Article

Thesis Eleven
2017, Vol. 139(1) 46–68
Empire in three keys: ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513617701958

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Berlin trade exhibition

George Steinmetz
University of Michigan, USA

Abstract
Germany was famously a latecomer to colonialism, but it was a hybrid empire, centrally
involved in all forms of imperial activity. Germans dominated the early Holy Roman
Empire; Germany after 1870 was a Reich, or empire, not a state in the conventional
sense; and Germany had a colonial empire between 1884 and 1918. Prussia played the
role of continental imperialist in its geopolitics vis-à-vis Poland and the other states to its
east. Finally, in its Weltpolitik – its global policies centered on the navy – Germany was an
informal global imperialist. Although these diverse scales and practices of empire usually
occupied distinct regions in the imaginations of contemporaries, there was one repre-
sentational space in which the nation-state was woven together with empire in all its
different registers: the Berlin trade exhibition of 1896. Because this exhibition started as
a local event focused on German industry, it has not attracted much attention among
historians of colonial and world fairs. Over the course of its planning, however, the 1896
exhibition emerged as an encompassing display of the multifarious German empire in all
its geopolitical aspects. The exhibition attracted the attention of contemporaries as
diverse as Georg Simmel and Kaiser Wilhelm. In contrast to Simmel and later theorists, I
argue that it represented the empire and the nation-state, and not simply the fragmenting
and commodifying force of capitalism. In contrast to Timothy Mitchell, I argue that the
exhibit did not communicate a generic imperial modernity, but made visible the unique
multi-scaled political formation that was the German empire-state.

Keywords
1896 Berlin trade exhibition, empire, Germany, German empire, nation-state

Corresponding author:
George Steinmetz, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Email: geostein@umich.edu
Steinmetz 47

Understanding world fairs

World fairs were central modes of self-representation and self-admiration for the
industrial capitalist societies of the 19th century. Trade exhibits have continued up to the
present, giving rise most recently to the idea of virtual world fairs. These fairs were
already becoming outmoded by the early 20th century, however, due to the emergence of
new technologies like film and radio that could render economic progress visible in other
ways. The idea of world fairs was further undermined by growing skepticism about the
very idea of progress that underwrote such events.
In other respects, however, world fairs continued as privileged sites in which subjects
could attempt to locate themselves in time and space. Fairs offered visitors a chance to
orient themselves temporally, vis-à-vis breathtakingly accelerated change. Spatially, the
fairs displayed an ever more interconnected world and new forms of urban space
(Warren, 2014). Politically, the world fairs depicted the rise and fall of global hegemons,
new forms of warfare, and catastrophic dangers, as well as utopian hopes – democratic,
socialist, or totalitarian, depending on the context (Zarecor and Kulić, 2014).
World fairs have much in common with museums, theme parks, zoos, human zoos
(Blanchard, 2011), panoramas (Ellis, 2008), department stores, and contemporary
‘“tourist bubbles” – historical districts, entertainment precincts, malls, and other varia-
tions’ that are ‘partitioned off from the rest of the city’ (Davis, 1998: 392). The rise of
international exhibitions in the mid-19th century was closely connected to the ‘museum
movement’, and ‘a number of technical and natural science museums . . . owe their
existence [and the core of their collections] directly or indirectly to the impulses of the
great international industrial exhibits’ (Haltern, 1973: 34). All of these are built struc-
tures, constructed in such a way that they stand out or distinguish themselves from their
surrounding ‘conventional’ environment. These assemblages are particularly well suited
to insinuating themselves into the minds and habituses of their participants.
There are four main interpretations of world exhibitions, each of them corresponding
to a broader set of theoretical assumptions and analytical claims about social change and
modernity.1 The first and most developed approach is grounded in the (Marxist and non-
Marxist) critique of capitalism. These analysts emphasize world expositions’ role in
promoting industry and consumerism, their reflection of the fragmented world of
commodities, their ‘didactic’ function with regard to capitalism in general and to new
technical discoveries, and the ways they reproduce class divisions between bourgeoisie
and proletariat while attempting to overcome that class division symbolically (Benjamin,
2003: 171–202; Grossbölting, 2008; Naumann, 2007). One of the earliest analyses of
world fairs along these lines was provided by George Simmel (2004), in an article on the
1896 Berlin industrial exhibition. Walter Benjamin saw the world exhibitions as ‘places
of pilgrimage to the fetish Commodity’ (1983: 165), and wrote in his Arcades Project
that the ‘link’ between the world exhibitions and the entertainment industry, which
makes the masses ‘ripe for the working of advertising’, was ‘well established’. The trade
shows were ‘training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned
empathy with exchange value’ (Benjamin, 2003: 201).
A second approach foregrounds the world fairs as purveyors of political propaganda
and messages like national prestige, democracy, free trade, republicanism, progress, and
48 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

peace (Haltern, 1973). So-called postmodern theories interpret these expositions as

examples of spectacular culture, hyperreality, and simulation (Baudrillard, 2010). A
different approach is offered by Timothy Mitchell (1989), who draws on Heidegger to
interpret world exhibitions as part of a generalized ‘enframing’ of the modern world as
a ‘world picture’ (Weltbild). Mitchell’s intervention is related to a set of interpretive
frames associated with postcolonial theory and empire studies and focusing on
imperial and colonial representations in metropolitan fairs (Breckenridge, 1989).
Starting in the 1970s the Great Exhibition of 1851 has been analyzed through the lens
of imperialism, although the focus has been mainly on economic rather than political or
cultural imperialism (Haltern, 1971; Purbrick, 2013). Robert Rydell (1984, 1993)
examined ‘visions of empire’ at the world fairs. Others have focused on specifically
colonial exhibitions.

