One of the most influential readings of the history of globalization sees the outbreak of the First World War as the decisive watershed in a process that had originated much earlier. In its wake, the standard account has it, the interruption of cross-border interaction ushered in a phase of ‘deglobalization’ that culminated in the economic crisis of 1929 and the Second World War. The world of the nineteenth century, by contrast, then appears as a virtual utopia of peaceful interaction and cultural entanglement. As Harold James phrased it, 1914 marked the moment when ‘the wheel of globalization was turned back, and a new epoch of barbarity set in’.Footnote ¹ As long as the spirit of bourgeois cosmopolitanism survived, the unhindered mobility of people, things, and ideas seemed unbroken. It was only the seminal catastrophe or ‘Urkatastrophe’ of the Great War that marked the end of this happy phase of globalization, free trade, and liberalism, and signalled the beginning of an epoch of nationalism, xenophobia, and politics of exclusion. The economic historian Jeffrey Williamson goes so far as to call the period before 1914 a ‘belle époque’, the period from 1914 to 1950 the ‘dark middle years’, and the subsequent era a ‘renaissance’.Footnote ²

This perspective owes much to the views of contemporaries. In his nostalgic musings about the ‘World of Yesterday’, novelist Stefan Zweig has given vivid expression to the notion of global cosmopolitanism: ‘Before 1914’, Zweig writes, ‘the earth belonged to all people. Everyone went wherever he wanted and stayed as long as he wished.’ To him, there existed no borders that were more than ‘symbolical lines that were transgressed as easily as one stepped across the meridian at Greenwich’. This innocent and peaceful world was only shattered after 1914. Zweig speaks of an ‘enormous backlash ... that the world experienced after the First World War’, of the end to all cosmopolitan hopes and aspirations: ‘Only after that war did the destruction of the world through national socialism begin’, Zweig summarizes; ‘only then did xenophobia, or at least the fear of foreigners, set in’.Footnote ³

What Zweig's account suggests is, in principle, a familiar trope: globalization and nationalism are at odds with each other; they appear, in essence, as contradictory phenomena. Much of what has been written about the imminent dissolution of nation-states in the process of current globalization is part of a similar paradigm. In the theoretical literature on globalization, too, processes of de-territorialization (for which, read globalization) are frequently pitted against phases of – lamentable – re-territorialization along national lines.Footnote ⁴

It is important to recognize, however, that Stefan Zweig's was not necessarily a representative experience. As a renowned and well-off novelist, as an educated white man from Western Europe, he was faced with very different conditions from other people experiencing global mobility: Chinese ‘coolies’, Russian immigrants to the United States, and Polish seasonal workers in Eastern Prussia. Zweig's celebration of borderless mobility – ‘we embarked and disembarked without ever asking or being asked’ – was not easily extended to the kind of mass migration that was one of the defining characteristics of globalization in the late nineteenth century. The fear of immigrants and human invasion was not prompted by people such as Zweig, but rather by what was frequently termed the ‘flood’ of nameless strangers from across the borders. And their experience of globalization was quite a different one: immigration procedures, hygienic controls, fingerprints and passports, citizenship laws, and exclusion acts all contributed, from the late nineteenth century, to the entrenchment of national borders. Between 1890 and 1914, imagined lines in Europe were turned into national borders.

In what follows, therefore, I suggest that, contrary to common assumptions, globalization and nationalization were not pitted against each other, but were rather complementary, if not symbiotic. I will use the case of Imperial Germany, long a favourite topic of historians interested in the radicalization of nationalism and its legacies in the early twentieth century. This radicalization has mostly been explained in internalist terms: German history as a peculiar path, a Sonderweg.Footnote ⁵ I will argue instead that the dynamics of German nationalism were partly a reaction to transnational interactions. To do this, I will first take a brief look at the strategies that have hitherto been employed to make sense of the radical turn of German nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Then, I will focus on processes of trans-border exchange and entanglement to show to what extent the trajectories of nationalism in the German Kaiserreich were shaped by the global conjuncture.Footnote ⁶

Theorizing German nationalism in the nineteenth century

Between 1880 and 1914, the integration of the international economy, the political and imperial expansion of the West, and the increase in cultural exchanges across national borders contributed to a complex set of global engagements. This did not go unnoticed by contemporaries, who closely witnessed this process with enthusiasm, or apprehension. Not unlike today, the question of how to grasp the relationship between the nation and the process of trans-border exchange received much attention. The most common interpretation was one that perceived globalization – or internationalization, in contemporary parlance – as a natural stage of development in human history: after nations had consolidated into organized nation-states, conventional opinion had it, they would gradually relate to each other, internationalize, and engage in world trade and world politics. ‘The family forms a tribe, and several tribes form a state and the nation’, as the Social Democrat August Bebel typically phrased it, ‘and finally the close interaction of nations will result in internationality. That is the historical process.’Footnote ⁷ First the nation, and then entanglements – those were the generally accepted stages of global development.

This interpretation – what I call the paradigm of consecutiveness – has been largely reproduced by much of recent scholarship. When analysing the ‘mechanics’ of internationalism in the late nineteenth century, historians stress the a posteriori character of cross-border interaction. Only fully fledged nation-states – and civil society groups within these nations – seemed in a position to engage in negotiations and exchange across borders. As Leila Rupp writes, using the example of women's movements, ‘Nationalism was a precondition of internationalism, or at least a necessary condition.’Footnote ⁸

It is interesting to note that, in the historiography of German nationalism, the issue of internationalism has only begun to be raised in recent years. It is probably no exaggeration to say that historians of Germany have clung to the internalist paradigm more stubbornly than elsewhere.Footnote ⁹ The main concern, instead, was with the radicalization of German nationalism from the final decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ This transformation revealed itself, the standard interpretation went, on two levels. First, in the Wilhelmine period, nationalism was popularized and began to reach far beyond the educated elites as its original constituency. The growing importance of state institutions that inculcated nationalism – the schools, the military – were an important factor in creating a mass base for nationalism, but even more so was the press and in particular the emergence of national associations.Footnote ¹¹ Second, the structures and ideological contents of nationalism changed as well. For a long time, this shift has been interpreted as a shift in the political function of nationalism – a move from the ‘left’ to the conservative ‘right’. Recent scholarship has instead focused on the connection of nationalism to discourses of ethnicity and race. As a result, social hygienic as well as eugenic practices and technologies were employed to foster the alleged ‘purity’ of the nation, both without and within. The reconfiguration of the nation under the influence of racial practices and biological theories such as anti-Semitism was the central characteristic of this radicalization of fin-de-siècle nationalism.Footnote ¹²

The emergence of mass nationalism and its concomitant radicalization was primarily explained internally. What was frequently eclipsed was the larger – European and non-European – context within which the German Empire was situated. Historians, in other words, largely took German nationalism out of the world – at precisely the moment when the notion of the ‘world’ assumed centre stage in German politics and the public sphere. The logic here was one that resembles the stages theory pronounced by August Bebel: the mass base and racial radicalization of nationalism was seen as the cause and precondition of later imperialism and ‘world politics’. Colonial acquisitions, free-trade imperialism, and racialized wars were taken to be the result of Wilhelmine hubris – while not in turn affecting the nature of German identities. German nationalism changed from within, the received wisdom had it, before aggressively reaching out.

