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German and
United States Colonialism
in a Connected World
Entangled Empires
Edited by Janne Lahti
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

Series Editors
Richard Drayton
Department of History
King’s College London
London, UK

Saul Dubow
Magdalene College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a well-
established collection of over 100 volumes focussing on empires in world
history and on the societies and cultures that emerged from, and chal-
lenged, colonial rule. The collection includes transnational, comparative
and connective studies, as well as works addressing the ways in which
particular regions or nations interact with global forces. In its forma-
tive years, the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth,
but there is now no imperial system, period of human history or part of
the world that lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome
the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies
by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong
thematic focus that help to set new research agendas. As well as history,
the series includes work on politics, economics, culture, archaeology, liter-
ature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most
exciting new scholarship on world history and to make this available to
a broad scholarly readership in a timely manner.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13937
 Janne Lahti
Editor

German and United

States Colonialism
in a Connected World
Entangled Empires
Editor
Janne Lahti
Department of Philosophy, History and Art
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland

ISSN 2635-1633 ISSN 2635-1641 (electronic)

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-53205-5 ISBN 978-3-030-53206-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2

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 Acknowledgments

As usual, academic gratitude has accumulated during the making of this

book. The period spent as a visiting scholar at Free University Berlin’s
Global History Program certainly proved extremely helpful in deep-
ening my views on German colonialism and contemplating on the forms
and range of historical connections between United States and German
empires. Thanks for having me over and for the exchange of ideas, Sebas-
tian Conrad. I also enjoyed the lattes/beers and the talks with Eriks
Bredovskis, Nicola Camilleri, Minu Haschemi Yekani, Adam Hjorthen,
Valeska Huber, Dörte Lerp, and Ben van Zee. The experience would not
have been as stimulating without my Global Settler Colonialism class.
Thanks to all the wonderful students for engaging my arguments and
challenging me. The same goes to the equally wonderful students at the
University of Helsinki, where I have taught several years on settler colo-
nialism and German and US empires. For enabling this book to come
to life in the first place, I wish to thank the Academy of Finland and
the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Both institutions, together with the
University of Helsinki, have kept my academic career afloat in recent years.
Research fellowships at the Hunting Library, in San Marino, California,
and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming, have also
been very helpful in nurturing my ideas on global empires. My magnif-
icent author team deserves a massive thanks. At Palgrave, Molly Beck,
Ashwini Elango, Maeve Sinnott, and Sam Stocker have proven most

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

helpful, patient, and supportive. Finally, my warmest thanks go, as always,

to my family, to my wife Sanna who has put up with me for two decades
already, and our two soon-to-be-adults, Sofia and Juho.
 Praise For German and United States
Colonialism in a Connected World

“Janne Lahti brings together a fine ensemble of international scholars to

look at one of the currently most rewarding fields in imperial history, the
history of transimperial entanglements. The volume specifically engages
with US-German imperial relations and throws new light on their great
historical significance. Lahti’s skillful and gripping introduction immedi-
ately draws the reader into the subject matter. His real feat, however,
lies in the composition of the contributions that covers broad historical
ground and at the same time provides in-depth empirical analysis. A timely
and stimulating book at the interface of imperial and global history.”
—Roland Wenzlhuemer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

“This outstanding collection of essays on the many entanglements of

Germany and the United States in the age of empire showcases a highly
dynamic research field of younger and established scholars that is breaking
down the barriers and stale conventions that have long hindered a full
understanding of global competitive colonialism. By also challenging
the national exceptionalism that has long contained both American and
German history, the essays are sure to spark lively debate that will lead to
productive new avenues of research.”
—Erik Grimmer-Solem, Wesleyan University

vii
viii PRAISE FOR GERMAN AND UNITED STATES COLONIALISM IN A …

“Entangled Empires presents global and transnational scholarship at their

finest. Full of original research, arresting insights, and powerful case
studies, the essays collected here decentre US and German colonialism
in compelling ways. In crisp and elegant prose the authors in this superb
collection show as never before how the United States and German impe-
rial formations were entangled by flows of knowledge, people, and strate-
gies of colonial domination, and developed relationally with one another.
This carefully curated volume showcases how the signature methods of
transnational and global history—connected, comparative, and collabo-
rative—offers vital new understandings on imperial formation and the
imperial origins of contemporary globality.”
—Stephen Tuffnell, St Peter’s College, University of Oxford

“This important collection offers a wealth of thought-provoking essays

that open up a long overdue discussion about the myriad ways that U.S.
and German colonialism interacted with one another across the long nine-
teenth century. After reading German and United States Colonialism in
a Connected World, it will be impossible to think about U.S. or German
history—or, indeed, global history—the same way ever again.”
—Karl Jacoby, Columbia University

