The German Love Affair With American Empire

With the one-hundredth anniversary of the First World War upon us, a spate of new studies on the Second German Empire and its colonial legacy have landed on the bookshelves. Jens-Uwe Guettel’s first book is in good company. It joins the works of Sebastian Conrad, Birthe Kundrus, and Andrew Zimmerman in revisiting Germany’s imperial past through a wider geographical lens. Guettel’s perspective, though, stands out. Rather than turning to Africa or East Asia, where Wilhelminian Germany acquired its official colonies, Guettel searches for clues to the transnational coding of Germany’s colonialist designs in another, more unlikely place: the country’s historical relationship with the United States. German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States is an ambitious undertaking. In a time of increased scholarly specialization, the book’s chronological scope—it spans almost two hundred years from the American Revolution to the end of the Second World War—is refreshingly bold. A senior lecturer at Pennsylvania State University, Guettel does not shrink from picking a fight or two. He takes considerable delight in locking horns with the titans of post-1945 German historiography, most notably with Hans-Ulrich Wehler. His main thesis deserves attention. From the revolutionary era onward, Guettel argues, the United States provided an important template for a territorially expansive and racially stratified empire-state that Germans aspiring to put their nation on a similar trajectory learned to appreciate. Driving yet another nail into the coffin of the Sonderweg paradigm, which holds that Germany followed an exceptional path to modernity, Guettel demonstrates just how much liberal Germans in pursuit of empire relied on international precedents, and how North American developments shaped their thinking on subjects ranging from global mercantile penetration and territorial conquest to population control and the subjugation of racial others.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Economic history · Empire · German · Political science · European history and politics · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · History