A great postwar reconstruction challenge was the reintegration of West Germany into the global economy. The economic disruptions of two world wars had created a strategic knowledge gap, prompting economic actors to seek a better understanding of other regions’ potential as export markets for German goods. Subsequent knowledge production efforts are the subject of Steffen Dörre's study, which explores how discourse about Übersee (overseas) helped formulate a strategy to leverage increasingly available capital, decolonialization, and international admiration for the “miraculous” economic growth in 1950s West Germany in order to compete in the global economy. The book analyses changing economic-geographical conceptions of the term Ãbersee and traces the hopes for increasing commercial relations among foreign trade circles in the Federal Republic, covering the period from the immediate postwar years to the changing global economic landscape of the mid-1970s.

Dörre adds a new perspective to the rich economic-history literature on West Germany's postwar export successes with a cultural study of knowledge clusters and Denkkollektive (thought collectives). In the tradition of the German dissertation, this book is a thoroughly conceptualized and detailed study that draws primarily on archives of regional and national economic associations, chambers of commerce, and industrial organizations that represented export interests in the young Federal Republic. The inquiry is organized around the central term Übersee, which came to signify markets with structural and social issues completely different from industrialized countries in the West and state-trading nations in the Eastern bloc. This understanding of Übersee was rooted in collective learning about society, nature, culture, religion, and the “mentality” of these places. Methodologically, the study is located at the intersection of business and economic history, and the history of knowledge. What surprises is Dörre's criticism of business-history approaches for focusing on entrepreneurial genius and lacking contextualization (18–21), which he hopes to mend with the focus on collective knowledge production. With this excursus, he ignores at least a decade of Anglophone business-history literature, which has decidedly moved away from the omniscient Schumpeterian entrepreneur and has paved the path that Dörre now travels: the notion that societal ideas, norms, and values shape economic decision-making collectively.

The author reconstructs networks and knowledge clusters via letters, circulars, meeting agendas and minutes, and participant lists. Presentations, discussion transcripts, and a number of publications from interest representations for business, commerce, and export trade allow the tracing of knowledge production. Yet the idea of clusters suggests a homogeneity of opinion that the author rejects (180). In the end, the clusters mostly reflect the archival landscape of national and local trade associations that reproduce internal economic rivalries in West Germany. Apparently, communication was often easier to establish with German interlocutors in Dakar or Windhoek than between Munich and Hamburg (179). In the end, however, the idea of collective practice based on a shared understanding of Übersee among the West German Denkkollektive is one of Dörre's main conclusions.

Each chapter offers important insights beyond discourse analysis of knowledge production, frequently pointing to the deep entanglement of private interest and government economic and developmental policy. The second chapter follows West Germany's economic elites on goodwill missions to overseas, that is to Latin America, Africa, East Asia, and the Near and Middle East. These trips fed into the aforementioned presentations and publications about oversea markets, ending the previous knowledge monopoly of the Hanseatic cities with their historical ties to ports abroad. These cities often established relations with countries where the young republic had no diplomatic representation yet. The third chapter traces the emergence of export trade as the sine qua non for West German economic growth, alongside the realization that the global economic system is neither static nor a zero-sum game (95). Here we see the birth of Germany's success as export world champion with a large foreign trade deficit. Chapter 4 describes the institutional networks and knowledge clusters with regionally differing conceptions of, goals for, and concerns about underdeveloped overseas markets, showing that imperialist categories continued to shape the way in which economic actors thought and spoke about economic areas abroad. Chapter 5 is an excursus into private investment and official foreign aid policy, before chapters 6 and 7 delve deeply into shifts in knowledge production that manifest earlier curiosity about overseas in formalized forms of socio-cultural Entwicklungswissen (foreign aid knowledge).

Here the cultural aspects of this study shine brightest. However, the fact that knowledge productions about overseas Wirtschaftskultur (economic culture) is treated quite briefly in twenty-five pages (253-77) leaves the reader wanting more. After all, Dörre identifies this cultural interest among the foreign trade circles as particular to the period under consideration and as starkly contrasting with later scientific quantitative approaches to the collective endeavour to understand and evaluate overseas markets. Chapter 8 examines the translation of knowledge into collective practice, based on the conviction that the West German work ethic and efficient organization are unique export goods. Dörre discusses succinctly how this interpretation of Übersee knowledge led to apprenticeship schemes for foreign workers, with the aim of building up local elites, and leadership development for Germans to champion development overseas.

This study delivers on what it promises: to reconstruct the perspective of a group of influential economic actors on foreign markets and cultures in the global development process (14). However, it surprises that questions of power find no consideration, although Michel Foucault is cited as a theoretical inspiration for the discourse analysis. For instance, industrialists lobbied government for tax cuts, suggesting developmental aid by way of state-subsidized private investments in foreign markets, which meant that in the end “a large part of governmental development aid remained in the Federal Republic to the benefit of German industry and commerce” (285). Surely, preconceptions—produced, repeated, and reinforced in the discursive clusters that Dörre traces so skilfully—influenced which markets received direct investments and which ones did not. When discussing the “mentality” of foreign cultures, German observers commented repeatedly on the poor work ethic in “hot” countries (267–73). Yet the author does not question stereotypes as right or wrong; rather they are seen from a managerial perspective as cognitive facilitators in entrepreneurial decision-making (29). Although Dörre's subjects self-servingly displayed an air of anticolonialism to compete for sympathies abroad against colonial powers, they actively engaged in creating new postcolonial dependencies based on old colonial racism.