This article uses the example of Manoli Cigarettes and its product line, The Kaiser Cigarettes, to examine the concept of co-branding as applied to royal brand names in the German Empire. It reviews the broader networks of circulation that determined the production of royal brand names: commercial laws, business ties, advances in technology, advertising structures, tourism, and other sectors of the consumer economy. The article delves into how trademark law, the Imperial Patent Office's role in approving brand names, and case law contributed to the choice of royal brand names. The article also illuminates how manufacturers used royal brands to implement business strategies along a horizontal plane of market competition. The production of the monarchy as a cultural object was thus activated through a process of triangulation: not only through the bilateral relationship between monarch and subjects, but also lateral relations between producers who were concerned about their professional networks.

Historiography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as a transimperial phenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347–1351). They claim that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor-repressive regimes, such as serfdom, become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. The authors test their theory by tracing the consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. They find that areas hit hardest by that pandemic were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns, to exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics, and to have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

Significant variation in the institutions and efficiency of public bureaucracies across countries and regions are observed. These differences could be partially responsible for divergence in the effectiveness of policy implementation, corruption levels, and economic development. Do imperial legacies contribute to the observed variation in the organization of public administrations? Historical foreign rule and colonization have been shown to have lasting effects on legal systems, political institutions, and trade in former controlled territories. Imperial legacies could also explain variations in the performance of public administrations. The author uses the case of Poland to investigate the long-term effects of foreign rule on bureaucratic systems. Historically, Poland was split between three imperial powers with very different public administrations: Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Statistical analyses of original data collected through a survey of more than 650 Polish public administrations suggest that some present-day differences in the organization and efficiency of bureaucracies are due to imperial legacies.

Concerns about a sinking birth rate and possible ‘national degeneration’ led to the implementation of various measures in maternal and child welfare across Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Infant health was strongly connected with the idea of population as both a national and imperial resource. In the colonies of the imperial powers, similar issues started to be addressed later, mostly after the First World War, when colonial administrations, who until then had predominantly worried about the health of the white European colonizers, started to take an interest in the health of the indigenous population. This article investigates the transfer of maternal and infant health policies from Britain and Germany to their tropical African colonies and protectorates. It argues that colonial health policy developed in a complex interplay between imperial strategies and preconceptions as well as local reactions and demands, mostly reifying racial demarcation lines in colonial societies. It focuses on examples from German East Africa, which became the British Tanganyika mandate after the First World War, and from the British sub-Saharan colonies Kenya and Nigeria.

Discussions about ethnic mobilization in eastern Europe have emphasized efforts of nationalist leaders to demarcate their community from their neighbors in mixed areas where ethnic boundaries and identities were blurred. Demarcation became a common means of defining the community both geographically and culturally, a process which later facilitated the community's mobilization. In the German Empire, however, the Polish-German demarcation was already stark, since it mostly coincided with Catholic-Protestant demarcations. But while the Polish community mobilized quickly and showed great solidarity, the German community did not. Using the Bromberg/Bydgoszcz administrative district as a model, the article argues that the local German community's internal divisions limited its ability to mobilize. Germans agreed on the need for greater German community solidarity, but differed on conceptualizations of its ideal structure and form. Liberal nationalists, envisioning a more egalitarian community defined by a common ethnicity, fought with local conservatives, who were as intent on preserving their prominence within the community as they were on struggling with the Poles. Such divisions crippled local German mobilization on any scale comparable to their Polish neighbors, suggesting that an ethnic community's self-demarcation is necessary but not sufficient to ensure its mobilization.