Carl Peters and German Imperialism 1856-1918: A Political Biography [Oxford Historical Monographs]

FOR many years those of us interested in the German Right under the Kaiserreich have wished for a full-scale biography of the colonial freebooter Carl Peters, whose career acquired such emblematic importance for the most overt Pan-German and other radical nationalist advocates of German colonialism during the Wilhelmine era.

Born in 1856, the son of a Lutheran pastor in the state of Hanover to the south-east of Hamburg, and fourteen years old at the time of Germany's creation, Peters grew up in a generation of nationalists whose sensibility was formed by the excitements of unification, in the heady expectation of necessary glories to come. Emerging from his university studies in Göttingen, Tübingen, and Berlin already a well-connected and successful scion of the Bildungsbürgertum, moreover, he seemed well on his way to an academic career.

But having published his dissertation on Schopenhauer in 1883, his energies and imagination became enlisted by the emergent German colonial movement, newly centring around the German Kolonialverein (Colonial League) launched in 1882. As a key mover behind the Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation (Society for German Colonisation) formed in 1884, he quickly emerged in the forefront of this more radical wing of the movement. He galvanised a network of fellow enthusiasts, who both attracted financing and sought the ear of Bismarck.

Following a trip to Zanzibar between November 1884 and February 1885 (...)

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