Colonialism and society: Class and region in the popularization of overseas empire in Germany, 1890--1914.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation is a social history of colonialism in Wilhelmine Germany, from 1890 to 1914. It examines the popularization of the colonial empire and the spectrum of reception in different social classes and geographical areas. German colonialism first emerged in a significant way in the 1870s, as an organized movement of pressure groups and business interests, led eventually by the German Colonial Society. The movement claimed as its mission the broad dissemination of colonialism, and yet it excluded all but the educated and propertied bourgeoisie, both reflecting and reproducing deep divisions in German society. The powerful anticolonial rhetoric of the Social Democratic Party further reinforced class tensions, compounding the isolation of the colonialists and undermining their vision of colonialism as a cohesive force.
The dissertation emphasizes in particular the heterogeneous popular reception of colonialism. It combines four principal perspectives: institutional, cultural, social, and regional. It reconsiders the history of the organized movement, but dynamically, moving between the national and local levels and between the colonialist bourgeoisie and the working class. By tracing the transmission of colonial knowledge in the sphere of mass culture---including popular science, ethnographic exhibitions, and visual culture---and examining the diffuse relationships between culture and politics, the dissertation problematizes and refines notions of colonialism and its reception. Moving beyond the margins of organized colonial enthusiasm, a case study of Leipzig places colonialism in the context of local working-class history, examining class antagonisms, working-class reading culture and popular amusements, and Social Democratic anticolonial mobilization in the 1907 elections. A study of Bavaria emphasizes local reception in terms of region, in a part of southern, Catholic Germany often resistant to German nationalist projects.
By viewing colonialism as deeply intertwined with the political, social, and cultural history of the Kaiserreich, the dissertation engages a series of fundamental problems: the diffusion of racism in Germany; the role of manipulation and "social imperialism" in German politics; the convergence of imperialism and mass culture in popular forms of exoticism and orientalism; SPD anticolonialism and the tensions of a fractured class society; and the place of social class in the reproduction of knowledge.