american danger: united states empire, eurafrica, and the

American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, andthe Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950

SVEN BECKERT

AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, European industrialists, statesmen, econo-mists, and journalists joined in rare concord to decry the “American danger”: the newcolossus emerging across the Atlantic Ocean.1 French economist Louis Bosc warnedthat the United States was on its way to dominating “the universe”; the once-juvenile

The author wishes to thank Aaron Bekemeyer, Leonard Bowinkelmann, Chiara Chini, Julio Decker, Han-nah Everaert, Felix Fuhg, Alexandra Leonzini, Shaun Nichols, Samantha Payne, Rachel Steely, and JulieYen for their extraordinary research support. Thank you also to Alison Bashford, Andreas Eckert, BettinaEngels, Charles Forcey, Gary Gerstle, Lea Haller, Jurgen Kocka, Stephan Link, Noam Maggor, CharlesMaier, Lisa McGirr, Joseph Miller, Dieter Plehwe, Seth Rockman, Martha Schulman, Liat Spiro, EricVanhaute, Cyrus Veeser, Isabella Weber, Richard White, the fellows at re:work at the Humboldt Universityof Berlin, the members of the Humanities Research Seminar organized by the Valente Center for Arts andSciences at Bentley University and supported by a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for theHumanities (CH-50991-12), the members of the Cambridge History Workshop at Cambridge University,and the anonymous readers for the AHR for comments on earlier drafts of this article. A special thanks alsoto the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and its former director Beth Simmons, who funded theresearch on which this article is based.

1 See, among many others, Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, “The United States and Germany in theWorld Arena, 1900–1917,” in Hans-Jurgen Schroder, ed., Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany andthe United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924 (Oxford, 1993), 33–68; Fritz Blaich, Der Trust-kampf 1901–1915: Ein Beitrag zum Verhalten der Ministerialburokratie gegenuber Verbandsinteressen imWilhelminischen Deutschland (Berlin, 1975), 38; Alfred Vagts, Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten inder Weltpolitik, 2 vols. (New York, 1935), 1: 345; Frank A. Vanderlip, Amerikas Eindringen in das Euro-paische Wirtschaftsgebiet (Berlin, 1903); Hugo von Knebel-Doeberitz, Besteht fur Deutschland eine ameri-kanische Gefahr? (Berlin, 1904); Franz Erich Junge, Amerikanische Wirtschaftspolitik: Ihre okonomischenGrundlagen, ihre sozialen Wirkungen und ihre Lehren fur die deutsche Volkswirtschaft (Berlin, 1910); PaulLefebure, “Y a-t-il lieu de modifier la situation actuelle?,” in Les etats-unis d’Europe: Congres des sciencespolitiques de 1900 (Paris, 1901), 130; Hartmut Kaelble, Europaer uber Europa: Die Entstehung des europai-schen Selbstverstandnisses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (New York, 2001), 62, 70–72; Augustin Leger,“L’Americanisation du monde,” Le correspondant, April 25, 1902, 221–253, here 221; Edouard Reyer,“L’Americanisation de l’Europe,” Revue bleue, April 19, 1902, 484–488; W. Wendlandt, “Die amerikani-sche Gefahr, mit besonderer Berucksichtigung des deutschen Zolltarif-Entwurfs,” in Jahresbericht desBundes der Industriellen fur das Geschaftsjahr 1900/1 (Berlin, 1901), 45–84, here 45, 46, 47–48, 52, 66–67;Rudolf Harms, “Weltwirtschaftliche Aufgaben Deutschlands,” Veroffentlichungen des BdI 1 (1912): 19;Alphonse de Haulleville, Les aptitudes colonisatrices des Belges, et la question coloniale en Belgique (Brus-sels, 1898), 393–397; Egisto Rossi, Gli Stati Uniti e la concorrenza americana (Firenze, 1884); “La marciadegli stati,” Il sole, August 31, 1900; “Diario: Lotta di continenti,” Il sole, July 13, 1901; “Letter to theEditor,” Il sole, October 23, 1901; Jean Finot, “Francais et Anglais devant l’anarchie europeenne,” Revuedes Revues 24 (1903): 493–515; “Has Europe Abandoned Its Plan of Combining against Us?,” LiteraryDigest 23, no. 6 (August 10, 1901): 171–173; Monika Grucza, “Bedrohtes Europa: Studien zum Europa-gedanken bei Alfons Paquet, Andre Suares und Romain Rolland in der Periode zwischen 1890 und1914” (doctoral thesis, Justus-Liebig Universitat Giessen, 2008), 46; Richard Calwer, Die Meistbegunsti-

VC The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American HistoricalAssociation. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail [email protected].

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nation, he said, had matured into a “grave menace.”2 In Germany, the Alldeutsche

Blatter wailed hysterically that America’s “monstrous contiguous economic territo-ries,” enormously fertile soil, and wealth of raw materials had the potential to under-mine European competitiveness.3 The Italian La riforma sociale agreed, warning ofthe United States’ economic power as the “greatest menace,” a peril so significantthat the Bund deutscher Industrieller advocated that Germans should “arm ourselvesagainst America.”4

This discussion of the “American danger,” the “American invasion,” or the “Amer-ican specter” began in the 1870s, peaked in the early years of the twentieth century (ac-celerated by the Spanish-American War of 1898), resurfaced in the late 1920s, and

FIGURE 1: Eurafrica: The Dream of Integrating Africa into the European Economy. From Herman Sorgel, Atlan-tropa (Zurich, 1932), 75.

gung der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerica (Berlin, 1902), 9; German Ambassador in St. Petersburg, v.Schon, to Chancellor von Bulow, St. Petersburg, February 24, 1906, in vol. 5, R 16379 (1906) Generaliano. 13, Amerika, Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amts, Berlin, Germany; “For United Europe Notto Oppose Us,” New York Times, September 20, 1908, 25.