Germany as a hybrid empire

Germany was notoriously a latecomer to colonialism, but it was centrally involved in all
forms of empire. Germans dominated the early Holy Roman Empire. After 1870 it was
known as a Reich or empire, not a state in the conventional sense, with Prussia dom-
inating the other states. Germany also eventually acquired a medium-sized colonial
empire, between 1884 and 1918. In its policies vis-à-vis Poland and other nations and
states lying to its east, Prussia played the role of continental imperialist. And in its
Weltpolitik – its global policies centered on the navy – Germany was also an imperialist
power. Looking past the First World War, Berlin became the capital of the Nazi empire,
and finally, after 1945, Berlin was where the Soviet empire’s display of its conquest of
Eastern Europe, including East Germany, was most dramatic. Treptow Park, the site of
the 1896 exhibition, became the location of the largest Soviet monument outside Russia.
These diverse scales and practices of empire existed in entirely separate arenas, at
least in the imagination of 19th-century contemporaries. The Holy Roman Empire was
the topic of school books and young adult novels. The German Reich was officially
understood not as an empire along the lines of the British or French overseas empires or
the Roman empire, but in the narrower sense of a constitutional monarchy. The colonial
and imperial character of Germany’s overseas ‘protectorates’ in Africa and Oceania was
harder to overlook, but Bismarck’s lack of enthusiasm for the colonies echoed that of
most of his compatriots, at least during the 1880s. Only in the 1890s, after Bismarck’s
resignation, did the German public start to gain some familiarity with their colonies. The
most visible German imperial realm lay in Poland. As Bismarck famously said in the
context of the Emin Pascha Relief Expedition, ‘your map of Africa is very nice, but my
map of Africa is in Europe. Here is Russian and here . . . is France and we are in the
middle; that is my map of Africa’ (in Wolf, 1904: 16). Max Weber was both a rabid
imperialist with regard to Poland and completely indifferent to the German colonies
(Mommsen, 1984).
It makes sense that the capital of the German empire after 1870 would be the site of
the most important public symbolic assertion of imperial ideology. The Berlin West
Africa Conference in 1884–5 inaugurated the Scramble for Africa; the 1896 exposition,
as we will see, displayed German imperialism; the Colonial Museum was located in the
Steinmetz 49

Moabit district of Berlin, following the 1896 exhibition; and the German Colonial
Society’s colonial architecture competition took place in Berlin, with Berlin-area
architects making the ‘strongest showing’ (Osayimwese, 2008: 307). The main school
for training German colonial officials, the Seminar for Oriental Languages, was at Berlin
University. All of the German government offices involved in planning colonial and
imperial policy were in Berlin. Hamburg also had a powerful claim to being the true
metropole of the colonial empire, due to its trade and shipping activities, and Hamburg
was the site of the first German colonial university (Ruppenthal, 2007). Colonial exhi-
bitions were held throughout Germany between 1896 and 1845, ‘not only in nearly all
larger German cities but also in the provinces, where they were surprisingly successful’
(Arnold, 1995: 3). But Berlin was the center of German global power politics (Welt-
politik), cultural imperial endeavors, and the colonial empire, and the core of the Reich.

The Berlin industrial exhibition of 1896

The 1896 Berlin industrial or trade exhibition (Gewerbeausstellung) was a unique
representational space in which the symbolism of state and empire was woven together,
making visible the imperial dimensions of the state and the state-centrism of the empire.
The 1896 Berlin exhibition has not attracted as much attention as the world exhibits in
Paris, London, and Chicago.2 One reason for this is the exhibition’s official name –
‘industrial and trade exhibition’ – which belied the fact that it encompassed much more
than industry and trade. During its planning phase the 1896 exposition was far removed
from any idea of a universal exhibition covering all aspects of culture (Geppert, 2007:
438). Furthermore, the 1896 exhibition was not an international exhibition but a national
one in its symbolism and in terms of the nationality of most of its organizers and
exhibitors. In due course, the 1896 exposition attracted visitors from around the world
(Geppert, 2007: 440). Some aspects of the fair were in fact international, including an
‘official internal press bureau’ and a reading room where ‘3000 newspapers from all over
the world’ were available, allowing nearly ‘every visitor to find the newspaper of his
homeland’, according to the guidebook (Illustrierter Amtlicher Führer, 1896: 47–8). The
Cairo exhibit, as we will see, was both cosmopolitan and specifically German. And in
many ways the exhibition served ‘to create and cement Berlin’s identity as a Weltstadt, a
world city’ (Zelljadt, 2005: 308).
At the same time, the Gewerbeausstellung was in many ways the ‘opposite of a
world exposition’ (Badenberg, 2004: 192), as that term had come to be understood in
the preceding decades. Berlin was perceived by many Germans as provincial and cut
off from global cultural and economic affairs, compared to Paris, London, or even
Chicago. For these and perhaps other reasons the German Kaiser vigorously opposed
the idea of a German world exposition, at least before May 1896. Once the exposition
had become a fait accompli, however, the Kaiser participated actively, placing himself
at its center (XX, 1896). The year 1896 was chosen for the fair as the 25th anniversary
of Berlin becoming the capital of the Reich; this made the Kaiser’s participation
somewhat inevitable.
The Gewerbeausstellung took place between 1 May and 15 October 1896 in the
Treptow borough of Berlin. The exposition site occupied over 900,000 square meters,
50 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

Figure 1. Map of 1896 Berlin industrial exhibition. Source: Arbeitsausschuss der Berliner
Gewerbe-Ausstellung (1896).

taking up more space than any previous world fair (Figure 1). An electrical tramway like
the one at the Chicago Columbian exhibition three years earlier was built to move
visitors around the fairground. The exhibition was organized around 23 main sectors,
most of them focused on some branch of industry and trade. This official focus on
industry and trade was dramatically expressed in the fair’s official poster, which
depicted a giant, hammer-wielding arm bursting out of the ground, with the Berlin
Rathaus, cathedral, castle, and Victory Column (Siegessäule) in the background
(Rademacher, 1996).
The Gewerbeausstellung also included exhibits of graphic arts, scientific and musical
instruments, health and welfare (including the national social insurance plans), educa-
tion, sports, and gardening. The 23rd grouping was the German colonial exhibit. Special
displays that were not included among these 23 main ones included a walk-through
simulacrum of ‘Old Berlin’, an Alpine panorama, a giant telescope, and ‘Cairo’ – an
exhibit modeled on the rue du Caire at the Paris and London expositions (Mitchell,
1898), but larger and more spectacular.

