and history as a westbound process where Anglo pioneers built civilization on free land. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show also delivered validations of American national story through performances that centered reenactments of the frontier process, of the winning of the West. The exposition, Cody, and Turner idealized American development, and in doing so suggested an innate difference toward European empires and their colonial projects.1

Yet as Chicago celebrated America and its uniqueness, the world was never far from the scene. The exposition’s Midway Plaisance held several ethnographic shows of “primitive” cultures, disseminating stories of civilization and savagery from America and around the world, of the global regimes of difference and integration colonialism had created. Converging in Chicago were also men like Carl Peters, Carl Hagenbeck, and Max Sering. These men, in their own way, were dynamic advocates of German colonialism and globalization. And they all were infatuated by the example the US was setting as a rising empire. Drawing inspiration from the American westward expansion, the explorer Peters was a staunch campaigner for German colonial expansion outside Europe, while the agrarian economist Sering was a promoter for German settler colonialism in Eastern Europe. Being a highly successful entrepreneur, Hagenbeck imported exotic animals and colonized peoples—including members of Native American groups such as Lakotas—to Germany and placed them on display for the masses.2 Buffalo Bill too was more global then one could first think. He was a performer and storyteller of not only US but global colonialism. He toured Europe extensively, incorporated topics from other colonial empires to his show, and was a smash success, especially in Germany.3 Even Turner engaged with German colonialism. He was impressed by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who had toured the American West prior to coining the term lebensraum, living space. Turner quoted Ratzel at length and the two scholars engaged in correspondence over territorial expansion and integration, and spatial destinies of nations, recognizing parallels between US frontier expansion and German acquisition of African colonies in the 1880s.4 In all, Turner, Ratzel, Cody, Sering, Hagenbeck, and Peters suggest that Germany and the United States were relational empires; that they were entangled with each other and the world via an assemblage of multidirectional connections arising from diverse and intricate human actions, manifesting multiple voices, engaging numerous sites, and traversing great distances.5

Taking as its cue the suggestion made by historians Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton on the need to explore relationships and spaces not merely within but between empires,6 this anthology examines German and US colonialism through their previously underanalyzed shared and intersecting histories in a global setting of empires. It grapples with and elaborates on the range, forms, and intensity of connectedness between the two empires. Traditionally, Germany and the United States have been understood to represent an authoritarian vs. a liberal path into modernity, but such dichotomies are misplaced, as these essays here show. There are many more similarities than we think—and they are the result of multilayered entanglements made visible via circulations, transfers, and exchanges of ideas, peoples, and practices relating to conquest, settler expansion, power, race, and rule of difference.

This book also sees that the Germany–US connections were not exceptional but emblematic of an interconnected, highly competitive, and increasingly integrated world of empires.7 It argues that this kind of approach, to rephrase historian Sebastian Conrad, allows us to investigate colonial globality via “a complex web of shared histories,” where historical processes are seen as relational. In this way, we cannot only avoid and go beyond the sharp division between “internal” and “external” so prevalent in national histories, but to situate what we discuss via an inherently relational and dynamic framework of structured transformations and multidirectional entanglements spanning and linking empires and the local and the global.8

American Danger

In a recent essay historian Sven Beckert maps how the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European discussion of “American danger” explicated a rising imperial colossus that spearheaded new forms of spatial integration—connections between territory, state power, and capital through its continental expansion—forcing European powers to take notice. US empire grew into an essential question in European imaginary and discourse, as Beckert notes, and birthed real and imagined projects among European colonial powers addressing more effective territorial colonization of Africa, possibilities for European integration, and questions of violent territorial expansions within Europe. In short, Europeans began to measure themselves against the United States and to imagine a future world dominated by only a select few empires that were territorially expansive enough.9 It is from within this setting that the German–US entanglements drew their vitality. While Britain, France, Japan, and even Italy mattered in German eyes, still the United States, like historian Erik Grimmer-Solem recently noted, “emerged as the most important reference point” for German imperial ambitions, Weltpolitik, and as “the greatest potential long-term threat to German globalization.”10 Thus, while the German imperialists admired and followed the United States for the scale and integrative efficiency of its colonial projects, they also feared and envied it for the very same reasons.

