Race and World Politics: Germany in the Age of Imperialism, 1878–1914
This article analyses the question of race in world politics in the backdrop of imperialistic Germany. Racism and concepts of race emerged from an unequal, regionally varying, and international division of labor inside Europe and the United States and in those regions around the world over which Europe and the United States came to exercise formal and informal imperial power. Germany developed a unique Central-European politics of race in the contested Polish provinces of the Prussian East, and they annexed in the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland. Many Germans regarded Poles as deficient in Kultur, a concept signifying everything from diligent work habits to a secular rationality supposedly absent among Catholic Poles. Early German racism was thus cultural rather than biological and was promoted by the progressive bourgeois. As a principle of social ordering, race functioned as a colonial kinship system, and thus depended ultimately on the control of sexuality. A comparative analysis between international racism and German racism concludes this article.