Frontiers of Empire

Max Sering, Inner Colonization, and the German East, 1871–1945

Robert L Nelson author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:25th Jan '24

£85.00

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Frontiers of Empire cover

Connects Germany's colonial adventure in Eastern Europe with the North American Frontier.

Frontiers of Empire connects the settlement of the North American West with Germany's colonization of Eastern Europe, through the fascinating biography of Max Sering, a world-famous professor who was present at every major phase in the evolution of Germany's relationship with its eastern frontier.How did the homesteads and reservations of the Prairies of Western North America influence German colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eastern Europe? Max Sering, a world-famous agrarian settlement expert, stood on the Great Plains in 1883 and saw Germany's future in Eastern Europe: a grand scheme of frontier settlement. Sering was a key figure in the evolution of Germany's relationship with its eastern frontier, as well as in the overall transformation of the German Right from the Bismarckian 1880s to the Hitlerian 1930s. 'Inner colonization' was the settlement of farmers in threatened borderland areas within the nation's boundaries. Focusing on this phenomenon, Frontiers of Empire complicates the standard thesis of separation between the colonizing country and the colonized space, and blurs the typical boundaries between colonizer and colonized subjects. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

'In this brilliant volume, Nelson masterfully reconstructs the complex, consequential, and hitherto obscure life of the settlement planner Sering. As Sering outfitted the colonial gaze with what Nelson calls 'utopian goggles', the resulting reverberations were global, shifting, and disastrous for Germany and Eastern Europe.' Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, University of Tennessee
'In Frontiers of Empire, Robert Nelson brings new insight and clarity to one of the most important, but also baffling, phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the tangled web of global settler colonialism, German overseas imperialism, and Nazi genocide. He does so by focusing on the fascinating life of Max Sering, one of the spiders who spun this web and remained at its center the whole time.' Angela Elisabeth Zimmerman, The George Washington University

ISBN: 9781009235365

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

332 pages