Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 by Erik Grimmer-Solem (review)

In this impressive book, Erik Grimmer-Solem offers a new narrative of the German Empire's expansionist discourse and pursuit of global power from the 1870s through the 1910s. Learning Empire presents Wilhelmine Weltpolitik as an "improvised response" to, and product of, an "accretion of insights" about the "opportunities and challenges" presented by the processes of globalization that first came into view beginning in the 1870s (19). Weltpolitik flowed from a newly emerging and continually evolving liberal nationalist discourse about Weltwirtschaft and the interrelationship between global politics, empire, and economics. The discourse's prime movers were a group of university-trained, policy-oriented political economists, who as the nation's leading experts on matters of globalization gained, by 1900, the ears of key decision makers such as Alfred von Tirpitz and Bernhard von Bülow and then remained involved in key areas of imperial politics through the end of World War I. Embedded within the world of global scholarly connections, these economists forged the contours of their discourse in the crucible of their experience of overseas travel and study in multiple parts of the world, especially North America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Japan, and China, in the 1880s and 1890s.

Elegantly yoking intellectual history to the history of policy making, and deeply grounded in vast multiarchival research, Grimmer-Solem places at the center of his analysis a group of five German economists: Ernst von Halle, Karl Helfferich, Karl Rathgen, Herrmann Schumacher, and Max Sering. Eventually gaining professorships in political economy, these men were connected in one way or another to Gustav Schmoller, the doyen of Germany's school of historical political economy and eminent public figure, who also figures prominently in the analysis together with one of his American students, Henry Farnam. Organized in three chronologically arranged parts ("Absent-Minded Empire, 1875–1897"; "Empire Imagined, 1897–1907"; and "Empire Lost, 1908–1919"), Learning Empire closely follows the pursuits of its main characters, covering both their encounters with the new worlds of global politics and economics through study and travel and their direct involvement in key fields of national policy making. These fields range from the naval build-up, trade relations and tariff reform, and particular overseas empire pursuits (for example, in China) at the turn of the twentieth century, to the multifaceted colonial crisis of 1904–1907, the subsequent colonial reform efforts, the Anglo-German naval arms race, financial reform, and Weltpolitik projects such as the Baghdad railways before World War I. They extend to the formulation of annexationist war aims, unconditional submarine warfare, the Jewish census, and other wartime issues. Throughout, Grimmer-Solem richly situates the intellectual and political pursuits of his protagonists within both ever-changing concrete situational contexts and conjunctures and his own account of the changing worlds of big-power competition over empire and industry and the German Empire's national politics and pursuit of global power.

Learning Empire is a wonderfully ambitious book. Its goal is to offer not only a "new, wider narrative about German expansionism" but also a novel account of the "full arc" of German history from 1875 and 1919 as "concurrent with the rise and fall of the first era of globalization" (14, 19). It places liberal imperialism (including its radical nationalist mutation) and middle-class publics at the center of Germany's imperial imaginary and pursuit of global power and world empire. It stresses the paramount importance of the United States as the most important point of reference for German global-imperial aspirations and it presents Great Britain, not Germany, as the key destabilizing force in multicentered world politics before 1914, while stressing the fairly moderate and ultimately reactive and defensive nature of German ambitions in the fast-moving milieu of global power. Historiographically, Grimmer-Solem frames his intervention as an attempt to supersede, once and for all, any national exceptionalist narratives of the German Empire...