Recent cultural histories of nationalism have done much to modify this perspective.Footnote ¹³ Scholars such as Michael Jeismann and Dieter Langewiesche have demonstrated that the dynamics of nationalism cannot be fully understood without reference to other societies. Most prominent in this regard are France, the ‘fatherland of the enemies’,Footnote ¹⁴ and later the ‘internal enemies’,Footnote ¹⁵ the Jews and the Poles.Footnote ¹⁶ In addition, much recent scholarship has illuminated the extent to which Germany was implicated in processes of colonial and global integration before the First World War. On the one hand, the colonial past has received wide attention, frequently informed by postcolonial studies and an interest in the effects of the colonial encounter in the metropole.Footnote ¹⁷On the other hand, scholars have begun to investigate the mechanisms of international and global integration and have reconstructed Germany's role as one of the major players in the process of globalization before 1914.Footnote ¹⁸ In what follows, I will build on this growing literature to argue that, in order to understand the dynamics of Wilhelmine nationalism, we need to take into account the global context that reached deep into the German Kaiserreich.

Among the many aspects of the increasing entanglement of the world, it was the process of mobility and migration that particularly affected the global discourse on what it meant to be a nation. The mobility of large numbers of people was one of the defining characteristics of globalization in the late nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has shown that, between 1840 and the 1930s, more than 150 million people left their countries of origin for elsewhere, often to settle permanently.Footnote ¹⁹ However, these global movements were accompanied by the erection of global walls. The movement and circulation of people, in other words, proved to be a rather paradoxical process: a truly transnational phenomenon that, at the same time, reinforced national borders and mechanisms of exclusion.Footnote ²⁰

In the case of Germany, too, migration was one of the forms through which large segments of the population experienced the global entanglement at first hand. The third wave of transatlantic migration between 1880 and 1893 led almost two million people overseas, mainly to the United States.Footnote ²¹ It was accompanied by intense public debate, in which the alleged ‘loss of national energies’ was pitted against the advantages of migration as a ‘safety valve’ that rid the Empire of ‘revolutionary elements’. When outbound movements subsided, immigration figures began to soar, mainly drawn from Russia and Austrian Galicia, but also from Italy and the Netherlands. Germany effectively turned into a country importing cheap labour on a scale only second to the United States.Footnote ²² In addition, migrants from eastern Europe continued to travel through Germany on their way across the Atlantic. Their temporary sojourns had repercussions in Germany on different levels: West of Berlin, the train station in Ruhleben was built in 1890 for the sole purpose of channelling incoming labourers to the outbound sea ports. On the national level, it was the high proportion of Jewish migrants that particularly aroused public suspicion in a climate increasingly dominated by anti-Semitism.Footnote ²³

As Klaus Bade and others have convincingly argued, cross-border migration since the 1880s increasingly emerged as a central site where questions of belonging, of citizenship, and of nation were negotiated.Footnote ²⁴ This is not to imply, to be sure, that the concept of the nation originated in the years of intensified global exchange from the 1880s onwards. German nationalism, as elsewhere, was shaped by a longer tradition that reached back at least to the Napoleonic wars. Romanticism, the 1848 revolution, and the unification movement further contributed to the dynamics of a nationalism that was by no means a new phenomenon in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ Rather, it was in many respects the product of a complex set of social conditions and political discourses within German society. These seemingly internal trajectories, however – and this becomes increasingly clear after the 1880s – need to be situated in a global context fundamentally shaped by cross-border entanglement.

Diasporic Germanness and rejuvenation

The re-territorialization of the world in the context of mobility and migration took different forms. An important strand of discussion was the emergence of diaspora nationalism and its appropriation by the völkisch factions within Germany. There, the debates about mobility, for the most part, were dominated by a concern with outward migration. Over the course of the nineteenth century, successive waves of emigration had propelled more than four million Germans overseas, mainly to the United States. For many decades, the discussion centred on the benefits and costs that the German states incurred through this outward movement. This changed at the end of the century when migration was seen almost as a natural phenomenon accompanying industrialization and modernization. Now the focus of debate shifted to issues of geography. Among the explicit goals of the colonial movement, for example, was the redirection of population flows to the colonies – so that Germans would remain Germans, albeit overseas, and not deteriorate into what was called ‘fertilizer of the peoples’ (Völkerdünger) in contemporary parlance, a comment on the allegedly too rapid assimilation of Germans in the United States.

As Bradley Naranch has suggested, the shift in the meanings associated with outward mobility can be observed in a terminological adaptation: while German migrants overseas had for a long time been referred to as Auswanderer (emigrants), this began to change in the last third of the nineteenth century. Supplementing the centrifugal overtones of emigration, the term Auslandsdeutsche (diaspora Germans) became hegemonic in the Kaiserreichas its use was extended from German diasporas in central Europe to overseas migration. The term was an expression of the social and cultural fears that were aroused by increasing mobility. In light of the fact that notions of belonging in the German states were deeply influenced by the concept of being rooted in a territory, emigration was associated with the danger of losing one's national identity. The modified terminology stressed the timelessness and stability of belonging to a nation defined by culture and language. The perceived gap between Heimat and overseas settlements was here translated into the conviction that a national identity that presupposed a cultural (and soon völkisch) essence could not be cast away.Footnote ²⁶

The result was, mainly on the nationalist fringe and among those that reported on the diaspora Germans in a booming print culture, a discourse of Germanness (Deutschtum) and a call for a politics of Germanification in places of German settlement. The fear of rapid assimilation in the North American ‘melting pot’, where German migration was primarily headed, eventually led to attempts to redirect the flow of German emigrants elsewhere, in particular to Africa, but also to South America, the Levant, and Australia.Footnote ²⁷ Here, the reasoning went, Germans did not dissolve into the majority population, but were able to retain and even foster their German national characteristics. The ideology of diaspora Germanness was shaped by the different contexts, but the general thrust of the rhetoric exhibited many similarities.