“The compelling essays in this rich, wide-ranging volume vividly demon-

strate the value of approaching histories of modern colonialism as globally
entangled. Focusing on the ways Germans’ perceptions of U. S. empire—
as inspiration and model, rival and threat—shaped their understandings
of Germany as nation, empire and world power, the essays reveal myriad
ways that German visions of settler-colonial rule, racialized power and
colonial violence crossed national and imperial boundaries.”
—Paul Kramer, Vanderbilt University
 Contents

1 Introduction: Relational Empires 1

Janne Lahti

Part I Portabilities

2 Seapower and Frontier Settlement: Friedrich List’s

American Vision for Germany 17
Gregor Thum

3 The Fantasy of Open Space on the Frontier: Max

Sering from the Great Plains to Eastern Europe 41
Robert L. Nelson

4 The Role of US Railroads in the German Expansionist

Mindset of Gerhard Rohlfs 63
Tracey Reimann-Dawe

5 Between France, Germany, and the United States:

Raymond Aron as a Critical Theorist of Colonialism
and Empire 83
George Steinmetz

ix
x CONTENTS

Part II Passages

6 “A Truly Exquisite Little Phrase:” Global Colonialist

Visions vs. The “Drang nach Osten” 109
Jens-Uwe Guettel

7 Ruling Classes and Serving Races: German Policies

on Land, Labor, and Migration in Trans-Imperial
Perspective 129
Dörte Lerp

8 How the Südwest Was Won: Transnational Currents

of American Agriculture and Land Colonization
in German Southwest Africa 153
Jeannette Eileen Jones

9 Practicing Empire: Germany’s Colonial Visions

in the Pacific Northwest 177
Eriks Bredovskis

Part III Parallels

10 Similarity in Appearance—“Chinaman” in German

and American Satire Magazines Around 1900 203
Volker M. Langbehn

11 “I Almost Pulled Her to My Heart, but…”

Competing Masculinities in Karl May’s Wild West
Fictions and Their Modern Theatrical Adaptations 229
A. Dana Weber

12 In Service of Empires: Apaches and Askaris

as Colonial Soldiers 253
Janne Lahti and Michelle R. Moyd
 CONTENTS xi

13 Words and Wars of Conquest: The Rhetoric

of Annihilation in the American West and the Nazi
East 277
Edward B. Westermann

Part IV Afterwords

14 Empires of Comparison 301

Andrew Zimmerman

15 Settler Colonialism and Financial Imperialism: The

German and United States Empires in a Global Age 307
Sebastian Conrad

Index 315
 Notes on Contributors

Eriks Bredovskis is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at

the University of Toronto and affiliate with the Collaborative Program at
the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Funded by the Canada
Graduate Scholarship from SSHRC, his dissertation examines German
anxiety about US empire from 1878 to 1918, with a particular interest
in Germans in the North Pacific Ocean. His most recent publication is
titled “Sketching America: German Depictions of the United States and
Woodrow Wilson” in the October 2019 issue of German Studies Review.
Sebastian Conrad is Professor of Global History at the Free Univer-
sity of Berlin. He has a background in both modern Western European
and Japanese history and is currently interested primarily in transnational
and global history approaches and their contribution to an understanding
of the interactions and entanglements of the past. His recent publica-
tions include German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2012), What is Global History? (Princeton University Press,
2016), and An Emerging Modern World, 1750–1870, eds. with Jürgen
Osterhammel, (A History of the World, vol. 4; The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2018).
Jens-Uwe Guettel is Associate Professor of German Studies and History
at Penn State. His first book, German Expansionism, Imperial Liber-
alism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge University Press,
2012), focuses on the domestic ramifications of colonial expansion for

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and Nazi expansionism.

His current book project, Radical Democracy in Germany, 1871–1918,
takes a broad look at women, socialists, anarchists, and a host of other
individuals and movements interested in radical change in Germany
before 1918. Guettel’s articles have appeared, for instance, in the Journal
of Modern History, Central European History, and Modern Intellectual
History.
Jeannette Eileen Jones is Associate Professor of History and Ethnic
Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research expertise
and interests include Gilded Age and Progressive Era history, transna-
tional history, pre-Colonial Africa, history of science, digital history, Black
European Studies, and the Black American West. She is the author of
In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in Amer-
ican Culture, 1884–1936 (The University of Georgia Press, 2010). She is
currently working on her second monograph, America in Africa: U.S.
Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1821–1919, which is under
advanced contract with Yale University Press.
Janne Lahti works as Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the
University of Helsinki, Finland. His research focuses on global and
transnational histories of settler colonialism, borderlands, the Amer-
ican West, and German and Nordic colonialism. He has authored five
books, including Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film,
with Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Routledge, 2020), The American West
and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge,
2019), and Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the South-
west Borderlands (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). His current book
project is titled Global Settler Colonialism: American West and Imperial
Germany in the World of Empires.
Volker M. Langbehn is Professor in the German Program at San Fran-
cisco State University. His scholarly interests include German Literature
from 1700–1820 and from 1890–present, theory of literature, cultural
criticism, European and American Colonialism, Visual Studies, and Geno-
cide Studies. His main publications include German Colonialism: Race,
Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, with Mohammad Salama (Columbia
University Press, 2011) and German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and
Modern Memory (Routledge, 2010). Langbehn’s current project is titled
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Precursors to Genocide: European and American Imperialism and Mass

