Conrad’s Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany and Ureña Valerio’s Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities share a common argument, that the German nation was created through the entanglements its constituent populations had with global labour, colonialism, and transnational mobility, rather than through the protection of closed borders.
Conrad is often used to demonstrate how global history reshapes our understanding of the modern nation-state, but in this work he goes further than suggesting that Germany was merely ‘affected’ by globalisation. Global connections appear as a key constitutive factor of the nation itself. His chapters show how nationalisation, racialism, and labour/class politics were moulded, and in some cases produced, through negotiation with foreign movements, markets, and ideals.
The introduction and first chapter present globalisation as a set of overlapping processes that forced Germans to reconsider who could count as part of ‘their’ national community. Similar to how Saunier frames transnational history as a perspective rather than a stable, easily defined method, Conrad uses ‘globalisation’ as a lens to reveal how national practices only make sense in relation to wider systems: emigration to the Americas, immigration from eastern Europe, and competition with other industrial powers.
Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities similarly traces how ‘internal’ colonisation in Prussia’s Polish provinces shaped colonial consciousness among both Prussian and Polish elites. For Prussian policymakers, techniques developed in the East, expropriating estates, settling German farmers, racialising Polish peasants, were closely linked to the empire’s overseas projects in Africa and Asia. For Polish elites, the same experience of dispossession encouraged visions of national renewal abroad, whether through large émigré communities in Brazil or fantasies of founding a ‘New Poland’ overseas.
In both Ureña Valerio’s and Conrad’s texts, the boundaries of the German nation appear as contingent and revisable, defined by how Germans, Poles, and others were positioned within a wider world. Whether in relation to Polish seasonal workers, imagined Chinese labourers, or German emigrants in Latin America, the nation emerges as a product of global entanglement, shaped as much by what moves across its borders as by what exists within them.
A nice and very tidy comment. Excellent. From here (and other posts) would like to dig deeper into the “how” both books are written, from which perspectives and sources. What may both books tell us about transnational and global history and their respective development over the years.