D orian B ell . Globalizing Race

What was the connection between European overseas empire during the age of high imperialism and the development of modern continental antisemitism? By extension, what was the connection between modern colonial imperialism and the antisemitism-infused fascism that turn-of-the century antisemitic politicians and ideologues foreshadowed? Attempts to answer these questions date back at least as far as Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, wherein Arendt identified precedents for Europe’s totalitarian tragedies in earlier colonial endeavors. These questions have received increasing attention in recent years, primarily from historians of Germany interested in linkages between colonialism and the Holocaust, the Holocaust’s ideological antecedents, and Nazi population policies in wartime Eastern Europe. In my own work, which examines Imperial Germany, I argue that colonial imperialism and antisemitism influenced each other, in part by presenting Kaiserreich-era colonial actors and antisemites with ideas about, and policies toward, one type of racialized “other” that...

Antisemitism · Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Ethnology · Ideology · Judaism · Nazism · Political science · Politics · The Holocaust · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law