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This remarkably thorough and readable synthesis of the latest scholarship on Nazism and the Holocaust seems destined to become the standard survey of German history from unification to the end of World War II for a generation for whom the notions of "globalizationâ[euro] and "postcolonialismâ[euro] have become defining concepts. The novelty of Baranowski's synthesis lies in explaining the Nazis' willful and irrational destructiveness as the radical culmination of Germany's belated and particularly violent entry into the scramble for colonial possessions and continental Lebensraum. In six carefully constructed chapters of roughly equal length, Baranowski moves from the German Empire through World War I and the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany in peacetime, World War II, and the Holocaust. While rather perfunctorily dismissing Hans-Ulrich Wehler's now somewhat unfashionable (at least among non-German historians) Sonderweg paradigm, which attributes the root cause of Nazism to Germany's deviation from the liberal western model of political modernization in the nineteenth century, she does show how deeply rooted Nazi aims and methods were in the political and military culture of the "Second Empireâ[euro] and especially in the colonial and expansionist aspirations not just of its ruling elite but of the broad middle-class public as represented in militant right-wing pressure groups as well. By tracing the intermittent radicalization of the right, a process that began well before World War I but gathered steam in proportion to the real and perceived decline of German fortunes in and after the Great War, however, she stresses discontinuities as much as continuities and leaves no doubt that despite genocidal colonial military campaigns in Southwest and East Africa, the methods of control and domination used both at home and abroad in the Second Empire were of a qualitatively different order compared to the much more extreme methods of the Third Reich. "Although the National Socialists would regret the incompleteness of the Bismarckian unificationâ[euro] she writes, "and underscore the faults of Imperial German domestic and foreign policy, they would build on the Second Empire's legacies even as they catalogued its failuresâ[euro] (p. 66). The peculiarity of German imperialism--what made it more destructive than the colonialism of the much larger empires of Germany's European rivals--lay in what Baranowski calls "the conflict between...