Comp. by: PG2557 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001249585 Date:3/2/11 Time:14:13:16 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001249585.3D CHAPTER 16 ............................................................................................... RACE AND WORLD POLITICS : GERMANY IN THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM , 1878 – 1914 ............................................................................................... ANDREW ZIMMERMAN Both transnational processes and national particularities shaped the politics of race in the German Kaiserreich.1 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. In the late nineteenth century, various types of European and American racial thinking came increasingly to influence each other, as certain local racial divisions of labor became paradigms imitated by several imperial and colonial powers, and the racial politics that a state exercised in one region came to influence the racial politics that that state exercised in other regions. Germany developed a unique central European politics of race in the contested Polish provinces of the Prussian East, 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 progressive bourgeois, rather than by backward gentry. The liberal self-understand- ing of Germans as a cultural people, or Kulturvolk, engaged in a world-historical struggle for culture, or Kulturkampf, also influenced German overseas imperialism. In its empire, Germany further pioneered a colonial adaptation of the unique racial politics of the American New South and took part in the international racial politics of employing Chinese contract, or ‘coolie,’ laborers. Each of these local and transnational racial politics influenced each other to produce a uniquely German mixture, one that itself in turn further shaped transnational racial politics. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 3/2/2011, SPi