Entanglements between Germany and the United States took on many forms, and drew from many root systems, penetrating the German society. The United States impacted minds and guided actions from the corridors of higher political power to the ranks and file of public and private organizations, and to the fictive realm of literature and mass entertainment. Paving the way for unearthing the repertoire of these German–US entanglements have been Andrew Zimmerman and Sven Beckert’s investigations on the agricultural regime of the southern United States influencing and guiding German colonial exploitation and control in Togo.11 In addition, as Jens-Uwe Guettel and Robert Nelson show in their respective studies, the US conquest of the West worked as an inspiration in German domestic debates relating to settler expansion and as a model for concrete colonial policies in the Prussian East and in Southwest Africa during the Kaiserreich.12 Later, the US West also stimulated many of the influential Nazis in their hunger for expansion and living space, Hitler included.13 Another type of nexus for German–US colonial connections can be detected in the naval race, with its close mutual surveillance and imitations in development.14 The most pertinently researched form of interlinkage, however, is the emigration of Germans to the United States, as thousands upon thousands made the move in the 1800s, related their experiences back home in millions of letters, and thus actively promoted interest in the US settler colonial expansion among German workers and middle classes.15

Another node of transimperial connections among the educated classes and the bourgeoisie were the universities and sciences as knowledge transfer and scholarly exchanges disseminated colonial knowledge and influenced policies. Grimmer-Solem has shown how connectedness of the academic world, “this ‘empire of learning’ became entangled with the task of learning about the world and devising an imperial strategy” in the Kaiserreich.16 Guettel, in turn, has stressed how the United States and its forms of empire and colonialism—territorial expansions and racialization—were especially attractive among, and deeply permeated the thinking of, liberal and progressive segments of German society, including academics but also entrepreneurs and merchants.17 The US empire reached all segments of the German society, however. Karl May’s adaptations of the American West held a prominent place in German popular imagination spanning class boundaries, as May’s books were read by millions of people. Millions also came to see the numerous “Wild West shows” touring Germany.18

Much of this book’s focus is on the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. It was in this integrated and competitive age where empires formed the principal political, social, and cultural motors for globalization. Furthermore, this period corresponds with the temporal and spatial fundamentals of the recent colonial turn in both US and German historiographies, respectively. Traditionally, the national-history paradigm has been excessively dominant, contributing, among other things, to strong traditions of exceptionalism and denial of empire in the United States. But in recent years, historians, in their approaches and analysis, have made the imperial visible in US history, reaching across national boundaries and into transimperial and global histories of US empire.19 Studies have de-exceptionalized the histories of the continental empire and the US imperial formations more broadly, exposing the transimperial connectedness of peoples, ideas, commodities, as well as colonial structures and processes.20

In Germany, the national-history paradigm has traditionally led to the marginalization of the colonial “phase” as short and insignificant. The “usual story” claims Germany as a “late” arrival to the world of colonial empires, and not a very successful one because the period of formal German colonial rule proved short-lived (starting in the mid-1880s and terminated by World War I). Recent studies on German colonialism have overturned much of this outdated thinking, reexamining, and reconceptualizing the history of the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, as well as the Nazi regime as colonial history.21 This colonial turn looks all the more noteworthy since not long ago German colonial history scarcely existed as a field outside the toils of a select few practitioners.22

What histories centering the national-history paradigm frequently overlook is that the 1800s and early 1900s was an era of globalization. The trans-Atlantic migrations, the telegraph, and the railroads, for instance, integrated the world together in an unprecedented manner. As did empires fueling innovations and mobility and spreading across much of the planet: scrambling for Africa, contesting for Asia, extending informal influence over Latin America, and competing whose explorers would reach the most remote polar areas, impenetrable deserts, and highest mountains first. It was also a time of settler colonialism: the United States taking over the trans-Mississippi West from Mexico, Britain, and numerous indigenous powers, “British Wests” expanding exponentially in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, hundreds of thousands of Europeans imposing a settler society in French Algeria, Russian settler projects remaking the Caucasus and the Siberia, Japanese settler colonialism penetrating Korea and Manchuria, and the Germans initiating settler projects in the German-Polish borderlands and in Southwest Africa.23 This all lead to complex, entangled, and uneven processes of contact and mutual exchange that operated on different scales from the local to the global and remade the metropole as well as the colonies. Relationships of power and hierarchies of differentiation were enforced, negotiated, and contested in everyday lives and in discourse, while intensifying, intertwined, and interdependent globe-spanning networks and rivalries recalibrated commerce, state power, and culture.24

The current drive in German colonial history has a strong transnational and global flavor, involving an ongoing effort to rebut nation-centered analysis in favor of treating imperial centers and colonies within a single analytical field and exploring relationships and spaces within and beyond the formal bounds of empires.25 While this has meant a fundamental reconceptualization of German colonial history, the German–US connections have remained relatively unexplored considering their extent, diversity, and depth. There exist several significant studies showing how intellectually stimulating it can be to explore the German and US entanglements26 and that the potential for future research remains considerable. This book further addresses this research gap these works have started to fill by emphasizing the scope and the repertoire, and the relationality and open-endedness of these entanglements.