2 Louis Bosc, “Unions douanieres et projets d’unions douanieres: Essai historique et critique” (doc-toral thesis, Universite d’Aix-Marseille, 1904), 237–239, 240, 243, 431. Unless otherwise noted, all trans-lations are mine.

3 “Deutschlands Weltstellung und der Weiterbau am deutschen Nationalstaat,” Alldeutsche Blatter,January 7, 1894, 5–8.

4 The Bund der Industriellen (BdI) is quoted in Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, “Die deutsch-amerikani-schen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen, 1890–1914, im Zeichen von Protektionismus und internationaler Integra-tion,” Amerikastudien 33 (1988): 329–357, here 353; Federigo Flora, “Il pericolo americano,” La riformasociale 12 (1902): 444–468, here 444.

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continued into the 1950s.5 Anxious over the exponential rise of the first postcolonialsociety, economic and political elites in France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy debatedwith rising urgency how to respond to “the American flood.”6

One response proved particularly consequential—the call for the territorial reor-ganization of European economies. The debate on the “American danger” revealssomething fundamentally new and portentous about capitalism after 1870: its obses-sion with territory as a key component of future growth and prosperity. Well into thesecond half of the twentieth century, a large number of European entrepreneurs andstatesmen saw territorial control of raw materials, markets, and labor as the essentialingredient for economic development and political might. A thriving industrial core,many believed, depended on resource extraction in the periphery, and the integrationof the two called for an imperial state.7 They came to this belief partly because of theirimmediate economic and political needs, but their thinking was shaped by a shift in worldeconomic power. In order to compete, they had to emulate the new leader. The UnitedStates, they alleged, had succeeded in integrating its vast hinterland by radically redefin-ing the relationships between national capital, state power, and national territory. If Eu-ropean nations wanted to retain or regain their global dominance, they would have toembark on an equally radical reorganization of their national economies and foreignholdings, to create a form of territoriality in which political and economic spaces con-verged. They disagreed on the particular paths to be taken, and their strategies shiftedradically in the eighty years after 1870, but their perception of the United States shapedtheir belief that by selective emulation they could better equip themselves to compete.8

Capitalism, of course, had always relied on converting natural resources, land, andpeople into units of commodity exchange. Therefore, capitalism had important spatialaspects—the intensive deepening of capitalist social relations went hand in hand withtheir extensive spread. The forms of this spatial integration, however—the connec-tions between capital, state power, and territory—changed significantly in the nine-teenth century. Before mid-century, trade in commodities such as that between Afri-can palm oil producers and European merchants had been largely untouched by theintensification of production by human effort that had transformed the heartlands ofindustrial capitalism in Europe and North America and the exceptionally hard-drivenslave lands of the Americas.9 Frontier capitalists had maintained a somewhat inde-

5 A Google n-gram on “amerikanische Gefahr” shows the rise and fall of this debate. Also, a searchon galica.bnf.fr/editors for the term “peril americain” in the complete text of twenty-five French news-papers shows that its use peaked between 1901 and 1906. On the terms themselves, see Max Prager, Dieamerikanische Gefahr: Vortrag gehalten in der Munchener Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesellschaft am 16. Januar1902 (Berlin, 1902), 8. On the effect of the Spanish-American War, see Egbert Klautke, UnbegrenzteMoglichkeiten: “Amerikanisierung” in Deutschland und Frankreich (1900–1933) (Stuttgart, 2003), 40–44.

6 “Vom Welttheater,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 15, new series 11, no. 17 (1898): 153. On the Germandiscussion, see also August Sartorius von Waltershausen, The Workers’ Movement in the United States,1879–1885, ed. David Montgomery and Marcel van der Linden, trans. Harry Drost (New York, 1998),59. For such arguments see also Bosc, “Unions douanieres et projets d’unions douanieres,” 237.

7 For the bourgeois nature of the debate, see Grucza, “Bedrohtes Europa,” 48.8 Such responses to the emergence of new economic powers on the world scene are not uncommon.

They occurred in the context of the eighteenth-century rise of Great Britain and the twentieth-centuryrise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and are currently occurring in response to the rise of China.

9 On African economies and the intersection with European economic actors, see especially JosephC. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, Wis.,1988); Andreas Eckert, Grundbesitz, Landkonflikte und Kolonialer Wandel: Douala 1880–1960 (Stuttgart,

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pendent and often ad hoc mode of sovereignty over labor and land, driving an unevenprocess of market expansion, often with little state oversight. By the middle of thecentury, however, both slavery and territorial rule by European chartered companieswas in retreat. This vacuum was quickly filled by new forms of hinterland integration,as states made territorial grabs that both required and extended their administrative,political, and military penetration. As a result, people and resources all over the worldbegan to experience the full weight of the social relations of industrial capitalism.10

Heavy investments in fixed assets made industrialists ever more dependent both onreliable raw material supplies and on expanding markets.11 Moreover, as historianCharles Maier has shown, by the 1870s, new forms of territoriality emerged that en-abled states to claim these resources. These new territorial forms were characterizednot only by more sharply drawn borders, but also by an intensified pressure on popu-lations by states with new administrative and infrastructural capabilities—and, as thedebate on the “American danger” demonstrates, new economic motivations.12

