Content area
Full text
Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, ed. German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)
Including Bradley Naranch's introduction, this anthology, which consists of 18 contributions from prominent and emerging historians of modern Germany, exemplifies the vitality of research on German colonialism that has surfaced over the past 15 years. It covers the 100-year history of Germany as, in Bradley Naranch's words, an "expansion-oriented imperial state" (4) from imagining unification in the 1840s to National Socialism. Despite its title, this collection deals not only with colonialism as territorial control and/or settlement but also imperialism and empire in the broadest sense from the migration of Germans globally, to the informal economic penetration of Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, to (finally) the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe. It also explores a broad range of topics through which the contributors probe the depths of global and imperial imaginings in German politics, society, and culture. Although most chapters concentrate on Imperial Germany, this collection implicitly addresses the ongoing debate regarding the links between Imperial Germany as "empire" and that of the Third Reich. In Geoff Eley's words, the "genealogies of Nazism" (39) make little sense apart from the "connective dynamics" of periods that preceded...