Event Date: 13 May 2010

Professor Geoff Eley (University of Michigan) Empire by Land or Sea? Germany’s Imperial Imaginary, 1870-1945

This talk seeks to take stock of the current upsurge of interest in German colonialism in order to revisit the much older debates of the 1960s and 1970s prompted by the Fischer Controversy and the work of Hans-Ulrich Wehler concerning social imperialism, the sources of German authoritarianism, and the continuities in German expansionism between Bismarck and Hitler. Extrapolating from the salience and breadth of the pre-1914 ideological consensus about the unavoidable rivalries of the great world empires, it considers the benefits of creating a common conceptual framework for analyzing the overseas colonialism of the Kaiserreich and the landward imperium of the Nazis together.
This event has been recorded and is available at the following URL: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/05/geoff-eley-empire-by-land-or-sea-germanys-imperial-imaginary-1870-1945/