As late-nineteenth-century European observers recognized, the United States hadpioneered this new form of integration within its continent-spanning national territory,as railroads, telegraphs, courts, capital, and soldiers acted in concert to consolidate ac-cess to distant minerals, labor, agricultural commodities, and markets. The resulting re-source abundance embedded in national commodity chains was one of the primarydrivers of the stunning economic performance of the United States at the turn from thenineteenth to the twentieth century, the era when its new “linkages and complementar-ities to the resource sector,” as economic historians Gavin Wright and Jesse Czelustapoint out, began to prove “vital in the broader story of American economic success.”13

In the years after the U.S. Civil War, the country’s steel output, wheat production, rail-road construction, and textile industries, among others, came to the forefront of theworld economy. By 1914, the manufacturing capacity of the United States exceededthat of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany combined.

This was the second great divergence, the preamble to the “American century,” to

1999). For the general point, see also Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and theMaking of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Indus-trial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (New York, 2002);Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman,eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia, 2016); DaleW. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and the World Economy (Boulder, Colo., 2004);Rafael de Bivar Marquese, “As desventuras de um conceito: Capitalismo historico e a historiografiasobre escravid~ao brasileira,” Revista de historia 169 (July/December 2013): 223–253.

10 On how these processes played out, see, for example, Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow:France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, N.Y., 2011); Beckert, Empire of Cotton; Noam Maggor, Brah-min Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2017).

11 Among many others, see Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution inAmerican Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (NewYork, 1987).

12 Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for theModern Era,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 807–831; and, more extensively, Maier,Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, Mass., 2016).

13 Quote from Gavin Wright and Jesse Czelusta, “Resource-Based Growth Past and Present,” inDaniel Lederman and William F. Maloney, eds., Natural Resources: Neither Curse nor Destiny (Palo Alto,Calif., 2007), 183–211, here 184; for the general argument, see also A. Paul David and Gavin Wright,“Increasing Returns and the Genesis of American Resource Abundance,” Industrial and CorporateChange 6, no. 2 (1997): 203–245.

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be sure, but also to the “age of empire,” as Europe struggled to retain its global mas-tery.14 European observers understood quite clearly how radical a discontinuity therise of the United States represented, and they wanted to emulate it just as they hadtried to emulate Great Britain during the first great divergence a century earlier.Understanding that this new form of integration was a deeply political undertaking re-quiring a powerful state, they were eager for European nations to embark upon simi-lar projects of recasting territorialities and creating convergences between economicand political spaces.15 Looking at the debate on the “American danger” demonstratesthat the expansive territorial integration of capital—like economic nationalism morebroadly—makes sense only from a global perspective. Tracing the fantasies, hopes,strategies, and politics of those who trumpeted “American danger” allows us to see theseldom-recognized thread connecting developments an ocean apart—developmentsthat are usually considered from a national, regional, or imperial rather than global per-spective: transnational railroads in the United States and the European “scramble forAfrica”; America’s high protectionism and European cooperation; and the abundantresources of the American West and the violent remaking of Eastern Europe.

At the heart of European responses to the “American danger” were the real andimagined projects of territorial enclosure advocated by Parisian colonial officials, Ital-ian journalists, and German steel industrialists, among others: the colonization of Af-rica, European cooperation, even integration, and violent territorial expansion withinEurope. Historians and others have all too often focused on sui generis factors in dis-cussing these massive upheavals. To explain the new imperialism, they have arguedfor the importance of “power politics,” “primitive accumulation,” the role of financecapital during the “last stage of capitalism,” the “white man’s burden,” or “social im-perialism.”16 To explain the territorial reordering of Europe, they have zeroed in onthe peculiar political character of fascism or a virulent German nationalism.17 And toexplain European unification, they have focused on the lessons Europe learned fromthe “age of catastrophe.”18 While these explanations are salient, they overlook thethread that links them, connections that a focus on European debates on the “Ameri-can danger” puts into stark relief, and that suggest new explanations for each of theseupheavals.

The apparent links between territory and development and between geopoliticsand growth, and an emphasis on the importance of continents to economic success

14 On the first great divergence, see Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. On the age of empire, seeHobsbawm, The Age of Empire.

15 The political and contentious nature of this process is also emphasized by Steven Hahn, A Nationwithout Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York, 2016).

16 For a range of very different interpretations of the “new imperialism,” see, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne, 1969); Wehler, Der Aufstieg des amerikanischenImperialismus: Studien zur Entwicklung des Imperium Americanum 1865–1900 (Gottingen, 1974); RosaLuxemburg, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals: Ein Beitrag zur okonomischen Erklarung des Imperialismus(Berlin, 1913); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (New York,1939); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperialismustheorien: Ein Uberblick uber die neueren Imperialismusinter-pretationen (Gottingen, 1980); Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (New York,2004); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire.

17 Among many books, see, for example, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and World War II:Essays in Modern German and World History (Cambridge, 1995); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kai-serreich, 1871–1918 (Gottingen, 1973).

18 See, among others, Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (Berkeley, Calif.,1992); Desmond Dinan, ed., Origins and Evolution of the European Union (Oxford, 2006).



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0

500

1,000

1,500

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

USA

UK

France

Germany

Metric Tons(thousands)

Sources: B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Sta�s�cs, 1750–1970(London, 1975), 427–433; Historical Sta�s�cs of the United States, Millennial Edi�on Online, Series Dd844.