Culture from the late 19 th Century to 1933.
Dörte Lerp works as postdoctoral researcher at the Free University of
Berlin. Her research interests include German and European colonial
history, postcolonial memorial culture as well as tourism and development
history. Her first monograph, Imperiale Grenzräume. Bevölkerungspoli-
tiken in Deutsch-Südwestafrika und den östlichen Provinzen Preußens
1884–1914 (Campus, 2016), examined colonial policies in German
Southwest Africa and the eastern Prussian provinces. Her current project,
funded by the German Research Council, investigates how tourism shaped
European-African economic and socio-political relations. Her publica-
tions also include New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire.
Comparative and Global Approaches, with Ulrike Lindner (Bloomsbury
2018).
Michelle R. Moyd is Associate Professor of History at Indiana Univer-
sity—Bloomington. She is a historian of eastern Africa, with special inter-
ests in the region’s history of soldiering and warfare. She is also inter-
ested in bringing the experience of nineteenth-century African-American
soldiers into a broader analysis of soldiers of empire. Her book, Violent
Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in
German East Africa, was published by the Ohio University Press in 2014.
Robert L. Nelson is Head of the Department of History at the Univer-
sity of Windsor, Canada. His main areas of research include settler colo-
nial studies, cultural military history, the law of warfare, and food history.
His revised Cambridge dissertation appeared in 2011 as German Soldier
Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge University Press). Earlier
he published the edited volume Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expan-
sion to the East: 1850 Through the Present (Palgrave, 2009). He is currently
working on the biography of Max Sering.
Tracey Reimann-Dawe is Assistant Professor in German at Durham
University, UK. Her research interests focus on aspects of German
history, literature, and culture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards,
including colonialism, travel writing, nationalism, cultural memory, and
protest movements. Her publications include “Time and the Other in
Nineteenth-Century German Travel Writing,” Transfers: Interdisciplinary
Journal of Mobility Studies [Special section ‘Travel Writing and Knowl-
edge Transfer], 2016 and “The British Other on African soil: the rise
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of nationalism in colonial German travel writing on Africa”, Patterns of

Prejudice [Special issue ’German Nationalist and Colonial Discourse’],
2011.
George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology at the
University of Michigan and has been a tenured professor at the Univer-
sity of Chicago and the New School in New York. His main areas are
the sociology of empires and states, social theory, and the history and
philosophy of the social sciences. His recent publications include “Sozi-
ologie und Kolonialismus: Die Beziehung zwischen Wissen und –Politik,”
Mittelweg 36 (May 2020), “Scientific Autonomy, Academic Freedom,
and Social Research in the United States,” Critical Historical Studies
(Fall 2018), and “Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French
Empires, 1940–1960s,” Journal of Modern History 89.3 (2017).
Gregor Thum is Associate Professor of History at the University of
Pittsburgh. He is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Central
European history with a particular interest in the German borderlands
of east central Europe, the history of forced migration, and politics of
the past. He is the author of Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław
during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton University Press, 2011),
editor of Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20.
Jahrhundert (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006) and co-editor of Helpless
Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear, and Radicalization (Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2013).
A. Dana Weber is Associate Professor of German in the Department of
Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University in Talla-
hassee. Her interdisciplinary research addresses diverse topics including
performativity, performance and the uncanny, Karl May festivals, the films
of Fritz Lang and Quentin Tarantino, film noir in East Germany, and
the German Romantic novella. Dana is the author of Blood Brothers and
Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals (University of
Wisconsin Press, 2019), editor of the essay collection Performativity—
Life, Stage Screen. Reflections on a Transdisciplinary Concept (LIT Verlag,
2018), and author of several articles.
Edward B. Westermann is Professor of History at Texas A&M
University-San Antonio. He has published extensively on the Holocaust
and military history, including Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars:
Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

and Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (Univer-
sity Pres of Kansas, 2005). His newest book, Drunk with Genocide?
Drinking Rituals, Masculinity, and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany will
be published by Cornell University Press in March 2021.
Andrew Zimmerman is Professor of History at the George Washington
University. They is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in
Imperial Germany (Chicago University Press, 2001) and Alabama in
Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization
of the New South (Princeton University Press, 2010). They has also edited
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (Inter-
national Publishers, 2016). Their current project is writing a transnational
history of the American Civil War.
 List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual Cover (1905) (Courtesy

