Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies. Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Durham: Duke University Press.

Abstract

Germany's brief colonial career began in the 1880s after centuries of European overseas expansion. Yet as Susanne Zantop shows in this interesting study, German observers were anything but “passive” during these long years of colonial abstinence. Between the Welsers' ill-fated South American colonial venture (1528 – 55) and the late-nineteenth-century Scramble, German writers generated a huge literature on colonialism which was fraught with fantasies about imperial conquest, European conflict, and German class struggles. While most recent work on German colonialism focuses on the late nineteenth century and on the sites of Germany's eventual overseas empire, this book concentrates on the New World, arguing that it played a more important role in German colonial fantasies than Africa, Asia, or the Pacific. Zantop traces the evolution of colonial discourses within a variety of literary, philosophical, and scientific genres, focusing on the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1870s.