Raw Co�on Consump�on1870–1920

0

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10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

Germany

France

UK

USA


Sources: Mitchell, European Historical Sta�s�cs, 237–277; Historical Sta�s�cs of the United States, Millennial Edi�on Online, Series Da718. Data for the UK before 1910 were converted from hectoliters using the standard weight of wheat (780 kilograms per cubic meter).

Wheat Output1870–1920

0

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200,000

300,000

400,000

500,000

600,000

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

USA

UK

Germany

France


Hard coal, bituminous coal, and anthracite produc�on. Sources:Mitchell, European Historical Sta�s�cs, 360–370; Historical Sta�s�cs of the United States, Millennial Edi�on Online, Series Db25–Db28.

Coal Produc�on1870–1920

0

15,000

30,000

45,000

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

USA

Germany

France

UK

Metric Tons

Crude steel produc�on, types of steel produced by the Bessemer and later-invented processes. Sources: Mitchell, European Historical Sta�s�cs, 399–404; Historical Sta�s�cs of the United States, Millennial Edi�on Online, Series Dd399–404.

Steel Produc�on1870–1920

0

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2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

7,000

8,000

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12,000

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

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Germany

France

UK

Thousands

France: 1866, 1886, 1896, 1901, 1906, 1921. Germany: 1882, 1895, 1907, 1925. UK: 1871, 1881, 1901, 1911, 1921. Sources:Mitchell, European Historical Sta�s�cs, 153–165; Historical Sta�s�cs of the United States, Millennial Edi�on Online, Series Ba821.

Economically Ac�ve Popula�on in Manufacturing Industry

1870–1920

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UK

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Kilometers

Length of railway kilometers operated. Sources: Mitchell, European Historical Sta�s�cs, 581–588; Historical Sta�s�cs of the United States, Millennial Edi�on Online, Series Df391, Df874. No data were available for the UK for 1870, so the kilometers for 1871 are indicated here.

Railway Kilometers Operated1870–1920

FIGURE 2: The Second Great Divergence: The Economic Rise of the United States.

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were common tropes between the 1870s and the 1950s. They connected the MonroeDoctrine with ideas about Lebensraum and Pan-Europe with Eurafrica—and struc-tured debates about history and geography, politics and economics.19 And while thesediscourses were not shared by everyone and were often fantastic, untouched by muchunderstanding of the situation on the ground, they were not arbitrary; they had a defi-nite coherence and direction as well as real and dramatic policy implications.20 TheUnited States became an important and consequential presence in the European po-litical imaginary.

DURING THE LAST THIRD OF THE nineteenth century, the administrative and economicintegration of the world’s land and markets joined labor and machinery as the essen-tial ingredients of capitalist growth. The rapid rise of American economic power, inhindsight seemingly inevitable, came as a shock to a confident European civilizationwhose goods, guns, ideas, and culture had dominated the global nineteenth century.21

In a few short decades, the United States had transformed itself from an importantsupplier of agricultural commodities—first tobacco, then cotton, and then wheat—into the world’s dominant industrial power.22 The prolonged economic crisis after thecommodity price collapse of 1873 exacerbated fear of the U.S., as periodic depres-sions and price deflation signaled the possible maturing of European economies.According to contemporary analyses, Europe’s ever more productive factories wereon the verge of outgrowing existing markets. Moreover, they lacked “secure” accessto many essential raw materials—cotton, copper, and oil, for example—and were los-ing huge segments of their working class to emigration, often to North America. Asfree-trade “Manchesterism” ran out of steam, activist states searching for markets, la-bor, and raw materials became the key building blocks of the global economy.23 Whilenecessary for profit, those markets, labor, and raw materials were also necessary forthe military strength and social stability of states.24

The epicenters of the debate on the “American danger” were France and Ger-many, but economists, businessmen, journalists, and statesmen from Italy and Bel-gium weighed in as well. One contemporary observed that concerns about the United

19 Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York, 2014), 59;Neil Smith, America’s Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, Calif.,2003), 59; Friedrich Ratzel, Grundzuge der Anwendung der Erdkunde auf die Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1899);Isaiah Bowman, The New World: Problems in Political Geography (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1921); KarlHaushofer, Bausteine zur Geopolitik (Berlin, 1928); Johannes Mattern, Geopolitik: Doctrine of NationalSelf-Sufficiency and Empire (Baltimore, 1942).

20 Africans, Ukrainians, and also many Europeans had of course very different ideas about the shapeof their polities and societies, but those are not the subject of this investigation.

21 On the importance of Europe to the nineteenth century, see Jurgen Osterhammel, Die Verwand-lung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2009).

22 R. Deeken, “Pago Pago,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 18, new series 14, no. 37 (1901): 362–363.23 Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 40–41.24 D. Friedrich Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien? Eine politisch-okonomische Betrachtung

(Gotha, 1879), 13; Fritz Blaich, “Die ‘Amerikanische Gefahr’ und die deutsche Wirtschaft, 1900–1914:Offentliche Meinung und Wirklichkeit,” in Blaich, Der Trustkampf, 38–45; Roger Freiherr von Battaglia,Ein Zoll- und Wirtschaftsbundnis zwischen Osterreich-Ungarn und Deutschland (Leipzig, 1917); Flora, “Ilpericolo americano,” 444. For the general point, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: TheUnited States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York, 2000); Hobsbawm,The Age of Empire, 45.