The focus of public attention was on the settlement projects in the newly acquired African colonies, where migration was supported by state subsidies. German South-West Africa, in particular, was envisioned as becoming a settler colony, and the first governor, Theodor Leutwein, initiated a series of measures to establish large planter and settler communities there. The large colonialist associations, such as the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), supported these projects that were fuelled not only by considerations of power politics and international competition, but also by visions of a reconstruction of Germanness. The idea was to found a new Germany that was not riven by internal conflicts of class, region, and confession and thus to go beyond the political unification of the Kaiserreich in 1871, which nationalist and völkisch milieus considered as incomplete.Footnote ²⁸

Long debates ensued in governmental and colonialist circles in a quest for the ideal settler, who was not only to be manly and productive but was to assume the role of a bearer of German culture. As recruitment of migrants proved difficult, a number of different schemes were employed, which even included attempts to establish tuberculosis sanatoriums in the colony.Footnote ²⁹ In the end, however, the politics of colonial settlement proved unsuccessful. Before 1914, there were never more than 20,000 Germans living in all the overseas possessions combined – small even in comparison to the tiny German principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen.

The largest diaspora community outside the United States emerged instead in southern Brazil. South America had been a destination for German emigrants throughout the nineteenth century, even if no more than 5% of the Auswanderer settled on the subcontinent. The great majority of them – more than 200,000 – moved to Brazil. They were lured by the prospects of allegedly uninhabited land and bountiful nature, and by proactive immigration measures on the part of the Brazilian government that aimed at reinforcing the European elements in a politics of embranquecimento(whitening).Footnote ³⁰ German settlement was concentrated in the three southern provinces of Paraná, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Bordering on Uruguay, the most southern province of Rio Grande do Sul was home to 150,000 Auslandsdeutsche (roughly 15% of the total population) in 1914.Footnote ³¹

Brazil was present in Germany through the activities of the Brazil lobby – people such as Friedrich Fabri, the large shipping companies, and also the Protestant church – but also through letters, migration handbooks, and countless travelogues that reported from this new promised land. In these texts, the German settlements were typically represented as a ‘fountain of youth’ that was immune to the kind of degeneration often associated with modern civilization. ‘If you want to know and appreciate the power and energy of the German nation’, as one travelogue claimed, ‘then you have to follow the Germans to the far end of the world, into the swamps and jungles of South America.’Footnote ³² The German colonies in Brazil not only seemed to remain ‘German’ longer than other diaspora communities; in fact, they appeared as manifestations of the true Germany. Struggling with and overcoming nature, in particular, enabled the German colonist to discover a potential and virtues that purportedly ‘he had not known in Germany for a long time’.Footnote ³³ German Brazil was different: ‘Here’, it was held, ‘the German is not in danger of degenerating.’Footnote ³⁴

The German colonies in Brazil were thus appropriated, more by the radical nationalists than by the emigrants themselves, as laboratories of a specific vision of German society, informed by the nostalgia for a pre-industrial countryside, for large families and patriarchal gender-relations, for the limited impact of the state and its bureaucracy, for the levelling of social differences. It is important to note, however, that these utopias were not confined to Brazil. Rather, they were geared towards an audience in Germany, mainly to the educated and bourgeois classes. More importantly, the project of rejuvenation itself was not only directed at the diaspora community but rather targeted German society as well. The return to some kind of German essence, the ‘rejuvenation of the race’,Footnote ³⁵ was not only a project for subtropical Brazil but primarily a model laid out for the German Kaiserreich: ‘The old fatherland, too, can learn from these German colonies overseas.’Footnote ³⁶

Indeed, there were numerous connections between the German colonists overseas and other agents of social renovation, in particular agrarianists and the life reform movement, which shared the critique of industrial society, division of labour, and mass politics. The parallels between these two projects were striking, in particular in the rhetoric of the bourgeois press that appropriated the diaspora Germans, many of them of non-bourgeois backgrounds and hardly conversant with the ideals of the social renovation movements.Footnote ³⁷ But there were not only similarities in scope and world vision but also direct interactions with the Brazilian colonies, which were often referred to as privileged sites for the realization of the goals of the life reform movement. The founder of the vegetarian garden colony ‘Eden’, for example, Bruno Wilhelmi, had lived in Brazil for two years and had been inspired by the ‘life reform settler colonies there’.Footnote ³⁸ In many texts, ‘Brazil’ assumed a metonymic presence and implicitly evoked the promises of authenticity, simplicity, and national reawakening. ‘I cannot stop thinking about Brazil’, confessed the young writer Herman Hesse in 1895. Hesse himself had, at this point, made the decision to emigrate to Brazil. ‘The longing for a healthy and sane existence, for a simple culture, for true and authentic life, for Brazil, does not cease within me.’Footnote ³⁹ In the end, Hesse never made it to Brazil. The realization of his life reform impulses had to wait until 1907, when he spent some time on Monte Verità, the famous vegetarian artists’ colony, primarily to give up alcohol. It may not come as a surprise, however, that, after the project had failed in 1920, the founder of the resort in the vicinity of the Lago Maggiore, Henri Oedenkoven, moved on to Brazil, to establish a vegetarian colony there.

‘The diaspora Germans’, in the eyes of the governor of German East Africa, Eduard von Liebert, ‘are our most important colony.’Footnote ⁴⁰ This quote illustrates how close colonial territories and settlement colonies had become in nationalist discourse. But the reformist claims went further. The German settlements were represented as a veritable laboratory of the nation. Brazil, as a short-hand for the Auslandsdeutschtum, was referred to as a site where Germanness – and eventually the Kaiserreich itself – could be transformed. The diaspora communities thus served a function similar to that which Frederic Jackson Turner envisioned for the American frontier: immigrants, Turner famously held, would get rid of their ‘European’ traits – hierarchical thinking, social stratification, decadence – and turn into free and equal people. Brazil, likewise, appeared as a utopian space where Gesellschaft was still Gemeinschaft: here all ‘class differences disappear’, as Robert Gernhard reported in his travelogue, ‘and most social problems solve themselves’.Footnote ⁴¹ For German nationalists and members of the life reform movement, too, the diaspora communities, in Brazil and elsewhere, served as the location for the transformation of the German nation under conditions of global mobility.

Racialization of nationalism

From the mid-1890s, the trajectories of mobility experienced a fundamental transformation. While the settler lobby was still occupied with agitating for an emigration law that was finally passed in 1897, the real currents of mobility had begun to flow in the opposite direction. Partly as a consequence of emigration but also in response to the increasing demand for labour in the industrialized centres, immigration figures soared. More than 500,000 people from the Polish-speaking provinces settled in the emergent conglomerations in the Rhein and Ruhr region (so-called Ruhrpolen). Many of them held German citizenship, as a result of Prussia's expansionist politics in the East, but they were frequently treated as foreigners, and their westward movement was accompanied by the rhetoric of foreign invasion and cultural incompatibility. In addition, an estimated 5.1 million people from eastern Europe travelled through Germany between 1880 and 1914 alone, many of them on their way across the Atlantic. Finally, migration to the cities created a demand for agricultural workers that was increasingly met through immigration. Seasonal workers in the Prussian countryside, many of them from the Polish territories in Russia and Austria, numbered more than 360,000 before the First World War.Footnote ⁴²

These inward movements, then, were on a large scale. Their significance was enhanced, moreover, by the fact that many observers did not treat them as local phenomena confined to the eastern provinces; rather, they were connected in public debates to the expansion of capitalist flows, to large-scale mobility, and to the emergence of global labour markets. This contextualization opened up a space, in contemporary debates, to link immigration to an issue that increasingly dominated discourses of belonging and practices of exclusion on a global scale, namely race.

The relevance of racial concepts as part of the dynamic of German nationalism since the 1890s is well established. What is striking, however, is the extent to which the scholarly literature treats the gradual racialization of nationalist discourse as part of a history internal to Germany, or at least internal to Europe. The standard narrative is almost exclusively concerned with the rise of anti-Semitism. What is almost entirely absent from these accounts, however, is the global context in which these European debates unfolded. While the world around 1900 was permeated by discourses and practices of racism under conditions of high imperialism and colonialism, the genealogy of German racism continues to be located safely within the boundaries of Europe.

In recent years, there have been attempts to look more closely at the colonial dimension of German racism. A number of studies have demonstrated how the colonial ‘rule of difference’ (Chatterjee) came to be organized according to the concept of ‘race’.Footnote ⁴³ The degree to which politics of ethnic segregation occupied centre stage after the Herero war has led Jürgen Zimmerer to speak of a ‘racial state’ in German South-West Africa. In Kiautschou (Jiaozhou) in China, the colonial government radically organized urban structures, social relations, and legal provisions according to the principle of ethnic segregation.Footnote ⁴⁴ The most ambitious, and most controversial, attempt to link the racial politics in the colonies to the metropole analytically has focused on the question of continuities between the Herero war in 1904 and the genocidal practices of the Nazi period. The ‘extermination order’ (Vernichtungsbefehl) of General von Trotha is then seen as a direct precursor of fantasies, and practices, of elimination that eventually culminated in the Holocaust.Footnote ⁴⁵ These works promise to denationalize the discourse of race and to re-insert it into the colonial context within which it was developed and practised.

One of the crucial areas where issues of race were directly implicated in notions of nationality was the debate about ‘racial mixing’ and miscegenation in the colonies, in particular in South-West Africa, which had the largest German settler community. The growing population of mixed-race origin was increasingly an issue of concern for colonialist and nationalist circles, particularly in the German homeland. On the one hand, criticism was aroused by the fact that, legally, the offspring of the mostly unofficial ‘mixed marriages’ between German men and indigenous women (there were no reverse cases) were entitled to German citizenship. On the other hand, miscegenation was seen to undermine the cultural essence of Germanness abroad and thus threatened to cut off the colonies from the Heimat.Footnote ⁴⁶

The colonial government reacted with a legal ban on interracial marriages, promulgated in 1905 with the explicit aim of protecting the ‘purity’ of the German nation. This measure bespeaks a fear of non-identifiability and a lack of clearly marked boundaries that are typical, as Ann Stoler has argued, for colonial frontiers.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was followed by similar prohibitions in East Africa and in Samoa, even if in the Pacific the rationale was more ambiguous, as Governor Solf aimed at protection not only of Germanness but also of what he thought of as pristine and pure island identities.Footnote ⁴⁸ The prohibitive measures were complemented by a large-scale campaign to bring German women to South-West Africa. Some of them were trained specifically in colonial women's schools in order to inculcate the virtues of Deutschtum, femininity, and domesticity. Eventually, over 2,000 women settled in the colony, intended by the mostly male colonial activists to be bearers of German culture to a predominantly male colony in danger of going native.Footnote ⁴⁹

These interventions were accompanied, in the metropole, by broad popular debates that spilled over into the proceedings of the Reichstag. As Lora Wildenthal has concluded, ‘Once the issue of racial difference was raised it was not easily laid to rest.’ It proved increasingly difficult, in the years to come, to insist on racial segregation at the colonial periphery without allowing for a transfer of this principle to the German Kaiserreich.Footnote ⁵⁰ The contexts of formal and informal imperialism as well as global migration were instrumental in overdetermining notions of belonging by supplementing a ‘colonial’ dimension to concepts of the nation. Politics of ethnic segregation and racial difference, so characteristic of the colonial experience, thus began to be superimposed upon social practices of inclusion and marginalization in Europe as well.

This can be further illustrated using the example of Polish migration into Germany and the accompanying discourse of racial difference that emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century. To be sure, ‘race’ in eastern Prussia did not hold the same connotations as in the overseas colonies; the most notable difference was the access of most Poles to German citizenship. But an argument can be made that the Polish-speaking population in Germany was increasingly defined through a language of race, as was the case in Gustav Freytag's novels, in the ubiquitous rhetoric of the cultural mission, and in the politics of a ‘Germanization of the soil’ and the denaturalization of property with the aim of settling German colonists. An interesting offshoot of this gradual racialization was the tendency to treat Jews and Poles, for example in cases of immigration and naturalization, as part of the same group. In the eyes of the bureaucracy, this seemed legitimate because the two groups frequently overlapped. What it also shows, however, is the complex process in which the radicalization of anti-Semitism and the racialization of anti-Polish sentiments informed each other.Footnote ⁵¹