Empire, colonialism, and imperialism at the 1896

industrial exhibition
Over the course of its planning and execution, the 1896 exhibition emerged as a full-
scale display of the multifaceted forms of German imperial activity. Some of these
imperial aspects appeared on the margins or in the interstices of the overall trade fair, and
have therefore escaped notice. One historian denies that the 1896 fair even had a political
Steinmetz 51

dimension, much less an imperial one (Crome, 1996). One can understand this reading if
one defines empire narrowly or focuses only on the main categories of the exhibition.
But empire theory has taught us to distinguish colonialism and imperialism and look at
informal and indirect forms of empire as well as more obvious forms. Postcolonial theory
has taught us that looking at the margins and edges can sometimes shed an entirely new
light on the ostensibly non-imperial aspects of metropolitan culture.
Not only did the 1896 exhibition encompass an explicitly colonial exhibit; it also had
a Cairo exhibit, public lectures on colonialism, and various displays of the imperial
monarchy and naval power. The most obviously imperial aspect of the exposition was
the second German empire itself. The post-1870 nation-state had been assembled
through wars of conquest. Prussia, with its capital Berlin, was primus inter pares among
the federated German states making up the Reich (Steinmetz, 2006). The image of the
bear that symbolized Berlin fluctuated between cuddly and more menacing messages.
An image from 1896 showed the Berlin bear dragging shields adorned with the coats of
arms of German Länder, along with a few foreign countries, toward Treptow, the site of
the exhibition (in Crome, 1997: 7).
A second imperial aspect was the ubiquitous symbolic presence of the Emperor and
Empress. World exhibitions before the First World War were usually organized by elites
from commercial or industrial groups, national and local government offices, scientists
and scholars, and cultural and public figures. The Berlin Trade Show was no exception.
On opening day, 1 May, almost all of the ministers of state were in attendance, along
with a large number of top bureaucrats, most of the foreign diplomatic corps, the Bul-
garian prince, the rector of Berlin University and the Law School’s dean, and Prussian
Prince Leopold, the exhibit’s general sponsor or patron. Most of the men present were
dressed in ‘bourgeois tails’ according to the local press. The man they were attending
was the Emperor, however, not one of their own. The German Emperor was a Kaiser – a
Germanized version of the word Caesar – and he toured his empire like a conquering
hero. When the Kaiser’s ship arrived at the dock at 11am on 1 May, the Emperor and
Empress walked with their entourage to a throne constructed for the exhibition and
located in a special pavilion that contained an ‘emperor exhibit’ (Illustrierter Amtlicher
Führer, 1896: 49). A group of nobles and military men then arranged themselves around
the Kaiser. The Emperor inspected the honor guard of the 3rd Garde-Regiment of the
Prussian Army on the grounds of the Gewerbeausstellung (Figure 2). The royal couple
toured the colonial and Cairo exhibits, where they were greeted with a ‘Bedouin parade’
(Figure 3). This parade was significant, given the Kaiser’s emerging role as a self-
appointed protector of global Islam (Richter, 1997) and his alignment with European
admirers of Bedouins as ‘pure, fearless, unspoiled by civilization’ and racially pure
(Gossman, 2013: 20).3 The Emperor’s enthusiasm for the colonial exhibit and above all
for Cairo set the tone for other visitors, most of whom also visited these special sections.4
Kaiser Wilhelm II was also committed to a massive expansion and modernization of
the German Navy, and the navy was at the core of German imperialist politics and
propaganda at the time (Eley, 1991). It followed, then, that the navy would play a central
role in the 1896 exhibit, despite Berlin’s landlocked location. The fairgrounds included
an 88-meter-long replica of the ocean liner Kaiserschiff Bremen, within which were
located the private rooms for the Kaiser and Kaiserin during their visits to the exhibition
52 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

Figure 2. The Kaiser inspecting the honor guard of the 3. Garde-Regiment of the Prussian Army
on the grounds of the Gewerbeausstellung on the exhibition’s opening day. Source: Lindenberg
(1896).

Figure 3. Bedouin parade for Kaiser Wilhelm II at the ‘Cairo exhibit’ on opening day.
Source: Lindenberg (1896).

(Flamm, 1896). Although the real Kaiserschiff Bremen was used for transatlantic
voyages, not battles, the walls in the Kaiser’s salon were made of wood from New
Guinea – a German colony (Lindenberg, 1896: 172).
In addition to the Kaiserschiff there were mock naval battles (Marine Schauspiele)
between miniature ships, presented every two hours over the course of the exhibition.
These presentations were said to have been created at the urging of the Emperor himself,
and they were directly connected to the ‘state’s permanent and intensive navy propa-
ganda’ (Crome, 1997: 25). According to the press these naval displays were the most
Steinmetz 53

popular part of the entire exposition, besides the indoor industrial exhibits (Lindenberg,
1896: 172). On 28 May the Kaiser and Kaiserin and all of the officers of the Imperial
Navy Office were invited for a special viewing of the navy spectacle.5

Visitors as conquistadors and middle managers colonial

There were over 50 colonial exhibits in Germany between 1896 and 1940, 300 human
zoos, and a number of touring colonial performance groups (Arnold, 1995). For most
Germans these were the only opportunities to see actual people from the colonies, but
there were countless other ways in which the colonies were made visible in the
metropole. Berlin and several other cities created colonial museums, and the ethno-
graphic museums that existed in many large cities and smaller university towns were de
facto colonial museums.
The 1896 colonial exhibition demonstrates the inadequacy of leading interpretations
of the world fairs. Visitors were not simply being taught to appreciate exchange value but
were also being inducted into practices and ideologies of colonial and imperial dom-
ination. The exhibit’s organizers aimed to educate and excite the German public about
their colonial empire. At the same time, the colonized people who were imported for the
1896 exhibit engaged in various forms of resistance while in Berlin.
Over 300 colonial firms – most of them German – presented their business at the
colonial exhibit, which attracted over two million visitors (Schweinitz et al., 1897: 335).
The planners of the colonial exhibition included leading figures of German colonial
governance, business, and propaganda. The exhibit’s official sponsor was Duke Johann
Albrecht zu Mecklenburg, president of the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolo-
nialgesellschaft), the leading German organization involved in colonial lobbying,
research, propaganda, and organizing overseas settlement. The exhibit’s Honorary
Presidium consisted of Dr Paul Kayser, Director of the German Foreign Office that still
controlled colonial policy at this time (a free-standing colonial office was not created
until 1907), and Prinz von Arenberg, a German diplomat, Prussian and German par-
liamentarian, and Vice President for Berlin of the German Colonial Society. The Gov-
ernors of German East Africa and Cameroon, Hermann von Wissmann and Jesko von
Puttkamer, were named Honorary Members of the exhibit’s presidium. The head of the
exhibit’s Working Committee was Graf von Schweinitz, a colonial military hero. A
second member of the Working Committee was Carl von Beck, Director of the chartered
company that had originally been put in charge of exploiting and governing the German
colony in New Guinea.
The 1896 colonial exhibition also displayed 100 or so colonial subjects imported from
the German colonies. The German Chancellor wrote to the governors of all the German
colonies, asking them to encourage participation in the exposition by sending objects and
people.6 The first Herero and Khoi arrived on 18 July in Berlin after a ten week journey
from Southwest Africa to Hamburg. The Namibians built their own kraal inside the
exhibition space under the supervision of Lieutenant von Garczinski, who had long been
‘active in Southwest Africa’.7
In spatial terms the entire landscape of the 1896 Gewerbeausstellung recalled the
German and European colonial cities during the same era. Modern colonial cities were
54 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

