Erik Grimmer-Solem's book foregrounds economics in a new interpretation of how Imperial German elites came to understand their place in the world. The first part of the book's title, Learning Empire, is meant to portray a double meaning: through global travels, German scholars both learned about empire and learned how to create an empire. The book focuses on six key figures in the history of German economics, to understand how their travels around the world influenced their economic thought and how, in turn, those figures shaped debates around German engagement in the global economy, politics, liberal imperialism, and naval rivalries before World War I.
The book advances two major arguments. First, German global political ambitions (or Weltpolitik) emerged from German understandings of the world economy (Weltwirtschaft). Rather than seeing major political and military figures as the originators of Weltpolitik, Grimmer-Solem roots the development in the travels of an “influential subset” of German economists who traveled abroad in the 1880s and 1890s, particularly to Japan, China, North America, the Caribbean, and Venezuela (p. 19). To show this, the book ably links the lives and works of individuals to German imperial politics around the Kaiser, Foreign Office, and Navy. The geography here is particularly intriguing for business historians, reminding us that 20 percent of all German overseas capital was invested in Central and South America by 1900, triple the amount invested in Asia (p. 310).
The book's second major argument is that university-educated scholars drove Germany's global influence and fundamentally shaped how German elites understood the role of Germany in the world. In discussing the global and transnational nature of Imperial Germany, Grimmer-Solem asserts, scholars have largely omitted the role of universities, which were in fact “a node of global connection that brought the world to Germany and then facilitated many active personal links to such places as Japan, China, Latin America, and the United States” (p. 7).
To drive home these two arguments, the book explores six scholars’ travels to and sojourns in all these places, showing how the particular context of each influenced that scholar's thought. The six scholars are the American Henry Farnam and five Germans: Ernst von Halle, Karl Helferrich, Karl Rathgen, Hermann Schumacher, and Max Sering. Grimmer-Solem justifies the selection of these six by noting common characteristics: all either studied with or were connected to well-known professor Gustav Schmoller; all were Protestant and middle class; all were educated in Germany and traveled overseas; all five Germans became professors of political economy; all enjoyed public and political influence. While all six provide illuminating and compelling biographies, it would have been useful to understand more about Grimmer-Solem's selection process and whether it depended upon factors like the availability of archival sources as much as commonalities among the figures.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 explores how the economists’ thought developed through their travels and how some influenced the development of scholarship in Japan. Chapter 2, on German scholars’ influence on Japan, is particularly compelling. Grimmer-Solem not only traces how German scholars like Karl Rathgen shaped the institutional structure of Japanese universities as well as legal and medical scholarship, particularly in the 1880s, but also conversely shows how Rathgen's time in Japan made him an astute observer of imperial friction in East Asia and convinced him that Germany required more warships to bolster its power. Yet the institutional and scholarly connections could only go so far when faced with imperial and commercial ambitions. The German government surprisingly reneged on its formal stance of neutrality during the 1895 Sino-Japanese War and pushed Japan to relinquish its claims to the Liaotung Peninsula. This destroyed decades of cooperative German-Japanese relations and showed the limits of scholarly diplomacy in the face of other imperial calculations.
Part 2 then turns to how the scholars’ liberal imperialist thought aligned with major political figures like Admiral Alfred Tirpitz and how Gustav Schmoller's personal connections enabled some of the scholars to directly shape pro-navy propaganda from 1897 onward. Grimmer-Solem details how these professors played integral roles during multiple campaigns around naval politics, tariff bills, and a campaign for finance reform between 1899 and 1909.
Finally, part 3 explores the scholars’ role in colonial affairs and their pushing often highly imperialist views during World War I. For Grimmer-Solem, autumn of 1914 marked “a massive and sudden shrinkage” of such scholars’ global influence, when Schmoller joined ninety-two other prominent German scholars, artists, and writers to sign a “Manifesto of the Ninety-Three,” a document justifying Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality (p. 517).
The book is based on thorough multi-archive research in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States to trace the journeys and intellectual trajectories of the six figures under study. It also excavates often unpublished personal memoirs and manuscripts, uncovered sometimes through Grimmer-Solem's dogged work in contacting the scholars’ families. One of the book's strengths is its tying of personal biographies and travels to developments in the individuals’ understanding of the world and the economy.
Overall, the book provides a thorough exploration of how six figures’ economic thought shaped political and public debate over Germany's role in the world. The book also makes clear the distinctive elements of German understandings of empire that built on foreign trade, investment abroad, and informal economic spheres of influence. By paying attention to economists alongside other well-researched figures like missionaries or politicians, Grimmer-Solem brings a richer texture to the scholarship on global economics and capitalism in Imperial Germany.
