Recent approaches in global history and postcolonial studies have pointed to global aspects of colonialism and suggested that the history of colonialism should not be described just as a unidirectional history of power, because the reverberations of colonialism within the metropolis were also important. If we reflect further, we might ask not only if the metropolis and the colonies were entangled, but also if different colonial contexts had connections to one another. Pursuing this in the case of missionary activities, Rebekka Habermas recently demanded that scholars connect missionary history and global history so as to examine the global entanglements of the mission. She drew attention to missionary societies’ active on a global scale. It stands to reason that missionary societies, as global actors, pursued similar politics in different regions and, therefore, different regions and contexts were thereby connected. But is it possible to show direct entanglements between individual mission contexts? Can we explain certain practices and discourses in colonial situations better if we look at other regional contexts?

In testing these questions, the case of the so-called “emigrant mission” (Auswanderermission), directed at Germans emigrants to Brazil by a sister organisation of the Protestant Rhenish Missionary Society, is instructive. Strangely, Habermas mentioned neither the Americas nor the emigrant mission when she proposed the analysis of global entanglements of the mission, as if there had been no missionary activities in the Americas. But it is exactly this kind of entanglement that seems most interesting, the entanglement between regions with apparently different histories. This paper tries to address this lacuna by asking if the history of the emigrant mission in Brazil can be linked with “normal” missionary contexts of, for example, missions directed at non-Europeans, in order to understand why certain discourses were circulating in Brazil. In this instance, the former German colony of Southwest Africa and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Nias serve as classical missionary examples, as the Rhenish Missionary Society was very active in these regions. In considering relations between German emigrants in Brazil, the German colony in Africa, and the German mission in a Dutch colony, one must remember that Brazil, although it figured very prominently in German colonial debates of the nineteenth century, was not a formal German colony.

The German presence in nineteenth-century South Australia is associated primarily with the immigration of Prussian Lutherans escaping religious persecution in their homeland. Their settlement in the fledgling British colony aided its early, stuttering development; in the longer term it also fitted neatly South Australia's perception of itself as a “paradise of dissent.” These Germans took their religion seriously, none more so than the Lutheran missionaries who committed themselves to bringing the Gospel to the indigenous people of the Adelaide plains and, eventually, much further afield as well. In reality, however, the story of the German contribution to the history of this British colony extended far beyond these pious Lutherans. Among those who followed in their wake, whether as settlers or travellers, were Germans of many different backgrounds, who made their way to the Antipodes for a multitude of reasons. In South Australia as much as anywhere, globalising Germany was a multi-facetted project.

The intellectual gamut of Germans in South Australia is nowhere more evident than in the realm of anthropology. The missionaries were not alone in displaying a keen interest in the Australian Aborigines. Anthropologists steeped in the empirical tradition that came to dominate the nascent discipline at the end of the nineteenth century also turned their attention to Australia. Indeed, in Germany and elsewhere, Australia occupied a special position in international discourse. The American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan had observed in 1880 that Australian aboriginal societies “now represent the condition of mankind in savagery better than it is elsewhere represented on the earth—a condition now rapidly passing away.”

In 1909, in a public lecture on German colonial politics, author and colonial activist Clara Brockmann emphasised the crucial role of female emigration to the colonies of the Kaiserreich (German empire). With special reference to German Southwest Africa, she argued:

The immigration of the German woman in our colony is much talked about and much is done for it. The aim is quite obvious: the prevention of mixed marriages, which are the mental and economic ruin of the settler, the achievement of a profitable farm business, which cannot be fully developed without the assistance of the housewife, and the establishment of German manners and mores, of German family life, which is created foremost by the presence of the woman.

Brockmann was one of many women who were committed to “the colonial cause” during the Kaiserreich. Most of these activists were organised in the Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft (Women's League of the German Colonial Society). Its central aim was to support and organise the emigration of German women to the colonies of the German Empire. This paper takes a closer look at the rhetoric and politics of the Frauenbund, its claims for the decisive role women were to play in the colonial project, its emigration scheme, organised to provide German settlers with racially “appropriate” wives, and its underlying assumption that Germanness itself was under threat in colonial space. The Kaiserreich's female colonial activists have been the object of numerous studies so far. None of these studies, however, reflects on the issue within the larger context of nineteenth-century global white mass migration or white diasporic movements as described, for instance, by Jürgen Osterhammel.

In 1852, the naturalist and writer Louisa Meredith observed in her book My Home in Tasmania: “I know of no place where greater order and decorum is observed by the motley crowds assembled on any public occasion than in this most shamefully slandered country: not even in an English country village can a lady walk alone with less fear of harm or insult than in this capital of Van Diemen's Land, commonly believed at home to be a pest-house, where every crime that can disgrace and degrade humanity stalks abroad with unblushing front.”