Figure 4. Map of the colonial exhibit at the 1896 Gewerbeausstellung. Source: Von Schweinitz
(1897).

characterized by the central location of the military fortress (King, 1976); as we have
seen, the military, navy, and monarchy had strongly insinuated themselves into an event
that originally had been dedicated entirely to the bourgeoisie, industry, and more
euphemistically, to labor. The colonial exhibition, and the colonized people displayed
there, were located on the edges of the fairground, half in and half out (Figure 4); the
Cairo exhibit was situated entirely outside the gates. This recalled modern colonial cities,
which systematically divided Europeans from non-Europeans and separated different
non-European groups from one another (Steinmetz, 2007).
On closer inspection we can see that the colonial exhibit’s layout also resembled maps
of colonial cities in Africa and Asia at the time. These similarities begin with the stark
boundary between the European section, officially called the ‘scientific-commercial
part’, and the section on the left, referred to variously as the ethnological section,
‘Negro village’ (Negerdorf), and ‘native villages’.8
Let’s first examine the scientific-commercial or European zone. This section was
designed to look like an ‘Arab city’ and most of the buildings were in Zanzibari style.
The first building at the top left, just past the entrance, was the ‘Colonial Hall’ (Figure 5),
built to imitate the ‘house of a rich Indian’ (Von Schweinitz et al., 1897: 51). This was
where private businesses and missions active in the colonies displayed their work.
American, British, and Swiss missionary societies were represented alongside German
ones (Schnitter, 1996: 119). This marked an interesting deviation from the overarching
industrial exhibit, where German firms were completely dominant. As we will see
below, the Cairo exhibit pushed this even further by involving firms from North Africa
and the Near East. The colonial and Cairo exhibits were in this respect the only parts of
the 1896 Berlin exhibition that resembled a world’s fair rather than a national one.
Two buildings further along was the ‘Africa house’, built of corrugated sheet metal,
representing a typical German colonial structure in Southwest Africa. Next in line were
the so-called Southwest African huts. These were not, as one might imagine, living
quarters for the Herero and Witbooi, who were housed and displayed on the other side of
the bridge in the ‘native village’. Instead, these ‘huts’ were actually South African
‘Hartebeest’ style buildings with walls built from reeds covered with mud and dung and
Steinmetz 55

Figure 5. The colonial hall at the 1896 colonial exhibit. Source: Kuehnemann (1898: 859).

Figure 6. The science hall at the 1896 Berlin colonial exhibit. Source: Von Schweinitz (1897: 60).

thatched roofs. As a specialist explained in the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, these were the
kind of lodgings that German settlers might inhabit during their first years in the colony,
perhaps while saving money to buy a farm (Dove, 1896b). Southwest Africa was the only
German overseas colony with a significant population of white settlers.
The presence of a science hall (Wissenschaftliche Halle; Figure 6) in the European
sector underscores the central place of science in German understandings of their
colonial empire and the growing importance of colonial science and social science in
56 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

Germany at the end of the 19th century. The science hall was described at the time as
an ‘Indian temple’ and an ‘Arab mosque’ – a stylistic mix typical of East African
Swahili coast architecture. Some of the building’s decorations were copies from an
actual mosque in Kilwa, East Africa (Illustrierter Amtlicher Führer, 1896: 185; Von
Schweinitz et al., 1897: 60). Inside the hall was a sculpture of Atlas carrying a globe
inscribed with the global shipping routes of the German postal service, the locations of
German embassies and consulates, and figures on the number of Germans resident in
colonies and foreign countries. Taken together, this information conveyed ‘the repre-
sentation of German power and German presence across the globe’. Inscriptions on four
smaller pyramids stationed near the hall’s entrance provided statistical data on German
literacy rates, maritime and foreign trade, and the size of the German Navy (Von
Schweinitz et al., 1897: 60). Large maps on the walls depicted Germans’ participation in
the exploration of the planet. Other parts of the scientific hall presented the flora and
fauna of the German colonies.
Continuing this clockwise circuit around the European section, the visitor would
come to the import-export hall, a building designed to resemble the German consulate
building in Zanzibar (Arbeitsausschuss, 1896: 222–3). The visitor would then arrive at
the ‘Tropical House’ (originally referred to as a ‘bureaucrat’s house’), just to the right of
the entrance to the European zone. The Tropical House resembled an actual German
colonial bungalow, with wrap-around verandas. Like many German tropical houses that
were prefabricated in Germany, this one was built in Hamburg. It was deconstructed and
sent to Togo for use as an administrative building once the exhibit closed.9 Ideas, objects,
and people were flowing in both directions between colonies and metropole, and this was
true of the colonial exhibit as well.
Like other parts of the colonial exhibit, this display emphasized the political and
administrative technologies of German imperialism along with economic and cultural-
ethnographic aspects. Each room inside the Tropical House was focused on a specific
colony, displaying its typical products as well as the ‘institutions created by the
administration and the lifestyle of the European’. Visitors could inspect reconstructed
offices of German civil servants in East Africa, Southwest Africa, and the South Pacific.
One room was arranged as a ‘living room and bedroom in Cameroon’, with a bed sur-
rounded by a mosquito netting, a desk, and ‘typical pictures on the walls’ (Schnitter,
1996: 119; Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9: 22 [30 May 1896], 171). This section encour-
aged visitors to imagine themselves as mid-level colonial managers.
The colonial exhibit’s layout continued to resonate with actual colonial cities on the
other side of the bridge separating the European and ‘Negro’ sections. Walking toward
the ‘native village’, visitors came upon the tropical hygiene exhibit of the Foreign Office,
contributed by the German Women’s Association for Health Care in the Colonies. By
inserting this additional symbol of health at the site of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ between
colonizers and colonized, the park’s design precisely echoed colonial cities, in which
indigenous neighborhoods were separated from European ones to prevent biological and
cultural infection.10 Included in the tropical hygiene exhibit was a laboratory, a tropical
apothecary, an operating room, and an exact replica of a tropical hospital, complete
with ‘all of the necessary apparatuses and chemicals’ (Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9: 35
[29 August 1896], 275–6).
Steinmetz 57