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States, more than any other question, dominated political and economic discussionsin Europe.25 Russia, with its vast territorial extent, came into focus as well at times,but its lack of sustained industrialization hardly suggested that its economy would sur-pass those of Western and Central Europe any time soon. The United Kingdom’s ex-tensive colonial empire generated envy too, while at the same time shielding GreatBritain somewhat from this debate, and of course in all nations there were those whoscoffed at these fears.26 Ludwig Max Goldberger, for example, published “Die ameri-kanische Gefahr” in 1905 to argue that this so-called “American danger” did not exist;his elaborate rebuttal itself testifies to the prevalence of this discourse.27 Well-bal-anced and calmly argued economic treatises mingled with hysterical exaggerationssuch as the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung’s shrill cry that “75 million energetic, intelligentpeople [Americans] . . . are forging the dagger with which to deliver the economicdeathblow to Europe.”28

Whatever its tone, the debate raised a myriad of concerns about the United States.Protectionism was one of them. American tariff barriers had increased drasticallysince the Civil War.29 In a small nation such as Belgium, Baron Alphonse de Haulle-ville argued, the fate of industry depended on the ability to export manufacturedgoods and to access inexpensive raw materials. The American continent had once pro-vided these markets and supplies, but as the United States became an industrialpower and expanded its trade into South America, Belgian industry felt threatened.30

In Germany those concerns were framed by the country’s growing trade deficit withthe United States.31 While U.S. exports to Germany had increased by 316 percent be-tween 1889/1891 and 1911/1913, imports had grown by only 75 percent. American tar-iffs, argued the Italian daily La riforma, constituted “a system of protection and isola-tion so extreme that the Chinese wall is nothing compared to it.”32

25 Prager, Die amerikanische Gefahr, 8–33.26 But see W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century

(New York, 1902); J. Ellis Barker, “Coal and Shipping: The American Danger,” Fortnightly Review 109(February 1921): 255–266.

27 Ludwig Max Goldberger, “Die amerikanische Gefahr,” Preussisches Jahrbucher 21 (April–June1905): 1–33. For such a critical evaluation of the debate, see also Prager, Die amerikanische Gefahr, 32–33.

28 Deeken, “Pago Pago,” 362.29 Auguste Beernaert, Ministre d’Etat, President de la Chambre des Representants, “Discours de

cloture,” in Congres International Colonial: Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles 1897, XIVe section (Brus-sels, 1897), 454–455.

30 Haulleville, Les aptitudes colonisatrices des Belges, 393.31 On the balance of trade, see Klautke, Unbegrenzte Moglichkeiten, 47; see also Walther Rathenau,

“Deutsche Gefahren und neue Ziele,” in Rathenau, Gesammelte Schriften, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1918), 1: 265–278, here 268; Cornelius Torp, Die Herausforderung der Globalisierung: Wirtschaft und Politik in Deutsch-land 1860–1914 (Gottingen, 2005), 332.

32 “Liberta, protezionismo e repubblica,” La riforma, July 21, 1890, as cited in Angelo Olivieri,“L’immagine degli stati uniti nella stampa liberale a Roma e Napoli,” in Giorgio Spini, Anna Maria Martel-lone, Raimondo Luraghi, Tiziano Bonazzi, and Roberto Ruffilli, eds., Italia e America dal Settecentoall’eta dell’imperialismo (Venice, 1976), 349–378, here 355. For similar such concerns, see Moniteur uni-versel, October 14, 1879, copy in Auswartiges Amt, 1878–1908, Akten zum Mitteleuropaischen Wirt-schaftsverein, R 901, f7556, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Berlin, Germany [hereafter BABerlin]; Il popoloromano, November 9, 1888; L’opinione, November 9, 1888; La tribuna, November 9, 1888; AndreasEtges, Wirtschaftsnationalismus: USA und Deutschland im Vergleich, 1815–1914 (Frankfurt am Main,1998), 299; Octave Noel, “Le peril americain,” Le correspondant, January–March 1899, 1083–1104, here1084–1088, and April–June 1899, 116–144, here 135; Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien?, 25;

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Even more disconcerting, America’s easy access to minerals and agricultural com-modities contrasted with Europe’s need to import them, often from the United States.Ninety percent of U.S. exports to Germany were raw materials such as cotton, copper,and petroleum, all essential to German industrial production and not easily procuredelsewhere.33 By 1900, 83 percent of Germany’s petroleum imports originated from theUnited States, as did 82 percent of its cotton, 22 percent of its wheat, and 79 percentof its copper.34 The numbers for France were similar.35 Fearing dependence on aneconomic competitor, Habsburg industrialist Alexander Peez warned as early as 1881about the emergence of “giant powers” with tremendous supplies of raw materials, asentiment the Brussels newspaper L’independance belge echoed when it expressed itsdread of America’s “inexhaustible resources,” including almost unlimited agriculturallands, important not just to supply industrial expansion, but also strategically.36

Territory, “American danger” trumpeters agreed, mattered in new ways to indus-trial economies. But they also understood that industrial economies mattered to terri-tory, and it was this concern that had moved anxieties about the United States to centerstage. While there were other large empires—the Ottoman Empire, for example—theysaw that America’s administrative mastery of its continental expanse and its infrastruc-tural integration gave it an unmatched ability to dominate the global emergence ofmass-production industries.37 Countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina showedthat territory without an industrial heartland was inconsequential.38

It was this combination of recast territory and industrial prowess, constituted as agigantic Zollverein—a customs union—that moved to the forefront of European