Relational Field

The purpose of this book is to bring attention to the German–US colonial entanglements as part of far-reaching, multidirectional, and multilayered networking and circulations between empires. These entanglements involved numerous actors, a broad repertoire of exchanges, and countless forms of influencing and borrowing. This book does not pretend to be exhaustive in its coverage or claim to provide comprehensive answers on the histories of German–US colonial connections. Rather it wants to canvas some of the potential avenues of research, arouse heightened attention to the German–US colonial connectedness, and create discussion on the meanings and connotations of these connections. It also wishes to offer analytic threads for further investigation. This book introduces a strand of global history often overlooked and stimulates dialectic and open-ended understandings and narratives of colonial entanglements. It hopes to ascertain that the spaces between empires still have much unexposed possibilities for scholars to uncover.

This book is organized into three thematic groupings: portabilities, passages, and parallels. Each offers a specific way of approaching the German–US colonial entanglements. The first part advances analysis pertaining to transferability of ideas and policies through the actions and thinking of individuals. The second section navigates the techniques of circulations, borrowing, and networking in the realm of colonial policies and practices. The third segment looks at patterns and analogies of divergent yet interrelated colonial racialization and gendering. Obviously, the essays overlap in myriad ways, showing the layered and multidirectional qualities of these colonial intersections. Furthermore, while each chapter in the book is intended to function independently, they, of course, also relate to others bringing a chorus of voices to play. It is no homogenous cadre of voices contributing to a uniform narrative storyline, and it is not meant to be. But it is rather a structured, multivocal mix of voices in discussion with each other, against each other, and over each other, and in relation to the broader field of global history.

The first essay to examine the portability of American colonial methods, practices, and ideas in the German colonial context is Gregor Thum’s “Seapower and Frontier Settlement: Friedrich List’s American Vision for Germany.” Thum argues that his US experience made the German economist List an intellectual forerunner for envisioning a German colonial empire in the mid-1800s. List not only pioneered visions of a united Central Europe under German leadership, but advocated for a German settlement frontier in Eastern Europe and took a great interest in advancing German maritime power for empire on the seas. In “The Fantasy of Open Space on the Frontier: Max Sering from the Great Plains to Eastern Europe,” Robert L. Nelson makes a case for agrarian economist Max Sering being of central importance in the intellectual and practical transfer of settler colonialism from the American West to the German East. It was Sering’s personal travels on the Great Plains that made him a visionary for settler colonial expansion for Germany, advocacy that lasted for decades, spanning from the “inner colonial” program of settlement in the Prussian eastern provinces to the First World War and the Ober Ost.

Tracey Reimann-Dawe’s essay “The Role of US Railroads in the German Expansionist Mindset of Gerhard Rohlfs” in turn builds a powerful treatise on the role of US railroads, as a vehicle for spatial takeover, fueling German colonial imagination. By centering the German Afrikareisender, explorer and traveler Gerhard Rohlfs, she claims the railroads enabled a self-perception for German colonialists that allowed for a mental identification with the United States and for distancing from the British and the French in the global colonial context. George Steinmetz in turn provides an example of a different type of colonial convergence. By looking at the interplay of German, French, and US empires and colonialism in the writings of the French philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron, Steinmetz carves openings for grasping some conjunctional spaces and trajectories of portabilities between empires. He does this by following Aron’s intellectual journal, from, first, his preoccupation with Nazi Germany as imperialist form, then French overseas colonialism, and lastly with United States as global hegemon empire of the Cold War world.