This was particularly evident in the debates about the so-called ‘Eastern Jews’ (Ostjuden) that preoccupied the public in Wilhelmine Germany. The immigration and subsequent settlement of almost 80,000 Jews from Russia unleashed an arsenal of xenophobic, apocalyptic scenarios of an imminent ‘flood from the East’, exacerbated by the alleged backwardness if not outright ‘barbarity’ of the Jews.Footnote ⁵² These fears, not infrequently supported by German Jews, were nourished not only by social resentment but also by their connection to the much larger flow of over five million transitory migrants (Durchwanderer), mostly Poles and Jews, who passed through Germany on their way across the Atlantic. The association of Ostjuden with political radicalism, with poverty, with the trafficking of women in the ‘white slave trade’, with a lack of hygiene, and with the spread of diseases, as in the case of the cholera epidemics in the early 1890s, further contributed to a mechanism in which anti-Semitic stereotypes were connected to the fear of the ‘East’ and ‘Asian’ influences, just as the threat of ‘Polonization’ was associated with anti-Semitic notions. This mechanism was not confined to the level of rhetoric, as the case of the forced expulsion of 40,000 Poles and Jews without Prussian citizenship in 1885 demonstrated.Footnote ⁵³ The 1890s, as Massimo Ferrari Zumbini has concluded, were characterized by a fusion of anti-Slavism and anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany.Footnote ⁵⁴

It is this gradual racialization of Polish migration that rendered conceivable an otherwise entirely unlikely proposal made by a certain Adolf Hentze in 1907 to Bernhard Dernburg, secretary of state of the Colonial Office. Hentze suggested employing 16,000 Herero and Nama, who had lived as prisoners of war in South-West African camps since the Herero war in 1904, as agricultural workers in eastern Prussia. There they were supposed to learn the necessary ‘civilized customs, the language and the cultivation of the land’ and over the course of time be ‘educated to work’. From the perspective of the government in Windhoek this project may have appeared as part of the civilizing mission and the overall ‘improvement’ of colonial subjects while at the same time contributing to the security of the colony. But Hentze's initiative had broader implications, particularly since moving the Herero to Prussia was meant to replace Polish seasonal workers. This plan was only thinkable in the context of a radicalization of difference along the Polish border. Only now could Africans stand in for, and indeed serve as substitutes for, Polish workers.Footnote ⁵⁵

This mechanism of connecting notions of ‘race’ to local practices of difference can be illustrated through another example that may appear as ephemeral as it may seem implausible considering what we know about the Prussian countryside. In late 1894, the story begins, a landlord by the name of Schmidt petitioned the Prussian government to allow for the ‘import of Chinese, a sober and diligent people with very modest needs’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The intention was to replace the large numbers of agricultural workers from eastern Germany who had left for the industrial centres in the Rhine–Ruhr region and for the United States. At the same time, the idea to invite Chinese ‘coolies’ to Prussia must be seen as a reaction to the influx of Polish workers across the adjacent German–Russian border. The Prussian government ordered its consulates in the Chinese treaty ports to report on the political possibilities of such a project. In the end, however, the plans were shelved. An important factor in this decision were the massive protests in the German press that did not subside until the plans were aborted. While the landowners were convinced that ‘our consumers, presumably, will not care who produced and supplied our products’,Footnote ⁵⁷ the public outcries indicated the opposite. Irrespective of transnational flows in the global economy, the comments in the press revealed a strong sense of culturally motivated protectionism.

From the outset, the plans to attract agricultural labour from China were implicated in the rhetoric of nationalism. The few advocates of the project saw the Chinese as a remedy against a growing Polish nationalism in eastern Prussia. The majority of those publicly engaged in the issue, however, depicted the ‘coolies’ themselves as the real threat to the German nation. The debate about Chinese workers was linked, on a popular level, to the transnational discourse of the ‘yellow peril’. Apart from its racist overtones, the slogan had a number of different connotations: economic interests were pivotal, as was the demographic phantasma of Chinese mass mobility threatening to ‘flood’ the ‘white’ civilizations.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Geoffrey Barraclough has concluded, the discourse of the yellow peril was indicative of the ‘almost neurotic awareness’ of the process of mobility held by contemporaries.Footnote ⁵⁹

Within the context of German nationalism, to be sure, the trope of the yellow peril did not occupy a central position. It played a role, however, in contributing to the racialization of German nationalism at the turn of the century. The power and influence it did have were further enhanced by the fact that it was grafted upon other discourses of exclusion, such as that of anti-Semitism. The frequent comparison of Chinese and Jews rested on the alleged economic proficiencies of the Chinese that turned them into a ‘by far more dangerous people than the Jews’. The possibility that these two marginalized groups might coalesce and unite the entrepreneurial capabilities of the Jews with the hardworking attitudes of the Chinese created further apprehension: ‘Between these two tribes the Germans would run the risk of being crushed completely.’Footnote ⁶⁰ In the nationalist discourse of the German Empire, the anti-Chinese and anti-Jewish stereotypes thus frequently overlapped. In the 1890s, when anti-Semitism in Germany experienced a marked radicalization through biological and racial overtones, the trope of the ‘yellow peril’ may very well have supplied a vocabulary through which this ethnicization of the nation could also be expressed. The anti-Semitic journal Neue Deutsche Volkszeitung, for example, saw ‘welcome parallels’, between the ‘exclusion laws against the Chinese in North America and the need for a law banning the immigration of Jews’ in Germany.Footnote ⁶¹ In the context of an influx of Jews from Russia and Galicia after 1890 in particular, the anti-Semitic press readily drew on anti-Chinese rhetoric and directed it against the Jews.Footnote ⁶²

The discourse of the ‘yellow peril’ allowed German nationalists to link up local issues with larger global trends. In the absence of first-hand information and social experience with Chinese workers, the main arguments were formulated with direct reference to developments in places such as Australia and the United States, which, according to the 1906 Deutsche Volkszeitung, had ‘had the worst possible experience and now are passionately opposed to the yellow pest’.Footnote ⁶³ The fear of the ‘yellow peril’ as a reaction to Chinese mobility can be read as the expression of a global consciousness. It allowed social actors to legitimate local/national concerns by reference to global contexts, in a spirit of glocalization. The argument here, then, is not primarily that debates about the ‘Coolie question’ had repercussions that changed the course of German history. What should be clear, however, is that the trajectories of German nationalism were shaped in a context in which many of the social actors operated within a global frame of reference.