Klautke, Unbegrenzte Moglichkeiten, 38, 40, 42, 101; Haulleville, Les aptitudes colonisatrices des Belges,394–397; Knebel-Doeberitz, Besteht fur Deutschland eine amerikanische Gefahr?, 127–131; Hector Petin,Les Etats-Unis et la doctrine de Monroe (Paris, 1900); Marquis de Barral-Montferrat, “La doctrine deMonroe et les evolutions successives de la politique etrangere des Etats-Unis (1823–1903),” Revue d’his-toire diplomatique 17 (1903): 594–619; Republique francaise, August 31, 1902; Canavero, “Stampa e opin-ione pubblica italiana di fronte alla guerra ispano-americana del 1898,” in Spini, Martellone, Luraghi,Bonazzi, and Ruffilli, Italia e America dal Settecento all’eta dell’imperialismo, 405–421; Il Corriere dellaSera, April 6–7 and April 14–15, 1898; E.-F. Johanet, “Le monde aux Americains,” Le correspondant, Au-gust 10, 1898, 497–526; Johanet, Un francais dans la Floride: Notes de voyage (Tours, 1889).

33 Fiebig-von Hase, “Die deutsch-amerikanischen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen,” 332; Torp, Die Heraus-forderung der Globalisierung, 331, 336.

34 Statistisches Jahrbuch fur das Deutsche Reich, 1901, 3, 32, 80–113; on protectionism, see also Fie-big-von Hase, “The United States and Germany in the World Arena”; Memorandum of Gunther Herzogvon Schleswig-Holstein an den Reichskanzler, Schloss Primkenau, December 8, 1905, in AuswartigesAmt, 1905–1908, Akten betreffend des Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, R 901, f2499, BABerlin.

35 The French numbers were 83 percent for petroleum, 80 percent for cotton, 18 percent for wheat,and 42 percent for copper. See Annuaire statistique de la France 20 (1900): 251, 264.

36 Alexander Peez, Die amerikanische Concurrenz (Vienna, 1881), 3, 111; Haulleville, Les aptitudescolonisatrices des Belges, 396; L’independance belge, as cited in “Has Europe Abandoned Its Plan of Com-bining against Us?,” 172.

37 Chandler, The Visible Hand. Chandler viewed this integrated market as almost the result of a “nat-ural” process, ignoring its deeply political nature.

38 Noel, “Le peril americain,” 1084–1088, 1090; Julius Wolf, “Ein mitteleuropaischer Wirt-schaftsverein,” in Wolf, ed., Materialien betreffend den Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, 2nd ed. (Ber-lin, 1904), 16–20; Wolf, “Die Erspriesslichkeit des wirtschaftspolitischen Zusammenschlusses dermitteleuropaischen Staaten u. a. mit Hinblick auf Amerika,” speech, Vienna, May 19, 1903, as reprintedibid., 31–49, here 41; “Bericht,” Staatssekretar im Reichsamt des Innern, v. Posadowsky-Wehner, andStaatsekretars des Auswartigen Amts, v. Tschirschky, an Kaiser Wilhelm II, Berlin, January 1906, in Aus-wartiges Amt, R 901, f2499, BABerlin.



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fears.39 Walter Rathenau, the head of the German engineering conglomerate AEG,tellingly saw the United States as

the happiest country in terms of raw material supplies . . . The more industry orients itself

to the world economy, the more the remotest coasts have to supply the market for raw ma-terials, the more dangerous it becomes that we own only such a minor part of the land of

the world.40

However incomplete this analysis, and however much it papered over very real flawsin the U.S. economy itself—deflation, periodic crisis, and social upheaval—most ofthe industrial and agricultural elites of Germany, ranging from the Bund DeutscherLandwirte and the Mitteleuropaischer Wirtschaftsverein to the Centralverbanddeutscher Industrieller and the Bund der Industriellen, shared his assessment.41

French, Belgian, and Italian observers agreed, with French economist Louis Bosc ob-serving that the expression “peril americain” had become a legitimate part of the lan-guage of economics.42 And when in 1898 the Spanish-American War raised the pros-pect of U.S. colonialism along with market dominance in Latin America, concernsabout the American danger reached fresh heights.43

Consequently, many elite Europeans began to anticipate a world dominated by afew, perhaps three, or four, or five, territorially expansive states, led by the U.S.44 In1906, when English businessman Max Waechter asked, “What are the circumstanceswhich have combined to bring about the phenomenal development of the UnitedStates, and how far can Europe follow the example of America?,” he concluded thatthe country had succeeded because it has “an enormous extent of rich soil . . . mineralsof all descriptions abound in [its] large territory. . . [and so do] emigrants.”45 As “largestates prepare for control of the world market,” Bosc demanded that European statesprepare for a “merciless economic struggle.”46 And prepare they did.

39 Summarizing these sentiments, August Sartorius von Waltershausen saw the United States as a“young giant”—with “giant” quite literally meaning the outsized spatial dimensions of its territory. Sartoriusvon Waltershausen, “Beitrage zur Beurteilung einer wirtschaftlichen Foderation von Mitteleuropa,” Zeit-schrift fur Sozialwissenschaft 5 (1902): 557–570, 674–704, 765–786, 860–894.

40 Rathenau, “Deutsche Gefahren und neue Ziele,” 268.41 Torp, Die Herausforderung der Globalisierung, 337, 340; August Sartorius von Waltershausen, Die

Handelsbilanz der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Berlin, 1901); Thomas Lenschau, Die amerikanischeGefahr (Berlin, 1902); Prager, Die amerikanische Gefahr; Knebel-Doeberitz, Besteht fur Deutschland eineamerikanische Gefahr?

