In Magic Lantern Empire, John Phillip Short identifies his topic as “the broad, shifting field of refraction, mediation, and dissemination of both discursive and visual representations of the overseas empire, a complex field that traced the contours and convulsions of German society in the period of its most intensified industrialization” (p. 2). We are asked to consider what empire might have meant to Germans during a time of amplified social stratification. Short explains early on that the “book examines colonialism in its metropolitan context, in an environment of class conflict in which the colonial empire was itself bitterly contested” (p. 3). Most significantly, colonialism remained somewhat ephemeral, a “form of knowledge” that did the lamentable but double cultural work of “both reproduc[ing] and dissolv[ing] class boundaries” (p. 3, emphasis in original). Put other ways, German colonialism was a “rhetoric” that helped to formulate an image of the “global” (p. 3) in the minds of Germans, yet it also functioned as a parasitic attack on the body of the “traditional public sphere” (p. 3)—or “better yet the idea” (p. 3) of the traditional public sphere, or even better the “post-public sphere” (p. 15) of late nineteenth-century Germany.

It is not incorrect to find this aspect of Short's argument confusing, but this imprecision is—strangely enough—part of his argument about the octopoid powers of colonialism itself. Metropolitan colonialism in Germany was rhetoric, discourse, and image. Inchoate and slippery, German colonialism legitimized antithetical positions. It was turned to seemingly limitless tasks, its manifold powers legendary for their abilities of coercion and seduction, of generating revulsion and reaction. Short ably demonstrates the ways that colonialism produced a kind of braided or woven set of intersecting reactions among metropolitan Germans. The diversity of responses that Short examines is a useful index of the varied social registers across which ideas and practices developed in the Kaiserreich, because, as Short puts it, there was “no uniform German ‘colonialism,’ but several, jostling and disturbing one another” (p. 17). Short's insight that we need a history of German colonialisms—and never just a uniform colonialism—provides an important new way to place German imperialism in its European and historical contexts.

Short's argument about German colonialism unfolds over the course of six brief chapters, and his emphasis on the diverse forms that colonialism assumed for metropolitan audiences is a welcome one. Beginning with the claim that German colonialism represented multiple force fields uncomfortably situated as debates between enchantment and knowledge, Short takes up the question of how the colonialism of the educated middle class, oriented around men and the public sphere of enlightenment, science, politics, and commerce, came to reflect the colonial aspirations of the elite. He carefully notes the singular importance of associational life to the development of the colonial enterprise among this social group, and he considers the ways that civil society successfully pushed a type of political colonialism in the 1880s and 1890s.

Short also examines the official practices of metropolitan colonialism alongside this social history of empire, and he considers the ways that Germans at home were sought-after targets of a process of colonial commodification. Simply put, the consumer life of empire represented a different mode of colonialism; unlike the scientific associationalism of middle-class elites, the proliferation of an empire-as-marketplace indicated another vision of colonialism, one that sought to legitimize empire through an appeal to the consumer. Short also considers how working-class Germans expressed their desires for empire, noting the poignant appeals of workers who sought support for their planned emigration to the colonies. A working-class form of settler colonization produced a colonialism that could function as an antidote to the diminished class status of the artisan at home. Many readers will find Short's chapter on “carnival knowledge” to be a compelling analysis of mass culture and the colonial project. Noting the nonofficial and subterranean visions of empire, Short explains that the celebrations of the grotesque, the weird, and the uncanny that adhered to popular representations of colonialism produced a type of imperial-entertainment complex that consisted of fairs, Ausstellungen, and Völkerschauen that combined the colonial with the logic of the freak show, generating a vision of the colonial far afield from the staid scientism of the middle-class association.

Short also contemplates the absorption and transformation of colonialist discourses by working-class audiences through an analysis of how working-class readers read colonial literature. Analyzing the records of SPD lending libraries, Short concludes that working-class intellectuals bridged the rowdiness of mass culture and the scientific literature of the elite by reading a range of works that included the scientific alongside grotesque and entertaining adventure stories. The book also includes a close analysis of the ways these multiple visions of empire came into conflict with one another during the so-called “Hottentot” elections of 1907, a situation in which the political was decided not just at the ballot box, but also through the theater of politics: the popular press, pamphlets, and even cycling clubs that used a particular vision of the colonial to advance certain political aims.

Short is part of an emerging group of historians—Michelle Moyd, David Ciarlo, and Jeff Bowersox, among others—who examine German colonialism and produce exciting new interpretations of the ways German colonialism worked, what its practices and practitioners sought to accomplish, and the gravitational pull that colonialism exerted over German politics, culture, and society during the Kaiserreich. John Short's work in this book, in which he considers not only the ways that colonialism was embraced by its “subaltern and demotic” (p. 3) practitioners, but also how the field was transformed through the unpredictable and uncontrollable ideas and practices of people who saw the magic in the magic lantern empire, makes his an important voice in these new histories of Germany's colonial past.