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

Grimmer-Solem's Learning Empire traces the circuits by which six university economists in Germany came to influence their country's economic, foreign, colonial, and social policy in the decades preceding World War I. Grimmer-Solem, deploying the tools of intellectual historians to examine these professors and their worldviews, mounts a robust, multifaceted inquiry into Germany's response to globalization in the long nineteenth century. In an innovative turn, he does so not through the use of familiar diplomatic and military documents but through the mobilization of the personal papers of German social scientists who, though mostly forgotten today, nonetheless enjoyed prominence in fin-de-siècle Europe. The reclamation of this source base is a significant achievement in itself.

Learning Empire mainly situates its findings within the voluminous historiography on modern Germany. Yet, the book also makes valuable contributions to growing secondary literatures about transnational entanglements, global flows of ideas, and the relationship between European liberalism and European imperialism. The depth and scope of the book are, accordingly, immense. Proceeding chronologically over the course of ten chapters, Grimmer-Solem examines Germany "in the world" along several lines: how the frontiers of the United States influenced the German push for settler colonies; Germany's infamous, if nebulous, demand for world status (Weltpolitik); Germany's hope to revise double standards in a British-dominated international system; the European naval arms race; public disappointments surrounding German colonial performance in Africa; responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914; and, not least, the failure of the postwar Versailles settlement. In each case, Grimmer-Solem scrutinizes certain professors' connections to power with the aim of refining, and periodically revising, conventional wisdom about German policies in the run-up to war. In this effort he succeeds, strongly conveying that members of the (widely liberal) German economics professoriate had a larger role in shaping German imperialism than has hitherto been appreciated.

What did this role look like? Learning Empire demonstrates that, when Wilhelmine Germans supported expansionist campaigns, leading professors of economics were well represented within the ranks and in government policies. Ernst von Halle and Hermann Schumacher, for example, produced timely propaganda touting the benefits of accelerated naval construction to schoolchildren and parliamentarians alike. In such cases, technical experts from German universities shaped the thinking of both domestic officials and a broad (and increasingly assertive) public. As Grimmer-Solem further shows, the professors in question operated as products of global networks, journeys, and conjunctures in an age when German universities enjoyed international preeminence.

But were these professors reliable indicators of overall "middle-class" opinion and behavior, as Grimmer-Solem argues? On this point, Learning Empire is less convincing. The book, in its sustained focus on professional economists as sources of opinion influencing the government, fails to define how such influence differed in impact from that wielded by, say, bourgeois journalists. Separately, the book does not address what role, if any, its chosen personalities played in influencing Otto von Bismarck's decision to enter Germany into the colonial scramble of the 1880s. In Chapters 8 and 9, which shed new light on German colonial reforms in the early 1900s, Grimmer-Solem's relative inattention to the origins of Germany's formal imperial project looks regrettable.

Grimmer-Solem's approach to writing has detectable strengths and weaknesses. His decision to craft economics professors' careers into the core of a prosopography is original, and it works especially well in the chapter about navalism. Elsewhere, however, the narrative gives the impression of too much information swirling around in too irregular a tempo, such that it becomes difficult to distinguish one intellectual career or moment from another. Further editing would have eased the way.

Such quibbles notwithstanding, Learning Empire is deserving of wide acclaim. Multiple generations studying Imperial Germany will benefit from Grimmer-Solem's learned, insightful book.