42 Bosc, “Unions douanieres et projets d’unions douanieres,” 237–239, 431.43 Hector Petin, Les Etats-Unis et la Doctrine de Monroe (Paris 1900); Marquis de Barral-Montferrat,

“La doctrine de Monroe et les evolutions successives de la politique etrangere des Etats-Unis”; Johanet,“Le monde aux Americains.”

44 Torp, Die Herausforderung der Globalisierung, 338.45 Sir Max Waechter, Confidential Memorandum (undated, but most likely 1906/1907), in vol. 6, R

16380 (1906/07) Generalia no. 13, Amerika, Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amts, Berlin. OnWaechter’s efforts to communicate his concerns to the German government, see the files in vol. 6, R16379 (1906) Generalia no. 13, Amerika, Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amts, Berlin. For similararguments, see Auswartiges Amt, 1908–1910, Akten betreffend den Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsver-ein, R 901, f2500, BABerlin; Schlesische Zeitung, January 22, 1904, in Auswartiges Amt, Akten betreffenddes Mitteleuropaischen Zollverein, R 901, f7557, BABerlin; Bosc, “Unions douanieres et projetsd’unions douanieres,” 27; Harry Denicke, “Ein kolonialpolitisches Nachwort zur Reichstagsrede desReichskanzlers vom 10. Dezember 1891,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9, new series 5, no. 1 (1892): 3–4.

46 Bosc, “Unions douanieres et projets d’unions douanieres,” 229.

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FACED WITH WHAT THEY PERCEIVED as an unprecedented combination of size and pro-ductive efficiencies in the United States, capitalists and statesmen of European na-tions sought solutions in competitive spatial expansion. They had learned somethingimportant about the U.S.: it had been uniquely successful in integrating a vast hinter-land into its metropolitan economy along the Atlantic seaboard.47 It had been able tocapture a huge continent by force and then, critically, to integrate that territory ad-ministratively into its state structures while still allowing for great regional diversity inlabor regimes, rights, and political institutions.48 The United States ensured the mise

en valeur of its territory by mobilizing labor and constructing infrastructure that madethe raw materials, agricultural commodities, and land itself accessible.49 Though it didnot see itself as a colonial power, from Europe’s perspective it was one of the world’smost territorially expansive nations—decisive in this “golden age of resource-baseddevelopment.”50

Territorial expansion has long been recognized as key to the American economy.51

By 1900, the states west of the Mississippi produced 65 percent of the nation’s wheat,44 percent of its cotton, 51 percent of its corn, 75 percent of its copper, 17 percent ofits coal, 38 percent of its iron ore, and 9 percent of its petroleum.52 While not all of itslands contributed significantly to the national economy, territorial expansion was theprecondition for its agricultural and mineral bounty. The thirteen original coloniesproduced only 9 percent of the United States’ wheat, 28 percent of its cotton, 9 per-cent of its corn, 1 percent of its copper, 0.04 percent of its cane sugar, 43 percent of itstobacco, 13 percent of its cattle, 11 percent of its iron ore, 37 percent of its coal, and23 percent of its petroleum.53 Because the U.S. had more than tripled the size of itsnational territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, its agricultural and min-eral resources had become extraordinarily abundant.54 By 1913, it produced 39 per-

47 But see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991);Wright and Czelusta, “Resource-Based Growth Past and Present.”

48 The political economies, and politics, of the three main sections of the United States remainedfundamentally different until well into the second half of the twentieth century.

49 For the use of the term in Italy, see Davide Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo: Le politiche dioccupazione dell’Italia fascista in Europa, 1940–3 (Torino, 2003), 278.

50 Quote from Edward B. Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed throughNatural Resource Exploitation (New York, 2011), 2. See also Richard H. Weiner, “The ‘Scramble forMexico’ and Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain,” World HistoryConnected 7, no. 3 (2010), http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/7.3/weiner.html. The “colonialcharacter” of U.S. continental expansion is emphasized in Fritz Sternberg, Der Imperialismus (Berlin,1925).

51 D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 3:Transcontinental America, 1850–1915 (New Haven, Conn., 1998); Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal:America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Hahn, A Nation without Borders; Maggor,Brahmin Capitalism.

52 William Mott Steuart, United States Bureau of the Census, Mines and Quarries, 1902 (Washing-ton, D.C., 1905), 417, 730; William Rush Merriam, dir., 1900 Census Reports: Agriculture (Washington,D.C., 1902), including vol. 5, pt. 1: “Farms, Live Stock and Animal Products,” clxii, and vol. 6, pt. 2:“Crops and Irrigation,” 80, 92, 425, 473, 528; David T. Day, Mineral Resources of the United States, Calen-dar Year 1900 (Washington, D.C., 1901), 144, 287.

53 Merriam, Census Reports: Agriculture, vol. 5, pt. 1: clxii, and vol. 6, pt. 2: 80, 92, 425, 473, 528;Steuart, Mines and Quarries, 1902, 417, 730; Day, Mineral Resources of the United States, 287.

54 In 1800, the thirteen original colonies and the Northwest Territory occupied around 800,000 acresof land; in 1850, the United States occupied nearly 3 million acres. See “Expansion of Our Territory” (ta-ble), in Oscar P. Austin, Steps in the Expansion of Our Territory (New York, 1903), 249–250; GavinWright and Jesse Czelusta, “Why Economies Slow: The Myth of the Resource Curse,” Challenge 47, no.2 (2004): 6–38, here 9.



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http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/7.3/weiner.html

cent of the world’s coal, 56 percent of its copper, 65 percent of its petroleum, and 36percent of its iron ore.55 As commodity chains broadened and deepened, the country’sprecocious continental political economy allowed American entrepreneurs to controlthem efficiently, enabling the second great divergence.