of History Nebraska) 166
Fig. 8.2 Top Left: Oxcart on the Trek. Bottom Left: Rambouillet
Sheep in Rehoboth. Top Right: Grazing Land of His
Majesty’s the Emperor’s Farm. Bottom Right: Cattle
Herd by the Open Water (Source Deutschland als
Kolonialmacht: Dreißig Jahre deustche Kolonialgeschichte
[1914]) 169
Fig. 9.1 Page from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer
“Falke,” Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von
Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nord-
und Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N
173/31, Bd. 31 183
Fig. 9.2 Page from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer
“Falke,” Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von
Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nord-
und Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N
173/31, Bd. 31 186
Fig. 9.3 Image from Paul Behncke, “Kleiner Kreuzer
‘Falke,’ Auslandsreisen unter dem Kommando von
Korvettenkapitän Paul Behncke (Fotoalben), Nord-
und Mittelamerika,” Bundesarchiv-Freiburg, BArch N
173/31, Bd. 31 193

xix
xx LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 10.1 Celestial Ladies, from Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 2, no.

53 (January 2, 1858). Held by the Lincoln Financial
Foundation Collection, held in the Lincoln Library,
Allen County Public Library (Image courtesy of Internet
Archive. https://www.archive.org/) 209
Fig. 10.2 Chinese Coolies, from Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 2, no.
53 (January 2, 1858). Held by the Lincoln Financial
Foundation Collection, held in the Lincoln Library,
Allen County Public Library (Image courtesy of Internet
Archive. https://www.archive.org/) 210
Fig. 10.3 “What Shall We Do With Our Boys?,” Oakland Museum
of California (https://www.archive.org/) 212
Fig. 10.4 “Im Hospital der Unheilbaren,” Heidelberg University
Library (https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kla
1900/0324) 219
Fig. 11.1 From left to right: Nscho-tschi (Radost Bokel), Old
Shatterhand (Jochen Bludau, ✝ 2019), Intschu-tschuna
(Wolfgang Kirchhoff), and Winnetou (Jean-Marc
Birkholz), in blood-brotherhood scene, Elspe 2012
(Photograph by A. Dana Weber) 234
Fig. 11.2 From left to right: Nscho-tschi (El’ Dura), Winnetou
(Hans Otto), and Old Shatterhand (Ludwig Körner),
Berlin 1929 (Image available in the public domain) 241
Fig. 11.3 Uschi Behm (right) and a friend as Old Shatterhand
and Winnetou on the shooting location of Winnetou’s
film adaptation in Croatia, 1982 (Used with permission) 247
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Relational Empires

Janne Lahti

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 cele-
bration 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 exam-
ples 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

J. Lahti (B)
Department of Philosophy, History and Art, University of Helsinki, Helsinki,
Finland
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 1

J. Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected
World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53206-2_1
2 J. LAHTI

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 inspi-
ration 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, incorpo-
rated topics from other colonial empires to his show, and was a smash
success, especially in Germany.3 Even Turner engaged with German colo-
nialism. He was impressed by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel,
who had toured the American West prior to coining the term leben-
sraum, 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 fron-
tier 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 multidi-
rectional 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 Ballan-
tyne and Antoinette Burton on the need to explore relationships and
 1 INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES 3

spaces not merely within but between empires,6 this anthology exam-
ines 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 excep-
tional 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 investi-
gate 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 “exter-
nal” so prevalent in national histories, but to situate what we discuss via
an inherently relational and dynamic framework of structured transforma-
tions 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 imag-
ined 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,
4 J. LAHTI

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 globaliza-
tion.”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 stim-
ulated 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 perti-
nently 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 strat-
egy” in the Kaiserreich.16 Guettel, in turn, has stressed how the United
States and its forms of empire and colonialism—territorial expansions
 1 INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES 5

and racialization—were especially attractive among, and deeply perme-

ated 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 tran-
simperial 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 colo-
nial 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 reconcep-
tualizing 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 over-
look 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
6 J. LAHTI

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 thou-
sands 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 initi-
ating 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 inten-
sifying, 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 funda-
mental 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 consid-
erable. 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 multilay-
ered networking and circulations between empires. These entanglements
involved numerous actors, a broad repertoire of exchanges, and count-
less forms of influencing and borrowing. This book does not pretend to
 1 INTRODUCTION: RELATIONAL EMPIRES 7

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 discus-
sion on the meanings and connotations of these connections. It also
wishes to offer analytic threads for further investigation. This book intro-
duces 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 diver-
gent 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
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