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.

Explores the entangled, interconnected histories of German and United States colonialism Highlights the many similarities between these two empires, resulting from the global contexts in which they were situated and bound together Brings together a distinguished range of scholars whose chapters organized into four themes: space, cultures, policies and violence

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 Spaces.- 2 Gregor Thum - Seapower and Frontier Settlement: Friedrich List's American Vision for Germany.- 3 Robert L. Nelson - From the Great Plains to Eastern Europe: Max Sering and the Dream of a Germanic Settler Empire.- 4 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 Colonialism.- 5 Janne Lahti - Buffalo Bill, Carl Hagenbeck, and Human Exhibitions in United States and Germany.- 6 A. Dana Weber - Masculinities in Karl May's Wild West Fictions and Their Theatrical Legacies.- 7 Volker Langbehn - Satire Magazines and the Transnational Circulations of Colonial Racism.- 8 Willeke Sandler - Empire and Race in Nazi Periodicals.- Part III Colonial Policies.- 9 Dörte Lerp - Ruling Classes and Serving Races: Transnational Influences and Segregated Agrarian Labor Regimes in the Kaiserreich Empire.- 10 Ulrike Lindner - Segregated Intimacies: Miscegenation in the German Colonies and the American Philippines.- 11Tracey 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, 1870-1918.- 13 Dirk Bönker - German Weltpolitik, Empire by Sea, and the American Example.- Part IV Violence.- 14 George Steinmetz - Explaining Colonial Genocide: German Southwest Africa and the Ethical and Explanatory Imperatives of the Human Sciences.- 15 Edward B. Westermann - Words and Wars of Annihilation: Military Strategy and Imperial Rhetoric in the American West and the Nazi East.- 16 Björn Krondorfer and Alex Alvarez - Genocidal Colonial Policies in the Nazi East and the American West: What is the Value of Comparisons?.- Afterword.- 17 Andrew Zimmerman - Transnational Intersections of UnitedStates and German Empires.- 18 Sebastian Conrad - Global Empires and Global Histories.