“The support and funding of the fleet was articulated by the politically aware German public as a national task,” writes Matthew Fitzpatrick, “with naval associations quickly spreading throughout the German-speaking states and abroad, with private citizens vigorous in their appeals to establish a navy capable of asserting Germany's position abroad” (p. 36). The year is not 1898 but 1848, when all but one member of the Frankfurt National Assembly voted for the establishment of a German naval fleet, and even the lone dissident (Hermann Grubert of Breslau) recognized the potency of a navy as a symbol of national unity. According to Fitzpatrick, the enthusiasm of the 1848 revolutionaries for a naval fleet was no flash in the pan, but typical of early German liberalism's consistent embrace of colonialism and imperialism. “The history of early German imperialism and that of German liberalism were remarkably intertwined,” he observes, “yet the major English language surveys of German liberalism, Dieter Langewiesche's Liberalism in Germany and James Sheehan's German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, have underplayed to the point of omission the role played by imperialism in the formulation of not only a liberal identity, but of a liberal national ideal” (p. 7). As this quote suggests, the young historian from Flinders University, Australia, is not afraid to pick fights with some of the biggest names in the field: Thomas Nipperdey, Wolfgang Mommsen, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler come in for similar criticism. Each, he suggests, has tended to portray German colonial history “as an historical dead end half a century before it was to become one” (p. 5).

Fitzpatrick's short but hard-hitting book seeks to reinstate imperialism as a fundamental constituent of German liberalism. As such it is a welcome and worthy addition to Berghahn's invaluable “Monographs in German History” series. Structured in three parts and eight chapters, the book first looks at liberalism's embrace of imperialism from the Vormärz era to the 1850s, focusing on individuals such as Hans Christoph von Gagern (father of National Assembly President Heinrich von Gagern), Alexander von Bülow, Johann Sturz, Wilhelm Roscher, and the ubiquitous Friedrich List. While the author is correct to argue that “prevailing historiographical paradigm” has tended to portray imperialism as a later corruption of liberalism's “true” ideals, his analysis in part one owes much to recent work by Frank Lorenz Müller (erroneously named “Franz” on p. 3) and Lora Wildenthal. Part two focuses on “private sector imperialism” before 1884—such as Hermann Blumenau's colony in Brazil and the activities of the Godeffroy & Son trading house in the Pacific region—and the world of the colonialist Verein in the same period. As well as explicitly colonialist associations such as the Colonisations-Verein von 1849 in Hamburg, Fitzpatrick also looks at the often underestimated role played by imperialism in the liberal Nationalverein of 1859. As he points out, the participation of National Association members such as Rudolf von Bennigsen and Johannes Miquel in the establishment of the Deutscher Kolonialverein in 1882 “was not a result of newfound colonial enthusiasm, but rather long-term imperialist ambitions for the new liberal nation” (p. 105). Part three turns to “the texts of imperialism,” by looking at the attempts of nineteenth-century geographers and anthropologists to categorize and characterize indigenous peoples along hierarchical lines, and to the role of popular culture in transmitting imperialist values through the pages of journals such as Die Gartenlaube, or the novels of Karl May.

Fitzpatrick is, of course, right when he states that by presenting the extra-European world as knowable and controllable, scientific research, the popular media, and the colonial novel all helped to further liberal imperialism. Yet he is hardly the first person to make this point, and it is somewhat disingenuous to claim that “this form of cultural production and transmission … has been ignored or, at best, understated” (p. 177). He is on firmer ground in his treatment of high politics, and the socio-political context of Bismarck's conversion to colonialism in 1884. Fitzpatrick agrees with Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann that Germany's belated entry into the race for colonies was neither the result of crude “social imperialism” (the view of “Bielefelders” such as Wehler), nor a response to foreign policy developments in Europe (the “neo-Rankean” view espoused by Klaus Hildebrand), but rather of Bismarck's desire to resurrect the fortunes of the National Liberal Party after the debacle of the 1881 Reichstag elections. “By embarking on an imperialist foreign policy,” Fitzpatrick suggests, “Bismarck implicitly conceded the political importance … of liberalism in Germany at the time” (p. 124). In so doing, he was also acknowledging the centrality of imperialism to German liberalism: it was, he concludes, “liberalism's longstanding answer to the social problems intrinsic to modernization” (p. 209).