Starting part II, “A truly exquisite little phrase:” Global Colonialist Visions vs. the “Drang nach Osten,” by Jens-Uwe Guettel, scrutinizes German debates from the Kaiserreich to the Nazis on the direction German colonialism should take: turn global or turn eastward. He claims that the proponents in these debates frequently referenced the American westward expansion, as global and eastern expansion plans formed political and ideological, argumentative and practical opposites. Dörte Lerp also keeps an eye on the close relationship between nation building and imperial expansionism. Her article “Ruling Classes and Serving Races: German Policies on Land, Labor, and Migration in Trans-Imperial Perspective” tracks the centrality of agrarian and colonial labor within the German expansionist debates and their trans-imperial machinations and considerations. While looking to the United States for models these debates did not limit comparing Germany with just one specific empire but looked for broader inspirations from the world of empires. She notes how deeply racialized debates in the Prussian East and in German Southwest Africa encouraged white Germans, as “ruling classes,” to settle in both regions, while limiting the access of Africans and Poles, the “serving races.”

Jeannette Eileen Jones continues with the theme of agrarian colonization in “How the Südwest Was Won: Transnational Currents of American Agriculture and Land Colonization in German Southwest Africa.” She examines how the Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee (Colonial Economic Committee) and the Reichskolonialamt sought information on agricultural practices—irrigation and dry farming—in the American West for the effective transformation of arid lands into white settlements in German Southwest Africa. Seeking to make the Southwest into a booming settler colony the Germans collected information from the United States about the so-called Campbell system in irrigation on the Great Plains and on the irrigation practices of Yakima Valley, Washington.

In “Practicing Empire: Germany’s Colonial Visions in the Pacific Northwest,” Eriks Bredovskis writes about traveling Germans in the Pacific Northwest of North America. He uses the tour of the German cruiser the Falke from Oregon to Alaska and back in 1905 as a case to study on how Germans in non-German spaces were active participants in the building of settler societies, disseminating notions of middle-class colonial belonging, and the development of Germany’s colonial imaginary landscape. Furthermore, he also encourages us to think about the constant production of a variety of documents by colonial agents and how intersecting these different source types provides an understanding of ordinary Germans’ fascination with North America during the Kaiserreich.

Opening the third section, and the comparative case studies, is Volker M. Langbehn, who, in “Similarity in Appearance – ‘Chinaman’ in German and American Satire Magazines Around 1900,” compares the visual depiction of Chinese in Germany and the United States. He shows how ordinary people became exposed to similar colonial tropes of racialization in their everyday readings of newspaper cartoons on both sides of the Atlantic, while also connecting satirical images, as a node in the transimperial network of transmitters of categories, to developments in modern sciences, especially eugenics. Armed with a premise that the German author Karl May’s “Wild West” writings were much more fluid in gender terms than the heteronormative masculine triumphs they are usually perceived as, is A. Dana Weber’s essay “‘I almost pulled her to my heart, but…’ Competing Masculinities in Karl May’s Wild West Fictions and their Modern Theatrical Adaptation.” She traces the gendering of the American West over time in German popular imagination through analysis of the contested masculinities in May’s texts and in their current reincarnations in German Karl May festivals.

Next Janne Lahti and Michelle R. Moyd’s piece “In Service of Empires: Apaches and Askaris as Colonial Soldiers” showcases how German and US colonial conquests involved interrelated, complex, and nuanced histories of violence. Focusing on the Apaches in the Southwest United States and askaris in German East Africa, the authors stress the tensioned relationships of power, where imperial pressures and colonial complicity coexisted with colonized empowerment through assertions of masculinity and households. Keeping with the theme of colonial violence, Edward M. Westermann unravels parallels and synchronicities between military rhetoric of annihilation in nineteenth-century US–Indigenous wars in the West and in the Nazi East. His “Words and Wars of Conquest: The Rhetoric of Annihilation in the American West and the Nazi East” shows how the discourse that drove the westward march of the American empire and the displacement of Native Americans provides intriguing parallels with the use of language during the Nazi conquest of the East and the conduct of a racial war of extermination against the region’s Slavic and Jewish populations.

As it scrutinizes the techniques of US and German colonialism, this book represents diversities in entanglements and multiplicities in approaching them. In the process it not only pays attention to the networks and webs of circulations in German–US connections, but situates them against a larger global canvas of empires that brought the United States to Germany and Germany to the United States, and both to the world. In all, this anthology represents a contribution to the recent scholarly attempt to turn attention to the global dimensions of German and US histories and thus it attests to the ongoing scholarly effort to look beyond the borders of the nation state and individual empires. Through this pursuit it deliberates on the nature, scope, and directionality of German and US colonial entanglements, on their shared colonial epistemologies and relational trajectories as rising world powers. Surely, this line of investigation has much more to offer, and the deliberations on the related German and US empires are just getting started.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1996), 1–38.

  2. 2.