The 1896 colonial exhibition thus cast a broader ideological net than previous
colonial fairs in London and Paris. Visitors were presented with opportunities to project
themselves into a variety of colonial roles, from conquistador and colonial official to
tropical doctor and nurse, small businessman, settler, and scientist. The similarities
between actual colonies and the exhibit continued inside the ‘native sector’. This was a
set of miniature native villages with life-size replicas of houses and other built structures.
The display for each colony was populated by people from those colonies. To avoid any
appearance of ‘laziness’ among the displayed people – which the organizers claimed was
a common problem at human zoos – each group was enjoined to engage in handicrafts,
dances, and other activities typical of their culture. The organizers claimed that the
scientific emphasis of these displays would ward off the unsavory voyeurism typical of
human zoos.
At the level of the Gewerbeausstellung as a whole, there was thus a juxtaposition of
the most advanced German industrial and scientific developments with the ‘primitive
handicrafts’ in the colonial exhibition. According to the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, there
was something ‘fascinating in itself’ about this very contrast.11 This technological gap
seemed to index a wider civilizational chasm that was used to justify colonial conquest in
this era. The Germans’ proven ability to reconstruct entire African and Oceanic villages
also seemed to justify conquest and appropriation. There was more here, in other words,
than voyeurism or the imposition of a modern ontology. The displays and the guidebooks
aligned visitors with the aims of German colonialism, urged them to reenact colonial
conquest and symbolic domination, and allowed them to imagine themselves in the more
mundane colonial roles that were essential to the operations of the colonial state.12
The logics underwriting the exhibit’s treatment of indigenous cultures was also very
much in line with actual ‘native policies’ in the German colonies. The organizers touted
their exhibit for avoiding the supposedly unrealistic mixing of ethnic groups in the
human zoos. The exhibit was in fact more authentic than the human zoos, but not for the
reasons the organizers claimed. The careful differentiation among colonized groups at
the colonial exhibit corresponded to actual native policy. The exhibit’s ‘reality effect’
stemmed from modern colonial rulers’ reliance on the combined strategies of ‘divide and
conquer’ and ‘indirect rule’, which relied on specific techniques to govern different
groups in clearly delineated geographic areas (Mamdani, 1996; Steinmetz, 2007). In
addition to splintering native resistance, such differentiation corresponded to the inter-
ests of professional and amateur anthropologists, who were busy dividing up the object
domain of the generic ‘native’ into ever more specialized categories at the time. Dif-
ferentiation among the colonized also met the interests of the missionaries. Battles
among missionaries over the same indigenous souls could be pacified by assigning
different cultures or tribes to different missionary societies. For these and other reasons,
the sharp boundaries between ‘tribes’ were artifacts of colonialism.
If colonial rulers, scientists, and missionaries were ‘splitters’ there were also ‘lum-
pers’– counterpressures towards lumping all of the colonized into a single category. All
colonized subjects in a given colony, whatever their ethnicity or language, were defined
legally and socially as inferiors to all Europeans. The spread of capitalism and urbani-
zation continued to level differences among the colonized. The mixing of ethnic groups
in human zoos and sideshows thus tapped into deeper truths about modern imperialism.
58 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

Figure 7. Replica of the quikuru at the 1896 Berlin colonial exhibit. Source: Von Schweinitz
(1997: 22).

The colonial exhibit’s German visitors were encouraged to imagine themselves as

conquerors. This can be seen in one of the best-selling fictionalized accounts of the
exhibition, Julius Stinde’s Hôtel Buchholz (1897), narrated by a Berlin hausfrau. At one
point in the narrative Frau Buchholz and her entourage visit the reconstruction of the
quikuru (fortress) of the Nyamwezi chief Siki, and they imagine themselves in the role of
German troops invading the fortress (Figure 7). This scenario was based on an actual
military campaign led by Graf Schweinitz, who seized the Sultan’s quikuru in a cam-
paign in German East Africa in 1892.13 Stinde seamlessly melded the narratives of the
petty bourgeois fairgoers and the actual German assault, shifting between present and
past tenses. Here is Frau Buchholz:

. . . we arrived at the East African fortress Quikuru qua Siki. This is a treacherous piece of
work on the outside, and even more treacherous within. . . . We keep on fleeing farther and
farther into the depths of this mousetrap, and can’t find our way out again. And then they
start to shoot at us through little holes in the wall. Bang! Boom! They are creeping toward us
with axes and spears; they massacre the intruders. Extremely dreadful . . . Although the
quikuru is only an imitation of the original, it is easy to see that even our German troops
would not be able to seize such a fortress in a single charge. But we managed it . . . they
couldn’t resist any longer – eventually they succumbed to the power of Krupp. (Stinde,
1897: 202)

The flip side of this kinetic, embodied experience of colonial conquest was resistance
by the imported colonial players to their treatment at the exhibition. Some of their defiant
practices stemmed from the tension inherent in the exhibit between insistence on dif-
ferences among native groups and an overarching commensuration of differences
through their definition as primitive and colonized. These tensions were expressed in
various ways. During the daytime, each subject group was separated and asked to engage
in supposedly distinctive cultural activities; at night, all of the people on display – and
Steinmetz 59

Figure 8. (left): Nama at the 1896 colonial exhibit in Berlin, with white feathers in hats
(caption: ‘Hottentotten am Pontok’). Source: Von Schweinitz (1997: 157).

those staffing the Cairo exhibit – ate and slept in a common hall. Indeed, the 1896
exhibition was one of the rare places where subjects from different German colonies
could interact in non-carceral conditions.14 The tension between a generalizing defini-
tion of the colonized as savages and the real differences in their forms of Europeani-
zation came to a crisis among the Southwest African delegation. The Witboois were
related to Khoi groups that had been in contact with Europeans at the Cape since the 17th
century and spoke Cape Dutch. German missionaries had worked intensively since the
mid-19th century in Namibia to Christianize the Herero, and had celebrated their con-
verts in numerous pamphlets. Now the Namibian delegation was being asked to perform
both a Europeanized ‘trek’ at the exhibit and a set of unspecified ‘pagan activities’. The
Herero refused to wear the ‘pagan’ costumes they were given by the exhibit’s organizers.
After several months in Berlin, these African Christians, led by Friedrich Maherero,
eldest son of the Paramount Herero Chief, demanded to return home, complaining that
they were being called upon to perform ‘all manner of pagan activities’.15
Another form of resistance at the colonial exhibit was represented by Hendrik
Witbooi, nephew of the Witbooi chief from Southwest Africa. After being defeated
militarily by the Germans in 1894, the Witbooi had been recruited as scouts and
sharpshooters in the colonial army. Whereas most of the imported colonial subjects were
exhibited in exotic native clothing, the Namibian Witbooi appeared at the 1896 exhibit in
their traditional European style clothing. They also appeared mounted on horseback,
bearing firearms and wearing feathers in their caps. For the Witbooi, these white feathers
signified warfare (Figure 8). In 1904, Hendrik Witbooi and his followers put white strips
of cloth on their hats when they went to war against the Germans. The fact that the
organizers were not bothered by the Witbooi carrying guns and wearing white feathers
showed how deeply they misunderstood them. Like the rulers of Southwest Africa, the
organizers seem to have been convinced that Witbooi warrior qualities had been suc-
cessfully harnessed to the regime. The Witbooi, however, understood their subjection to
60 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

Figure 9. (right): Depiction of a Nama in catalog of the 1896 Colonial Exhibit, with caption
“A Hottentot”. Source: Arbeitsausschuss (1896: 218–19).

the colonial state during the 1890s as a brief parenthesis between periods of self-
government. They may even have known that the Germans misunderstand their bra-
zen display of warrior symbols at the heart of the oppressive colonial system.
It is worth examining the depiction of the Witbooi in a bit more detail, since they were
the group that would deal the Germans the harshest blow when they joined the uprising in
1904. German depictions of these so-called ‘Hottentots’ were as contradictory in Berlin
during the summer of 1896 as they were in the Southwest African colony. On the one hand,
the chapter on Southwest Africa for the official catalog was written by Karl Dove, who was
the closest thing to an official expert on the Witbooi for the German colonial state (Dove,
1897). Dove’s rendering of the Witbooi relied on romantic depictions of the American
Indians. He described Hendrik Witbooi as ‘actually having traits that Cooper’s imagination
attributed to the leaders of the redskins’ and praised Witbooi warriors for their ‘experi-
enced, Indian-like eyesight’ (Dove, 1896a: 54, 314). On the other hand, a public lecture at
the 1896 exhibition on the natives of Southwest Africa by another colonial specialist
depicted the Khoi (‘Hottentots’) as a lying and lazy race incapable of civilization, con-
cluding that that they should be ‘pushed back’ like the Indians in North America.16 This
Khoi-phobic depiction was deeply rooted in South African racial ideologies (Steinmetz,
2007: ch. 2). It was echoed in an illustration labelled ‘A Hottentot’ in the exhibition’s
Steinmetz 61

official catalogue (Figure 9). Visitors to the 1896 colonial exhibit were thus given multiple
opportunities to identify with the colonial empire, to absorb its specific messages, and to
imagine themselves playing diverse roles in the colonies.

Cairo: Educating Germans in cultural imperialism

The experiences of visitors to the 1896 Cairo exhibit differed from those of visitors to the
colonial exhibit and to Egypt-themed exhibits in Paris and London during the same era. As
we have seen, the 1896 colonial exhibit only makes sense in the context of ongoing
German colonial government and ideologies. Similarly, the 1896 Cairo exhibit can only be
understood against the backdrop of Egypt’s peculiar position within 19th-century Eur-
opean imperialism and Germany’s specific relationship with the non- or semi-colonized
countries of the global periphery at the time, such as China, the Ottoman empire, and
Egypt. Although the Ottomans nominally controlled Egypt, they had recognized the
Khedive (Viceroy) as semi-autonomous in 1867. The Khedival state’s bankruptcy a
decade later forced Egypt to accept oversight by a Public Debt Commission, dominated by
Britain and France and representing the European creditors. By 1880 Egypt had become
‘enmeshed in the European-dominated world market as an exporter of raw cotton and an
importer of manufactures’. Over 900,000 Europeans had settled in Egypt by this time
(Reid, 1998: 219–20). After the 1882 British occupation Egypt was subjected to a British
‘veiled protectorate’. A British ‘consul general’ now provided the Khedive with advice
that ‘had to be followed’, and an ‘ever-increasing number of British advisors and
bureaucrats’ permeated the Khedival state (Daly, 1998: 240–3; Mitchell, 1988). Subjected
to informal but relentless forms of western imperialism, Egypt’s condition more closely
resembled China and the rest of the Ottoman empire than the formal colonies. One dis-
tinctive feature of these informally controlled countries was their relative openness to
trade, investment, and other inputs from all of the great powers, in contrast to colonies,
where trade, investment, settlement, and political influence were usually dominated by a
single metropolitan power (Williams, 1959; Bergesen and Schoenberg, 1980).
Britain’s informal style of exerting control over Egypt before the First World War
meant that Germans were able to insinuate themselves quietly into the country’s culture,
politics, and economics before 1914. German financial interests in Egypt were minimal
before the mid-1880s, when Germany and Russia were admitted to representation on the
Egyptian Public Debt Commission (Kleine, 1927: 26). Gerson Bleichröder, ‘Bismarck’s
banker’, succeeded in opening the Egyptian debt to German investment (Stern, 1977:
422, 427). By 1890 German trade in the Suez Canal was second only to British trade;
after 1895 Germans controlled the shipping of heavy manufactured goods from Europe
to Egypt (Kleine, 1927: 22–4).
Germany’s most undisputed realm of influence within Egypt was cultural. The
Egyptian Antiquities Service was directed by the French, but the Curator of the Cairo
Museum of Egyptian Antiquities was German-born Egyptologist Emil Brugsch. The
Khedival school system, created in the early 1870s, was directed by V. Edouard Dor, a
German-educated Swiss citizen. The Khedivial Library, created in 1869, was directed by
five German Egyptologists between 1873 and 1914.17 The last Khedive, Abbas Hilmi II,
attended college in Vienna and spoke German, along with French, English, and Turkish.
62 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

Germany gained a political presence in Egypt, although it never came to rival Britain
or France. Before 1890 Bismarck abstained from intervening in Egyptian affairs alto-
gether, in exchange for British diplomatic concessions and acquiescence to Germany’s
colonial program (Von Hagen, 1915). After 1890, however, with the new imperial policy
that began under Kaiser Wilhelm II, German officials and ideologues began to pursue a
more aggressive course vis-à-vis Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world. By 1911
Germans held 25 positions in the Egyptian ministries of the interior, education, finance,
justice, and construction, along with the public railways bureaucracy (Mangold, 2007:
74). Some Germans claimed that Germany was ‘the only European great power that had
not attacked or sought to dominate Muslims or . . . Muslim lands’ (Gossman, 2013: 39).
In German fiction, Egypt was often depicted as victim of western – but not German –
colonialist aggression (May, 1958). Kaiser Wilhelm II ‘delivered pointedly pro-Ottoman
and pro-Islamic speeches’ during his second visit to the Ottoman empire in 1898 and
declared himself the protector of the world’s Muslims in a speech at the tomb of Saladin
(Trumpener, 1968: 4; Richter, 1997: 86–92). The Emperor may have been influenced by
the notorious Egyptologist Max von Oppenheim, a free-floating Orientalist loosely
associated with the German Consulate-General in Cairo, who filed reports with the
Foreign Office on Pan-Islam and Egyptian nationalism and ‘encouraged the idea of a
German-inspired “holy war” of the Muslims against England’ (McKale, 1987: 14). In
1915 the Germans created prison camps for Muslim prisoners of war who had fought on
the Allied side. In an effort to foment jihad against Britain and in compliance with a
request by their Ottoman allies, the Germans provided lenient conditions in these camps,
and allowed the prisoners to build a mosque, the first of its kind in Germany and central
Europe (Höpp, 1996). Germany was the only European power expressing sympathies for
Egyptian nationalism and pan-Islamism.
How were these peculiarities of Germany’s relation to Egypt expressed in the 1896
Cairo exhibit? Much has been written about European Egyptomania and programs of
subjecting the Orient to modern epistemologies. Although these factors were certainly
present in the Berlin Cairo exhibit, they did not distinguish it from similar exhibits
elsewhere in the world. The specificity of the exhibit also goes beyond the organizers’
stated wish to surpass previous Cairo exhibits though ‘German thoroughness’ and by
avoiding ‘theatricality’ (Kuehnemann et al., 1898: 868).
The Cairo exhibit was arranged by a number of Germans with extensive experience in
Egypt. Willy Möller, an experienced Africa traveler, ‘led the negotiations with the
Egyptian officials and organizations concerning the exhibited collections’ (Krug, 1898:
7). When Möller became ill he was replaced by August Schmidt, the previous director of
the Egyptian railways and waterworks (Krug, 1898: 869). Schmidt was supported in his
efforts by the German General Consul in Cairo, Edmund von Heyking, and by Freiherr
Oswald von Richthofen, Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office and German
representative for the Egyptian debt. The Egyptian Khedive and Egyptian Minister
of Education, Ya’kub Artin Pasha, were also involved in creating the Cairo exhibit.
The Khedive lent the weapon collection from the Egyptian state treasury, including the
famous sword of the Khedivate’s founder, Muhammed Ali (Krug, 1898: 869). The
Khedive’s brother visited the Cairo exhibit repeatedly while visiting Berlin (Roman,
2010: 45).
Steinmetz 63

The actual display differed from previous ‘rue du Caire’ exhibits in several ways.
Like earlier versions, the German Cairo was divided into ancient and modern sections.
The 1896 Cairo exhibit included a replica of famous Egyptian mosques, city and
university gates, a quarter-size reproduction of the Cheops pyramid, and a small
Egyptian peasant village, conceived ethnographically. Around 400 people were
recruited to staff the 1896 Cairo exhibit. Most of them were Egyptians, but there were
also Algerians, Tunisians, Palestinians, Turks, Syrians, and others (Krug, 1898: 873).
The creation of an international, pan-Muslim group to represent Egyptians gestured
indirectly toward the pan-Islamism that Oppenheim and other Germans were begin-
ning to recognize and promote.
The reconstructed monuments of ancient Egypt were combined within an even
larger modern section of Cairo. The modern section was designed to look exactly like a
modern Cairene street. It was filled with shops that carried ‘European-made metal-
wares and appliances for the house and kitchen’ (Krug, 1896: 55) and other com-
modities that were far from exotic, but that alluded to the pan-European penetration of
the Egyptian economy. Cairo was the only part of the entire Gewerbeausstellung in
which non-German businesses were predominant. Even more distinctive is that the
foreign businesses represented at Cairo were not all European owned; some were based
in Cairo and Alexandria, Calcutta, Damascus, Beirut, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Tunis
(Krug, 1896, 118–19).
‘Cairo’ also burst the boundaries of the city of Cairo, compressing space as well as
time and becoming a metonym for the entire region. There were two mosques, one of
them a working mosque – a copy of the actual mosque of Sultan al-Mu’ayyad in Cairo.
As the official guidebook explained, European visitors could visit the outer dome hall if
they removed their shoes and wore headgear, but they were not allowed in the rest of the
mosque, ‘since the Muslims carry out their services here’ (Krug, 1896: 87). All of the
shops in the Cairo exhibit were closed during the Muslim holiday Kurban Bayramı (Eid
al-Adha) (Roman, 2010: 61). There was also a working ‘Koran-Schule’ or Madrassa for
boys living temporarily inside the Cairo exhibit. Visitors to the Cairo exhibit were able to
watch Egyptian boys learning the alphabet, punctuation, vocabulary, arithmetic, and
Koran lessons (Krug, 1896: 67–8). Just outside the second mosque – a replica of the
Qaytbay mosque in Cairo – was a display of Jewish settler villages in Ottoman Palestine.
In one room visitors could taste wine from actual settlements; in the second room other
agricultural products were displayed (Roman, 2010: 58).
Cairo’s modern section also contained a Fallachendorf (Krug, 1896: 51) or ‘Fellah
Village’. On the one hand, this was clearly ‘conceived as an ethnographic village’
(Roman, 2010: 56), and can be seen in the same light as the ‘native villages’ in the
colonial exhibit. On the other hand, the term fellah was associated in German discourse
at the time with the idea of intense poverty. Spengler, in Der Untergang des Abendlandes
(1918–22), would compare the rootless urban masses and intellectuals of decaying
western civilization to fellahin or Fellachenvo¨lker (Hell, forthcoming: ch. 17). Including
the Fella Village at the heart of Cairo thus called attention to the squalor of the British
quasi-colony, and by extension to the rapacity of British imperialism in general.
Cairo’s final peculiarity concerns politics and sovereignty. Cairo was the only display
at the 1896 Gewerbeausstellung that a foreign government had a hand in shaping. In this
64 Thesis Eleven 139(1)

case that government was the Egyptian Khedivate. Even more unusually, the Egyptians
who staffed the Cairo exhibit fell under the legal jurisdiction of the Egyptian police.
This was an extraordinary example of Egyptian extraterritoriality within a temporary
micro-territory inside Germany. However, Egyptians could only visit the rest of the
Gewerbeausstellung under police supervision (Roman, 2010: 45). As for the people on
display in the colonial exhibit, they remained German colonial subjects while in Berlin.
Here the difference between being formally colonized and being subjected to a ‘veiled
protectorate’ became clear.

Conclusion: Hybrid empire, multiple ideological interpellations

The 1896 Gewerbeausstellung thus contained a plethora of imperial messages, but these
fall into three main categories. Germans were interpellated as subjects of a Prussian-
dominated Reich in the exhibition as a whole, as rulers of a colonial empire in the
colonial exhibition, and as participants in a chaotic global imperialism, in the Cairo
exhibit.
Taken together, the Cairo and colonial exhibits pointed to two different imperial
processes that coexisted in late 19th-century Germany and whose advocates were locked
in fierce debate. On the one hand was the colonial lobby; on the other side were
defenders of a global, noncolonial hegemonic Weltpolitik. The colonial project pointed
toward an explicitly asymmetrical form of direct political control by Germany. Visitors
to the colonial exhibit were thus exposed to two core ideologies. The first was an
argument for the inferiority of the colonized, which justified their subjection to European
sovereignty. The entire segregated layout of the colonial exhibit made this point, as did
the display of ‘natives’ engaged in primitive handicrafts and the elaborate tropical
hospital. The colonial exhibit allowed European visitors to imagine themselves in an
array of colonizing roles.
The Cairo exhibit, in contrast, depicted a semi-autonomous non-European realm that
was religiously, ethnically, economically, and politically mixed. European and Egyptian
culture, business, religion, and sovereignty bumped up against one another and mingled
here. European control was less obvious, defining the general trajectory for economic
development and providing an overarching political framework within which sover-
eignties could be parceled out and shared. More ominously, Cairo allowed a glimpse of
other futures, including the increasingly fateful German intervention in the region.

Acknowledgements
For comments on earlier versions of this paper I would like to thank participants in a seminar at the
Centre Norbert Elias in Marseille and Julia Hell.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Steinmetz 65

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. For a meta-analysis of the number of scholarly publications on national and international
exhibitions between 1950 and 2004, see Geppert (2013: 10).
2. See Kaeselitz (1996); Müller (1996); Badenberg (2004); Geppert (2007, 2013: ch. 2).
3. When a Bedouin girl was born on 3 August 1896 inside the Cairo exhibit, newspapers reported
that she was given the name Josephine Berolina Augusta (Teltower Reichsblatt, 4 August
1896, vol. 40, no.181 (1896), p. 723).
4. Tägliche Rundschau (Berlin), 2 May 1896, no. 103; Teltower Kreisblatt, no.103, 2 May 1896,
p. 1; Geppert (2013: 46); Roman (2010: 44).
5. Teltower Reichsblatt, 29 May 1896, no. 124, p. 494.
6. Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichtenberg, Reichskolonialamt (RKA), vols. 6349–50, ‘Für die Kolo-
nialausstellung bestimmte Afrikaner der deutschen Kolonien’.
7. Teltower Reichsblatt, 23 July 1896, vol. 40, no. 171, p. 682.
8. Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9: 16 (18 April 1896), 121.
9. Illustrierter Amtlicher Fu¨hrer, 1896: 184; Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9: 19 (9 May 1896), 146.
10. On the administrative separation of the African and European zones in Douala, Cameroon by a
1-km wide free zone with no residences – the flight limit of the malaria-bearing anopheles
mosquito – during the German period see Austen (1977).
11. Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9:1 8 (2 May 1896), 138.
12. The shortcoming of Bennett’s (1995) use of Michel Foucault’s ideas about surveillance to
elucidate the ‘exhibitionary complex’ is that visitors here were positioned less as surveilled
than as surveillors – and as imperial masters.
13. Kapitän Spring, ‘Bericht des Grafen Schweinitz über seine Thätigkeit bei dem Sturm auf
Quikuru qua Sikki’, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, vol. 5, 15 October 1892, 153–4.
14. On the exile of anticolonial leaders to disparate colonies and the mixing of prisoners from
different colonies, see Steinmetz (2007).
15. Letter from Rheinische MissonsGesellschaft missionary August Schreiber to Colonial
Department, 12 August 1896, in Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichtenberg, RKA, vol. 6349, p. 163.
16. Teltower Reichsblatt, 30 May 1896, no. 125, p. 2.
17. These directors were Ludwig Stern (1873–4), Wilhelm Spitta (1875–82), Karl Vollers (1886–
96), Bernhard Moritz (1896-1911), and Arthur Schade (1913–14) (Mangold, 2007).

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Author biography
George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology in the
Department of Sociology and the Department of Germanic Language and Literatures
at the University of Michigan and a Corresponding Member of the Centre de Sociologie
européenne, Paris. He is a social theorist and a historical sociologist of states, empires,
and social science. He is currently working on two main projects: the first is on the
emergence of sociology in the former British and French overseas colonies between the
1930s and the 1960s; the second is a reconstruction of sociology as historical socio-
analysis. Recent books include The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German
Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (2007) and Sociology and
Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline (2013).