Meredith's paean to life in the notorious Australian penal colony of Hobart was in stark contrast to her earlier, highly unfavourable account of colonial Sydney. It papered over the years of personal hardship she had endured in Australia, as well as avoiding mention of the racial warfare against Tasmania's Aborigines that had afforded her such a genteel European existence.

Such intra-Australian complexities, however, were lost when Meredith's account was superimposed onto German debates about the desirability of penal colonies for Germany. Instead, Meredith's portrait of a cultivated city emerging from the most notorious penal colony in Australia was presented as proof that the deportation of criminals was an important dimension of the civilising mission of Europe in the extra-European world. It was also presented as a vindication of those in Germany who wished to rid Germany of its lumpen criminal class through deportation. The exact paragraph of Meredith's account cited above was quoted in German debates on deportation for almost half a century; first in 1859 by the jurist Franz von Holtzendorff, and thereafter by Friedrich Freund when advocating the establishment of a penal colony in the Preußische Jahrbücher in September 1895.

Historians have often viewed the history of the German empire with Berlin firmly in the centre of the lens, thus privileging the nation-state to the neglect of both the local and the transnational. Zooming out to include transnational processes such as migration and to globalise German history enables us to complicate the dominant narratives of the German nation-state. The movements of Germans overseas—whether as migrants, missionaries, or merchants—helped to forge a global presence for the German empire, but also entailed complex negotiations both among Germans and between Germans and their various “others,” thus revealing the ways in which German nationalist and colonial discourses and practices adapted to local conditions. While the German empire sought to establish itself as a colonial power abroad only in the late nineteenth century, Prussia-Germany was already a colonial power at home, in its eastern provinces. Zooming back in from the global to the local, and refocusing from Berlin to the borderlands, further complicates our understandings of the German empire, by revealing the ways in which local conditions in the eastern borderlands, themselves influenced by transnational phenomena such as international migration, informed the development of German nationalism there. Most notably, the demographics of the Prussian eastern provinces—and the movements of Jews, Germans, Poles, and Ruthenians/Ukrainians in and out of the region—required German nationalists to integrate greater flexibility into their discourse.

Between 1905 and 1914, tens of thousands of Ukrainians from East Galicia worked legally as seasonal labourers in Germany each year. This channelling of labour was a reflection of both global trends and local East Galician national and socioeconomic relations. On the communal stage, this movement was a carefully organised operation led by the biggest Ukrainian political party before World War I, the National-Democratic Party (Natsionalno-Demokratychna Partiia, NDP). This article looks at the role of Ukrainian seasonal labour migration to Germany within the Ukrainian nationalist project in Austrian East Galicia. Specifically, it focuses on the information campaign run in the populist-conservative daily newspaper titled Dilo (Deed). Dilo was a primary source of advertisements offering the possibility of seasonal work in Germany. At the centre of this investigation is how this NDP daily reported on the progress of the migration and how it furnished an ideological justification for this shift of the labour force. Of particular interest are both the nationalist-moral and socioeconomic arguments used by Dilo to persuade Ukrainian peasants to go and seek seasonal jobs in Germany. It will be argued that the NDP's drive to send local Ukrainian peasants to Germany as seasonal labourers was presented to them as a way to further the Ukrainian cause, with the campaign itself being seen as a routine extension of nationalist concern and mobilisation. The article thus contributes to the analysis of Ukrainian nationalist economic agitation by drawing attention to the largely unexplored German imperial influence on the shaping of the Ukrainian identity before 1914.

Emigration from the German states was a mass phenomenon in the “long” nineteenth century. Much of this migration was of course labour migration, and German workers were very much on the move during the nineteenth century: in addition to the traditional Wanderschaft (travels) of journeymen, the century saw increasing internal migration within and between German-speaking lands, migration from rural areas to cities, and the participation of working people in emigration to destinations outside Europe. Over five million Germans left the German states from 1820 to 1914, with a large majority choosing the United States as their destination, especially in the earliest waves of migration. By comparison with the mass migration to North America, the flow of German migrants to the British colonies in Australia (which federated to form a single Commonwealth in 1901) was a relative trickle, but the numbers were still significant in the Australian context, with Germans counted as the second-largest national group among European settlers after the “British-born” (which included the Irish) in the nineteenth century, albeit a long way behind the British. After the influx of Old Lutheran religious dissidents from Prussia to South Australia in the late 1830s, there was a wave of German emigrants in the 1840s and 1850s, driven by the “push” factor of agrarian and economic crisis in the German states in the 1840s followed by the attraction of the Australian gold rushes and other opportunities, such as land-ownership incentives. While the majority of German settlers were economic migrants, this latter period also saw the arrival in the Australian colonies of a few “Forty-Eighters,” radicals and liberals who had been active in the political upheavals of 1848–9, some of whom became active in politics and the press in Australia. The 1891 census counted over 45,000 German-born residents in the Australian colonies.