    On Peters, see Arne Perras, Carl Peters and German Imperialism, 1856–1918 (New York: Clarendon Press, 2004), and Guettel and Jones in this volume; on Sering, Nelson, Guettel, and Lerp in this volume; and on Hagenbeck, Hilke Thode-Aroa, Für fünfzig Pfennig un die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen Völkerschauen (Frankfurt: Campus, 1989); Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

  3. 3.

    Julia Stetler, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Germany: A Transnational History (PhD dissertation, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2012); Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Knopf, 2005); Robert W. Rydell, and Rob Kroes. Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

  4. 4.

    Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 100–102. On Ratzel’s views of America, see Friedrich Ratzel, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika (München: R. Oldenburg, 1893).

  5. 5.

    On connections as plural, diverse, and intricate in global history, see Roland Wenzlhuemer, Doing Global History (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), esp. 5–12, 19–22.

  6. 6.

    Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the Reach of the Global,” in Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 430.

  7. 7.

    On the world of empires, see Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  8. 8.

    Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5–6; Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

  9. 9.

    Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 122.4 (October 2017), esp. 1139–1143, 1146.

  10. 10.

    Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 22. On Germans emulating Italian colonialism, see Patrick Bernhard, “Hitler’s Africa in the East: Italian Colonialism as a Model for German Planning in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 51.1 (2016), 61–90. See also Patrick Bernhard, “Colonial Crossovers: Nazi Germany and Its Entanglements with Other Empires,” Journal of Global History 12.2 (2017), 206–227. On German-British colonial connections, see Ulrike Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen: Deutschland und Großbritannien als Imperialmächte in Afrika 1880–1914 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011).

  11. 11.

    Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Sven Beckert, “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton,” Journal of American History 92.2 (2005), 498–526.

  12. 12.

    Guettel, German Expansionism; Robert L. Nelson, “From Manitoba to the Memel: Max Sering, Inner Colonization and the German East,” Social History 35 (November 2010), 439–457.

  13. 13.

    Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (New York: Palgrave, 2011); James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

  14. 14.

    Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War I (Cornell University Press, 2012).

  15. 15.

    On German emigration, see Stefan Manz, Constructing a German Diaspora: The “Greater German Empire,” 1871–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2014); Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nagel, eds., People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  16. 16.

    Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire, 7.

  17. 17.

    Guettel, German Expansionism, 4.

  18. 18.

    H. Glenn Penny, Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians Since 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop, eds., Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). See also Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

  19. 19.

    For the past two decades the volume of scholarship that examines various periods and strands of US history as empire, and connects it to the world has magnified. For overviews of available scholarship, see Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton, “Introduction,” in Hoganson and Sexton, eds., Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 1–22; Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116.5 (December 2011), 1348–1391.

  20. 20.

    See, for example, Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (New York: Vintage, 2019); Janne Lahti, The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2019); David Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); Hoganson and Sexton, Crossing Empires.

  21. 21.

    For an overview of German colonial history and historiography, see Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Jürgen Zimmerer, et all, Kein Platz an der Sonne: Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013).

  22. 22.

    See, foremost, Helmut Bley, Southwest Africa Under German Rule (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Horst Drechsler, “Let us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama Against German Imperialism (1884–1915) (London: Zeb Books, 1980); Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).

  23. 23.

    Settler colonialism refers to a form of colonialism that, as argued by its key theorist, the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, is preoccupied with replacement and access to territory, the land itself. It includes conquest, long-range migration, permanent settlement (or at least intent of such), elimination and substitution of Natives, and the reproduction of one’s own society on what used to be other people’s lands. See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (December 2006), 387–409. See also James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Janne Lahti, “What Is Settler Colonialism and What It Has to Do with the American West?,” Journal of the West 56.4 (Fall 2017), 8–12.

  24. 24.

    Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Rosenberg, A World Connecting; Osterhammel, Transformation of the World; Heather Streets-Salter, and Trevor R. Getz. Empires and Colonies in the Modern World: A Global Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  25. 25.

    The volume of this new scholarship is too broad to do justice here. Some key works with a global emphasis include, Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, eds., German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Dörte Lerp, Imperiale Grenzräume. Bevölkerungspolitiken in Deutsch-Südwestafrika und den östlichen Provinzen Preußens 1884–1914 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2016); Benjamin Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia,” Journal of Genocide Research 6.2 (June 2004), 167–192.

  26. 26.

    For example, Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire; Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa; Guettel, German Expansionism; Penny, Kindred by Choice.