Empire in three keys
Forging the imperial imaginary at the 1896 Berlin trade exhibition
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4481086 |
|---|---|
| Authors | G Steinmetz (0000-0002-5081-1114, University of Michigan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 139 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 46-68 |
| Publication date | 2017-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Thesis Eleven (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0725513617701958 |
| OpenAlex | W2606748886 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 25 |
Germany was famously a latecomer to colonialism, but it was a hybrid empire, centrally involved in all forms of imperial activity. Germans dominated the early Holy Roman Empire; Germany after 1870 was a Reich, or empire, not a state in the conventional sense; and Germany had a colonial empire between 1884 and 1918. Prussia played the role of continental imperialist in its geopolitics vis-à-vis Poland and the other states to its east. Finally, in its Weltpolitik - its global policies centered on the navy - Germany was an informal global imperialist. Although these diverse scales and practices of empire usually occupied distinct regions in the imaginations of contemporaries, there was one representational space in which the nation-state was woven together with empire in all its different registers: the Berlin trade exhibition of 1896. Because this exhibition started as a local event focused on German industry, it has not attracted much attention among historians of colonial and world fairs. Over the course of its planning, however, the 1896 exhibition emerged as an encompassing display of the multifarious German empire in all its geopolitical aspects. The exhibition attracted the attention of contemporaries as diverse as Georg Simmel and Kaiser Wilhelm. In contrast to Simmel and later theorists, I argue that it represented the empire and the nation-state, and not simply the fragmenting and commodifying force of capitalism. In contrast to Timothy Mitchell, I argue that the exhibit did not communicate a generic imperial modernity, but made visible the unique multi-scaled political formation that was the German empire-state
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · Capitalism · Colonialism · Empire · Exhibition · Geopolitics · German · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Australian History and Society · History · Islamic Studies and History · Japanese History and Culture · Law
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World of fairs
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Reshaping the German Right
Ecology of Fear
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Presenting and Consuming the Past
Fleeting Cities
The birth of the museum
Die Wūnsdorfer Moschee
The World as Exhibition
The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,43 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |