Description
Book SynopsisMagic Lantern Empire examines German colonialism as a mass cultural and political phenomenon unfolding at the center of a nascent, conflicted German modernity. John Phillip Short draws together strands of propaganda and visual culture, science and fantasy to show how colonialism developed as a contested form of knowledge that both reproduced and blurred class difference in Germany, initiating the masses into a modern market worldview. A nuanced account of how ordinary Germans understood and articulated the idea of empire, this book draws on a diverse range of sources: police files, spy reports, pulp novels, popular science writing, daily newspapers, and both official and private archives.
In Short's historical narrativepeopled by fantasists and fabulists, by impresarios and amateur photographers, by ex-soldiers and rank-and-file socialists, by the luckless and bored along the margins of German societycolonialism emerges in metropolitan Germany through a dialectic of science an
Trade Review
In this substantially researched and concisely written book, John Phillip Short uncovers the complex influences of colonialism on Wilhelmine society in an age of mass culture and politics.
-- Michael Meng * Journal of Namibian Studies *
Short contends that both the elite and bourgeois of German society viewed colonial knowledge as information best suited for scientific exploration or economic growth. To most members of the working class, colonial knowledge was little more than entertainment, a means to ogle savages, animals, and artifacts... the book shines in its analysis of the actual and attempted interplay between the social classes as they tried to grapple with what colonialism meant for themselves and for the nation.
-- J.T. Rasel * Choice *
Short contextualizes the organized colonial movement more effectively than any other scholar, treating colonialists not as an atavistic force but rather as active and sometimes creative players in a very fluid environment.
-- Jeff Boersox * American Historical Review *
This welcome addition to our general understanding of colonial discourses in Imperial Germany is based on Short's careful research in municipal archives in places such as Augsburg, Leipzig, and Nurnberg. These are not the usual sites for such investigations, and that is one of the great virtues of his book: by taking us into colonial libraries in these cities, by introducing us to a range of populizers who actively promoted German interactions with the colonial world across Imperial Germany, and by identifying letters from seemingly naive citizens articulating their own visions of their possible futures in a colony Short provides us with a good sense of what people from the working classes were reading, seeing, and to some degree, thinking. He also shows how this compared to what members of the colonial lobby wanted them to read and think. The two were radically different. In that sense, Short's impressive social research provides us with a highly textured view of German interactions with the 'magic lantern empire'.
-- H. Glenn Penny * Journal of Modern History *
"Magic Lantern Empire traces the unfolding interaction among colonial associationsGerman workersand the Social Democratic Party (SPD) after 1884.... his work comes closer than any other to uncovering what the German working classes actually thought about imperialismand how these thoughts did and did not translate into political action" —Matthew FitzpatrickGerman Studies Review
Table of ContentsEmpire as World and Idea: Colonialism and Society in Germany1. Estrangement: Structures and Limits of the Colonial Public Sphere2. World of Work, World of Goods: Propaganda and the Formation of Its Object3. No Place in the Sun: The People's Empire4. Carnival Knowledge: Enlightenment and Distraction in the Cultural Field5. Ethnographic-Fantastic: Working-Class Readers at the Colonial Library6. The Hottentot Elections: Colonial Politics, Socialist PoliticsMagic Lantern Empire: Reflections on Colonialism and SocietyAbbreviations
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