Borders and border control

It is important to recognize that changes in the notion of Germanness triggered by mobility and diaspora did not remain confined to the level of rhetoric and ideology. In fact, they had palpable effects as they were translated into legal provisions as well as into measures to reinforce the boundaries of the nation. They were most palpable where new immigration regulations changed the very materiality of the border, an issue that has been entirely ignored by studies of German nationalism. It would be fascinating to study further the way new procedures of control and surveillance fundamentally changed the physical shape of the landscape. This is most obvious in the case of the control stations where immigrants from Russia and Austria were subjected to scrutiny before entering the country as seasonal workers. Thirty-nine of these stations were erected along the eastern Prussian border by the Central Office of Agricultural Workers (Feldarbeiterzentralstelle). Here, the incoming labourers needed to prove that they had a valid contract with a German employer. A medical doctor attached to each control station ensured that hygienic measures were taken so that ‘the threat of a spread of epidemic diseases would not rise to unmeasurable heights’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The border stations were nodal points at which checks on mobility were connected to notions of cultural superiority and hygienic nationalism. In 1913, the Prussian ministry of agriculture internally discussed plans of disinfecting every single non-German seasonal worker when he or she entered the country.Footnote ⁶⁵

Before the First World War, the character of national borders thus changed considerably, even if these changes were not readily visible on a map. What used to be largely symbolic lines were now turned into veritable impediments to free movement and mobility. A mere five years after its foundation in 1905, the Office of Agricultural Workers employed close to 1,000 civil servants to cope with the rising demands posed by this fortification of the border.Footnote ⁶⁶ Their number increased further when plans were implemented to separate the incoming Polish workforce from other groups, in particular from the Ruthenian population in present-day Ukraine. This was the bureaucratic response to widespread fears of an imminent ‘Polonization’ of Germany, perceived as a national as much as a cultural and ethnic threat. The Prussian government embarked on a policy that privileged Ruthenes over Poles, based on the conflicts observed in Galicia, where a Ruthenian nationalism had emerged that pitted Ruthenian farmers against the Polish-speaking aristocracy.Footnote ⁶⁷ As a consequence, linguistic experts were soon attached to the border control stations in order to prevent Poles from securing entry by pretending to be Ruthenes.Footnote ⁶⁸

The real problem, however, was not one of falsification of documents and identities, but rather the apparent lack of criteria to differentiate between the groups in the first place. ‘The situation in Galicia’, a clearly desperate expert of the Feldarbeiterzentralstelle related in 1909, ‘is such that an unquestionable and target-oriented division between Poles and Ruthenes cannot be accomplished.’ The alleged ethnic, linguistic, religious, and national differences upon which the Prussian policy depended appeared negligible as a result of close social interaction.Footnote ⁶⁹ Consequently, the control stations regularly requested advice on how to deal with a situation in which ‘Ruthenes ... frequently are no longer identifiable as Ruthenes’.Footnote ⁷⁰ This was, of course, not to be. In response, the Central Office of Agricultural Workers resorted to the quintessential imperial strategy producing difference. It devised a dictionary, handed over to every (presumed) Ruthene when entering Germany, which was aimed at inculcating nationalism and a sense of difference. ‘Remember that you are Ruthenian’ was the bottom line of the handbook, and ‘do not allow anyone to call you a “Pole”!’Footnote ⁷¹

The border, then, was a site where difference was marked, enforced, and also constructed. It is important to note, in this context, that the German practices were not the result of the radicalization of German nationalism alone, but rather coincided with the nationalization of mobility on a global scale. In many countries, authorities reacted to the apparent borderless movements with renewed technologies of exclusion, of identification, and of citizenship in order to channel, control, and counter the steady human flow in and out of the country. The most prominent example was the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which, according to historian Erika Lee, ‘transformed the United States into a gatekeeping nation’.Footnote ⁷² In Australia, the so-called ‘Chinese Crisis’ in 1888 initiated a series of exclusionary measures to prop the politics of ‘White Australia’. In Europe, too, we can observe a growing concern for border control and the managing of transnational mobility in many societies, such as the Alien Act, triggered by a massive influx of Jewish migrants and introduced in Great Britain in 1905.

These exclusionary measures were clearly sparked by mobility and the menace of vanishing borders in an age of globalization and cannot be solely attributed to what could be called an internal ‘closing of the national mind’. They were the result, partly, of close international monitoring and observation. Max Weber, for example, looked to Australia where ‘the immigration of Chinese is banned’, only to warn that ‘the Poles are even more dangerous due to the possibility of mixing and of bringing down German culture’.Footnote ⁷³ Calls for an exclusion of Poles, in other words, were not only connected to long-standing anti-Semitic traditions, but at the same time embedded in a consciousness of synchronous interconnectedness on a global scale. The Prussian government complied with a very specific form of exclusionary regulation that was unparalleled in other countries: the urgently needed agricultural labourers from Polish Russia and Austrian Galicia were annually forced to leave the country temporarily, during the so-called Karenzzeit (‘waiting period’), in order to inhibit permanent settlement and an unsettling of the unstable ethnic and national balance in eastern Prussia.Footnote ⁷⁴

The measures of exclusion were complemented in many places by a growing recourse to politics of identification. As late as 1874, France had abolished provisions that obliged European foreigners to carry passports – and thus essentially confirmed what had been social practice all along. In the context of mobility (and on the labour markets), nationality and citizenship were of only minor importance until the late nineteenth century. This began to change from the 1880s: as Gérard Noiriel has observed, ‘The more trade and communication develop, the greater the significance of identificatory techniques.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Among them were the Bertillonage, the fingerprint, and above all the passport, whose use increased enormously in the years leading up to the First World War.Footnote ⁷⁶ Complying with this international trend, the Prussian authorities, too, increasingly relied on a politics of dissociation and separation in managing mobility. On the border in eastern Prussia, interestingly, passports were supplemented by work permits that were not based primarily on nationality, but rather on ethnic criteria.Footnote ⁷⁷

While border controls and techniques of identification were designed to check the alleged borderlessness and fluidity of the globalizing world, citizenship emerged as the most important means to establish fixity and stability. Here, too, one can observe an adaptation of practices and regulations in accordance with the changing scales and trajectories of mobility. In fact, the revisions of German citizenship law in 1913 can be read as a direct response to the changes in German notions of belonging under conditions of global migration. These revisions are reminiscent of the shift from Auswanderer to Auslandsdeutsche referred to above. While the law of 1870 had foreseen that citizenship ended ten years after leaving the country, this stipulation was revoked in 1913: from now on, citizenship could not expire and was even transferred to descendants. This provision was a reaction to the changing conditions of mobility. During the nineteenth century, the vast majority of emigrants had moved to the United States, presumably for good, and were considered a loss to the national substance. The acquisition of colonies after 1884 was motivated to large extent, by the intention to provide emigrants with opportunities without severing their ties with the German nation. In the face of political support for the colonial project, it seemed mandatory to enable Germans to settle in the colonies without risking their legal status. The modification of the durability of citizenship was thus a direct outcome of the debates about global mobility. This was no mere legal cosmetic, rendered insignificant by the dissolution of the colonial empire just shortly thereafter; rather, it concerned central dimensions of belonging and participation. It is instructive to note that the effects of this legal adaptation survived the end of empire. When, in the 1990s, large groups of descendants of former emigrants (Aussiedler) ‘returned’, as it came to be called, from the Soviet Union, they still benefited from this redefinition of Germanness under colonial/global conditions.Footnote ⁷⁸

Nationalism and global consciousness

The impact of trans-border mobility on the trajectories of German nationalism was palpable on different levels. Diasporic nationalism, the racialization of national belonging, and the reinforcement of material and legal borders were among the most striking effects of transnational interactions on the sense of nation in the Kaiserreich. Different social milieus were affected by these developments in very different ways. The educated classes were particularly quick to respond to global challenges. While the Bildungsbürgertum was a minority, its influence in shaping the appropriation of the world went well beyond the confines of its constituency. The commitment to secure access to world markets enlisted the support of industrialists and entrepreneurs for expansionist schemes,while the churches were invested in the world through the missionary project. They helped to transmit the desire for tangible and spiritual acquisitions in exotic regions to social classes that might otherwise not have found it in their interest to support them. Presumably least affected by intensifying global exchange were the petty bourgeoisie and the lowest social strata. The working class, however, increasingly felt the dependency upon global demand structures, and the trade unions experienced highly emotional debates about the internationalization of the labour market. It is important to take these different actors and interests into account; engagement with the world was always of a contested nature.

On the whole, however, there can be little doubt that the increasing global entanglement left its traces on the way the German nation was conceived. Mobility – as the focus of this paper – was only one dimension of this globalizing process; other aspects affected the dynamics of nationalism as well. Among them, most famously, was the notion of world politics (Weltpolitik) that entered German political vocabulary in the late 1890s and was employed by Bernhard von Bülow as a descriptor of government policy in a 1900 speech before the Reichstag. The concept was tied to the German nation's claim to a ‘Place in the Sun’ and to a politics of symbolic interventions that bound national interests to places such as the Taku Forts, Venezuela, and Agadir. The dialectics between the global and the national are equally obvious in the kind of economic nationalism prominent after the protectionist turn in the late 1870s. Adherents to the free trade regime, virtually hegemonic through the 1870s, were soon depicted as anti-national forces: ‘The radicalism from Manchester, just like ultra-montanism and socialism, is anti-national’, as the journal Grenzboten wrote.Footnote ⁷⁹ The integration of the world market went hand in hand with a renationalization of the economy along neo-mercantilist lines.

The globalizing trends that began in the 1880s, of which Imperial Germany was part and parcel, produced an overdetermined space in which different strands of national thinking overlapped. Increasingly, social actors connected their sense of community and belonging to larger contexts. In the Wilhelmine period, the rhetoric of the ‘world’ became almost ubiquitous: terms such as world politics, world economy, world powers, and world empires pervaded public discourse, and the internationalization of economic flows triggered the founding of the ‘Institute for the World Economy’ in Kiel in 1911. German nationalism at the turn of the century was informed by what can be called a form of global consciousness.Footnote ⁸⁰

As a result, central tropes of the nation emerged that connected nationalist discourse to the geopolitical context. Among them was the quest for a larger Lebensraum for the German Volk, a term coined by geographer Friedrich Ratzel but influential far into the twentieth century. It may seem paradoxical that preoccupation with questions of mobility produced the notions of both not enough and too many people, of a loss of ‘national power’ (Volkskraft) and overpopulation. This apparent contradiction is indicative of the anxieties that accompanied fast social change and interactions on a global scale. Ratzel's term was part of his attempt to find ‘laws of the spatial growth of states’. He was convinced that cultural progress corresponded to territorial expansion, and that Weltpolitik was but a universal (and higher) stage of national development.Footnote ⁸¹

The notion of Lebensraum, like many others, fed into one of the founding concepts that continued to structure German nationalism for some time to come: namely, the figure of German ‘culture’ as a third way beyond western ‘civilization’ and eastern ‘barbarism’. The popularity of this trope surged in the early years of the twentieth century and culminated in the war years, but has retained a powerful grip on the German imagination since.Footnote ⁸² It has conventionally been traced back to the romantic period and to long-standing traditions represented by a class of mandarins detached from politics.Footnote ⁸³ From the perspective of a history of globalization, however, the trope can equally be understood as the effect of a peculiar reading of the world political status of the Kaiserreich: Germany as latecomer, when compared to France and Great Britain, both in terms of nation-building and as a global player; and Germany as superior compared to eastern Europe, and to the colonial world, which appeared backward economically and was not yet organized into nation-state units.

Finally, the notion of ‘German work’ (Deutsche Arbeit) can be read as a concept that linked Germany's particular location in the globalization process to nationalist discourse. It served as an ideological template that enabled the translation of the culture-versus-civilization paradigm into practice. To be sure, the idea of national work has had repercussions in other countries as well, as the French debate on travail national illustrates.Footnote ⁸⁴ But the conviction that German work was different and unique was widespread in Imperial Germany. This trope was the expression of a quest for uniqueness and an attempt to come to terms with the peculiarities of a nation that – unlike France and Britain – could not be defined through empire; a nation whose power did not rest, like Britain's, on maritime hegemony, capital investment, and trade; a nation that had no internal frontier at her disposal, as did the United States, as a resource of seemingly perennial rejuvenation; a nation, finally, that, unlike the Poles and many colonial societies, did not define its characteristics vis-à-vis an imperial oppressor. In the global context of the beginning of the twentieth century, the notion of ‘German work’ can be understood as a typical latecomer discourse, a form of protest against the underprivileged role Germany appeared to play in the international arena.Footnote ⁸⁵

At the same time, the concept was an expression of pride in Germany's achievements and ambitions. ‘German work’ was at the heart of the Kaiserreich's attempt to assert the place it deserved, both within Europe and beyond. The concept obviously had an expansionist ring, as is clear from its frequent use to describe colonial settlement, conquest, and occupation. The most important developmental project in the African colonies, as in other European possessions as well, was the ‘education of the negro to work’. Here, too, the concept articulated different dynamics and connected political claims and economic needs to the constitution of subjectivities and collectives along the lines of German ‘culture’. It was a foundational term, suggesting that Germany's position in the world was the product of her own efforts and achievements. Not unlike the naval arming, the rhetoric of ‘German work’ can be read as the expression of an ambivalent mix of pride and minority complex, and as indicative for the mechanisms through which global contexts translated into the grammar of nationalism. The afterlife of the trope – the ‘soldiers of work’ in National Socialism, ‘German Wertarbeit’ as the basis for the economic miracle of the 1950s, and the East German version of a ‘state of work’ (Staat der Arbeit) – attests to the mark it has left on notions of Germanness.

Conclusion

The Wilhelmine Kaiserreich was deeply implicated in global conjunctures, and the specific dynamics of German nationalism were shaped and transformed in the course of transnational entanglements. Contemporaries such as the historian Karl Lamprecht consequently attempted to make sense of the changing character of the nation-state and predicted that ‘the modern state will no longer exhibit the kind of homogeneity that was the case in the first half of the nineteenth century, and that it will be able to base its powers on a nearly unlimited number of modifications of form and realization’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Lamprecht, to be sure, was a member of the Pan-German League and an outspoken advocate of a Greater Germany beyond the narrow confines of the German Kaiserreich. But he went further and envisioned ‘a national society that is no longer confined to territory’, and that he came to call a ‘tentacle state’. This concept encompassed not only the German diaspora and forms of cultural imperialism but also the influence of economic networks and the diffusion of capital.Footnote ⁸⁷ Lamprecht's ‘tentacle state’ thus connected the völkisch utopia of Lebensraum to the global ambitions of the bourgeoisie and the complex forms of capitalist de-territorialization. The globalizing dynamics of the late nineteenth century influenced – and in some cases fundamentally shifted – the ways in which the nation was conceived and its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion were practised.

What is at stake here, then, is a revision of common assumptions concerning the history of nationalism. My argument is intended as a contribution to a ‘spatial turn’ in the historiography of nationalism. For the most part, the dynamics of nationalism have been located within the nation-states at issue: as long traditions and continuities of a national ‘essence’, as ‘imagined communities’, as reactions to the disruptive effects of modernization, as ‘invented traditions’, or as new departures by social groups that aimed at a different kind of modernity. My examples have suggested, however, that the particular form that nationalism and the representation of the nation took around 1900 need to be read in the context of interactions and entanglements on a global scale. The shifts and changes in the discourse of nationalism thus appear not only as effects of internal trajectories, as the familiar picture would suggest, but just as much of the larger process we retrospectively call globalization.

This not only refers to the obvious fact that the nation state concept, in many countries, was the result of cultural transfers. This is well recognized in many (if not all) theories of nationalism. Benedict Anderson and others have stressed the degree to which the nation was a product of relationships.Footnote ⁸⁸ In particular, in the colonial world the nation-state was thus an import that superseded traditional forms of belonging and loyalty. It remained, to use Partha Chatterjee's phrase, a ‘derivative discourse’.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is thus widely recognized that the institution of the nation-state has travelled. However, the specific meanings and dynamics of nationalism are generally seen as emanating from local conditions. The spread of the ‘nation form’ (Etienne Balibar), in other words, may be the product of systemic conditions of world order, while the particular ideological contents of nationalism are assumed to derive from cultural traditions and to draw on legacies entirely from within.Footnote ⁹⁰ What I have argued, instead, is that the way that the nation was defined, understood, and practised – the particular contents of nationalism – owed more to the global context in which it was constituted than has hitherto been recognized.Footnote ⁹¹ The logic and dynamics of nationalism, as Rebecca Karl has argued for late Qing China, were not only shaped by diachronic ‘stages of development’, but equally by a synchronic ‘staging of the world’.Footnote ⁹²

The task, therefore, is to go beyond national history – not least in order to understand the dynamics of the nation better. Modern historiography still tends to operate within a paradigm of ‘methodological nationalism’, as Anthony D. Smith has called it. By this he not only refers to a narrow, parochial tunnel vision that is only interested in one's own nation. Rather, the methodological standards of the discipline help to structure historical analysis in a way that presupposes the nation-state, as a ‘container’ of society, as the pre-existing unit. As a consequence, social processes are observed and analysed primarily within national borders.Footnote ⁹³ Much of what has been written in favour of transnational and global perspectives in recent years can be read as an attempt to challenge this hegemonic approach.Footnote ⁹⁴

But it is important not to jettison the category of the nation altogether. One of the most influential and stimulating proposals to wrestle historiography free from the fetters of the nation-state paradigm has been put forward by Prasenjit Duara. Duara attempts to undermine a linear, teleological historiography that has defined the nation through dichotomies such as tradition/modernity, hierarchy/equality, and empire/nation. He aims at deconstructing a Hegelian narrative that, since the nineteenth century, has been forced upon most parts of the world (Duara uses the examples of India and China) by an imperialist ‘West’. In order to challenge these hierarchies, Duara proposes a number of narrative strategies in order to privilege local events and the ‘disorder’ of particular histories vis-à-vis the linear national perspective.Footnote ⁹⁵

However, Duara's critique – like that of many others who have joined the recent chorus of transnationalists – remains largely confined to a critique of a specific narrative. The prerogative of national categories thus appears above all as a matter of representation. But, as long as analysis concentrates on a historiographical concern with universal categories, there is a danger of eclipsing the historical process that has institutionalized these categories in the first place. The critique of the universalism of the nation, in other words, should not lead us to ignore the ubiquity of the nation as cognitive dimension and as space of social practice in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Instead of lifting the ideological (or narrative) veil and deconstructing nation-state parameters as forms of false consciousness, the task has to be to explain the constitution (and reconfiguration) of nation-states in the context of complex, asymmetrical processes of the spread of capitalism and the projection of imperialist power.Footnote ⁹⁶

A global history perspective, therefore, does not imply abandoning the category of the nation. While the role of the nation as the metaphysical subject of history has surely run its course, what is still ahead of us is an understanding of the emergence of national history within transnational structures. It is fortunate if such analysis can take as its point of departure the insights of contemporaries. As early as 1896, German historian and sociologist Otto Hintze argued for a reconception of the nation in the light of global interactions: ‘The nations that are the object of historiography are not at all natural emanations, but rather products of world historical circumstance.’ He observed a dialectical relationship between global structures and the formation of particular identities. ‘The major world historical developments are not only produced by nations, but rather produce nations themselves.’ Hintze was convinced that transnational exchange ‘and entanglements have immensely influenced the process of national development’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The nation, then, might cease to be the point of departure of historical inquiry, but would become what needs to be explained as the effect of global conjunctures.