This book contributes to global history by examining the connected histories of German and United States colonial empires from the early nineteenth century to the Nazi era. It looks at multiple and multidirectional flows, transfers, and circulations of ideas, people, and practices as Germany and the US were embedded in, and created by, an interconnected world of empires. This relationship was not exceptional, but emblematic of the diverse entanglements that created colonial globality. Colonial entanglements between Germany and the United States took on many forms, but these shared and intersecting histories have been underanalyzed. Traditionally, Germany and the United States have been understood to have taken, respectively, an authoritarian and liberal path into modernity. But there is no neat dichotomy, as the contributors to this book illustrate. There are many more similarities than have previously been appreciated - and they are the result of multilayered entanglements made visible via conquest, settler societies, racialization, and rule of difference. Building on present historiographies of empires, colonialism, and globalization, this book introduces new analytical possibilities for examining these two relatively understudied empires alongside each other, as well as at their intersections. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Autorentext

Janne Lahti works as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He specializes in global and transnational histories of settler colonialism, borderlands, the American West, Imperial Germany, and Nordic colonialism. 

Inhalt
1.Janne Lahti - Introduction: Globalization and the Shared Histories of Empires

Part I Settler Spaces2.Gregor Thum - Seapower and Frontier Settlement: Friedrich List's American Vision for Germany3.Robert L. Nelson - From the Great Plains to Eastern Europe: Max Sering and the Dream of a Germanic Settler Empire4.Jens-Uwe Guettel - The Transition from Necessary to Incidental: American Westward Expansion and the Politics of Space in German Thought from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi Era
Part II Cultures of Colonialism5.Janne Lahti - Buffalo Bill, Carl Hagenbeck, and Human Exhibitions in United States and Germany6.A. Dana Weber - Masculinities in Karl May's Wild West Fictions and Their Theatrical Legacies7.Volker Langbehn - Satire Magazines and the Transnational Circulations of Colonial Racism8.Willeke Sandler - Empire and Race in Nazi Periodicals
Part III Colonial Policies9.Dörte Lerp - Ruling Classes and Serving Races: Transnational Influences and Segregated Agrarian Labor Regimes in the Kaiserreich Empire10.Ulrike Lindner - Segregated Intimacies: Miscegenation in the German Colonies and the American Philippines11.Tracey Reimann-Dawe - Transcontinental Railroads as Tools of Colonization in the German African Colonies and the American West 12.Michelle Moyd - Race and Military Recruitment Strategies in the German and United States Empires, 1870-191813.Dirk Bönker - German Weltpolitik, Empire by Sea, and the American Example
Part IV Violence14.George Steinmetz - Explaining Colonial Genocide: German Southwest Africa and the Ethical and Explanatory Imperatives of the Human Sciences15.Edward B. Westermann - Words and Wars of Annihilation: Military Strategy and Imperial Rhetoric in the American West and the Nazi East16.Björn Krondorfer and Alex Alvarez - Genocidal Colonial Policies in the Nazi East and the American West: What is the Value of Comparisons?
Afterword17.Andrew Zimmerman - Transnational Intersections of United States and German Empires18.Sebastian Conrad - Global Empires and Global Histories