Only during the last decade or so has Germany been considered more systematically as a factor in European Expansion from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. The effects of the Price Revolution – a decline in wages and prices stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to Central and Eastern Europe – favoured the growth of labour-intensive cottage industries, largely in the textile sector. Central Europe’s geographic features – reliable precipitation supports forestry and feeds rivers, providing hydro-energy for machines and transport lanes from hinterlands to maritime ports – favoured energy-intensive production of steel-, brass- and glass-ware, all destined for colonial markets and for the barter trade against slaves from the West African coast. Early on, these commodity flows and commercial networks had integrated German territories into the colonial empires of the Western sea powers, laying the groundwork for the colonial adventures of the Wilhelmine Empire.

Applying a comparative and cross-national approach, this article is based on case studies of four representative European Atlantic port cities, namely Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon and Cádiz, and their socio-economic relations with Hamburg, one of Central Europe’s most important marketplaces. Based on quantitative data of commodity flows towards and from the Atlantic basin, it also analyses the role of German and German-speaking merchant communities that were established in these metropolitan port cities. The article will show how these foreigners circumvented the respective monopolies that excluded them from direct trade with French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies. These monopolies crumbled only during the era of the Atlantic Revolutions and the disintegration of the respective empires.

This article analyses the reorientation of Hanseatic merchants’ involvement in world trade during the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. This shift was influenced by the independence of former British and Iberian colonies in the Americas, which caused the implosion of colonial trade monopolies. The abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the Scramble for Africa also allowed German commerce to obtain more direct access to markets in and raw materials from tropical regions. An examination of the commodity chains of rubber and palm oil/kernels reveals the great influence of Hanseatic merchant families (e.g. O’Swald, Schramm or Woermann) on determining and shaping the terms by which African and South American regions became incorporated into the emerging world economy.

This article discusses the position of Poland on the global map by focusing on the routes and impact of three selected ‘commodities’ that were transported to and from Poland in the early modern era, namely slaves, tobacco and silver coin. If studied in isolation, each of these ‘commodities’ assigns Poland a different role in the geography of the global market, work and know-how distribution. Only when studied together do they reveal the complex character of the relations between Central-Eastern Europe and its western and south-eastern neighbours, reaching as far as the New World and the Middle East.

This article examines the career of Johann Matthias Kramer, a language teacher and emigration agent, as a case study to illuminate the intersections between migration, colonialism, cultural transfer and the dissemination of information in the eighteenth century. Kramer’s career spanned diverse places and regions – his birthplace, Nuremberg, the commercial cities of Rotterdam and Hamburg, the university town of Göttingen and the North American colonies of Georgia and Pennsylvania – and it oscillated between two seemingly very different professions. The article argues, however, that both language teachers and emigration agents were highly mobile, usually lacked formal training, and had low reputations, but nonetheless helped to forge important social and cultural links.

The early modern books on Ambonese natural history by G.E. Rumphius have mostly been analysed for their aesthetic form and scientific content. However, with the concept of contact zones as introduced by M.L. Pratt, these texts can also be read as historical sources about colonialism and slavery in the late seventeenth-century Moluccas. This article explores the traces of colonialism and slavery in Rumphius’ Ambonese Herbal (1740ff.) and the Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet (1705).

In the eighteenth century, the French administration usually did not appoint foreigners to leading functions. The Upper Hungarian nobleman Móric Beňovský, who was commissioned by the French king to build a colony on Madagascar, was an exception. Soon, Beňovský developed fanciful accounts of his experience on Madagascar and eventually he became famous across Europe. His case raises the question about the conditions that foreigners had to fulfil in order to make a career in the French empire. This article seeks to answer the question of whether Beňovský’s Upper Hungarian origins contributed to shaping his career, self-fashioning, policy and knowledge production, that is, orientated these in a way that differed from the French colonisers. It claims that Beňovský chose to fictionalise his life and to conjure lies about his experiences on Madagascar because it was the only way to make a career in a system otherwise dominated by established networks of patronage. Furthermore, Beňovský’s fanciful information policy gives some insight into the way information was produced in the French empire: it shows that Versailles was very much dependent on a few informants, and that the logic of court patronage played a great role in knowledge production. Beyond that, the fact that Beňovský’s fantastic stories were considered trustworthy by the elite across the continent says a lot about European colonial imagination in the Enlightenment period.

The article gives an example of how actors and processes should be differentiated from each other in an imperial context that concerns both a European and a non-European region. Some of the ‘Austrian’ missionaries who worked in the Catholic mission in southern Sudan were of Slavic or Italian origin. Their double identity shaped the way they conceived their pastoral work. Nevertheless, these missionaries were not the only group of people who were engaged in this Austrian colonial endeavour in mid-nineteenth century Sudan.

This paper explores the Polish opinion about German colonialism in Africa in connection with the perception of Prussian rule ‘at home’. In late Imperial Germany, Prussian Poles tended to look at the German ventures in Africa with a very critical eye. Their interest in Cameroonian issues was due to the fact that both Poles and Cameroonians were facing the same difficulties at the same time, namely German attempts to eliminate local languages in schools and to take control of the lands. By establishing a link between Polish and Cameroonian suffering, Polish patriots wanted to make Poles aware of their political, economic and cultural subjection within a global context. In a certain way, this counter-hegemonic narration was supposed to deprovincialise the ‘Polish issue’ and make it part of the broader struggle against German imperial power. The Poles, however, did not support independence for Cameroon. They used the Cameroonian issues mainly polemically in order to advance their own cause in imperial Germany.

‘Eurafrica’, the continental-scale fusion of Europe and Africa into one political entity, was first developed as a political concept in the 1920s by the Pan-European Union, and named as such in a 1929 article by its founder and leader Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. Within five years, this neologism had become a commonplace, as Eurafrica exploded across public political discourse. This paper unpacks what Eurafrica entailed in its original expression, what made it a useful concept for the Pan-European Union to employ, and what made it so appealing to a wider (European) public. It does so with particular reference to the way in which Eurafrica was presented as a means of opening up colonialism to those European states that lacked their own colonies. Partly, this meant appealing to German colonialists resentful at the stripping of Germany’s colonies at Versailles. Crucially, however, it also meant appealing to the broader ‘historical injustices’ that meant that Central European countries did not have access to colonies, and promising a future in which these intra-European ‘injustices’ could be transcended and Central Europeans could thus become equal partners in Europe’s mission civilisatrice in Africa.

The history of European integration is usually presented as both a peace project and an economic endeavour. What is largely ignored is that it also had a colonial dimension. This article first recalls this largely forgotten history, asking why and how it could be erased from memory. It then explores ways in which the EU and its predecessors constituted a new postcolonial identity and how colonial legacies somehow reappear in policies and representations.