Indeed, rising American industries—textile production, steelmaking, oil refining,chemical manufacturing, food processing, telegraph and telephone manufacturing,and then the new automobile industry—were all built around commodity chains thatwere almost completely confined to the national territory of the United States. Thisconstituted a sharp contrast to earlier eras, when coastal merchants linking Americanslave plantations to British factories had dominated the U.S. economy. As Americanmerchants and financiers aligned themselves with domestic industry in the late nine-teenth century, the newly integrated national territory became crucial to them.56 Notsurprisingly, the trademark of this expansive capitalism was the intense relationshipbetween nation-states and national capital, a relationship that required states withnew capacities to satisfy the novel demands of their spatially anchored capitalists. InNorth America, these two anchors integrated and protected a national economyacross a vast territory, creating an unprecedented continental economic zone largelyindependent from the rest of the world. Global trade was of only minor importance to

FIGURE 3: The Wages of Territorial Expansion: Geographic Distribution of Commodity Production in the UnitedStates in 1900, by three regions: the original thirteen colonies, other states and territories east of the MississippiRiver, and states and territories west of the Mississippi River.

55 Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers, 399.56 Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bour-

geoisie, 1850–1896 (New York, 2001); Eli Cook, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Cap-italization of American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 2017).

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fin de siecle America; between 1890 and 1914, the value of its exports was responsiblefor just 7.3 percent of GNP on average, and its imports equaled 6.6 percent.57

The national integration of so vast a territory was aided by the severely lopsideddistribution of military power between settlers and the continent’s indigenous inhabi-tants.58 Equally crucial was the fact that territorial integration was, from its founding,one of the core missions of the American state. The government focused its expandingmilitary resources on territorial expansion and then ensured its effective administra-tive, scientific, and bureaucratic integration, a project that the U.S. Constitution hadalready set out in 1787.59

Beyond political, legal, and military mechanisms of integration and domination,the United States created one of the world’s most expansive free-trade zones, rivaledonly by that of the British Empire. The U.S. went far beyond Britain’s vaunted navy,however, in its integration of that free-trade zone through an extensive infrastructure,relentlessly pursued by both an activist federal and local state and abundant privatecapital—much of it, ironically, of European origin. Canals, turnpikes, and railroads(first local, then transcontinental) allowed goods and people to move into the remot-est corners of this territory and transported agricultural commodities and minerals toindustrial enclaves and the coasts.60 This accomplishment was clearly central to thenation’s self-understanding, as illustrated by late-century American anxiety over the“closing” of the frontier.61

By 1900, no other recently captured region had been as thoroughly integrated intothe national and global economy as the territory of the United States.62 To be sure,there were other territorially expansive nations, including Russia, and energetic em-pires, first and foremost the United Kingdom, but neither of them showed the sameeconomic dynamism as the United States, and thus they did not generate as muchanxiety. “The superiority of England,” agued German economist Julius Wolf, “is amatter of the past,” the “superiority of America a matter of the present.”63 Economicgreatness seemed to emanate from across the Atlantic, and not from across the Chan-nel. Territorializing commodity chains, not free trade, seemed to point the way to thefuture. And as Great Britain’s once-extraordinary role in the world economy began to

57 For import and export series, which includes both goods and services, see Series U1-25, “Balanceof International Payments: 1790 to 1970,” in Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 2 vols., 2: 864–865; for GNP, see Series F1-5, “Gross National Product,Total and Per Capita, in Current and 1958 Prices: 1869–1970,” ibid., 1: 216.

58 Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West(Norman, Okla., 1991); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism; Pekka Hamalainen,The Comanche Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2008); Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy ofAmerican Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York, 2000).

59 Jurgen Osterhammel has perceptively described the United States as an unusually early case forthe administrative and scientific integration of a very large and expanding territory. See Osterhammel,Die Verwandlung der Welt, 169. The American state, of course, also showed notable weaknesses, but it isstill remarkable how successful its project of territorial growth and territorial incorporation was com-pared to other parts of the world.

60 Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York,2011).

61 See Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in AnnualReport of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, D.C., 1894), 197–227.

62 Richard White might be entirely right when he argues in Railroaded that building vast transconti-nental railroads did not make “sense” economically, yet from a broader perspective, that infrastructurewas crucial to national territorial integration.

63 Wolf, “Die Erspriesslichkeit des wirtschaftspolitischen Zusammenschlusses,” 31.



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diminish, even its own free-trade imperialism gave way to ever more imperial enclo-sures, further amplifying the “territorial” model of national economic development.Even in Britain, empire began to trump trade.64

Europeans had a long history of exploiting colonial territories, but the goal ofdeeply integrating the world’s hinterlands and its peoples outside the Americas hadeluded them for several centuries. By the last third of the nineteenth century, how-ever, the United States had demonstrated how expansion and territorial integrationcould be combined.65 It required advanced infrastructural technologies such as rail-roads and the telegraph, and military technology, especially infantry tactics and equip-ment, advanced enough to dominate the people of the hinterland affordably. And itrequired a responsive, extensible, and politically permeable state. As German Protes-tant theologian and colonial advocate Friedrich Fabri remarked incisively, “theUnited States . . . has the most favorable conditions for a terrific colonial develop-ment . . . within itself”—and, indeed, American territorial integration until the twenti-eth century retained imperial characteristics; despite the strengthening of central stateauthority, distinct sets of rights, labor regimes, and regional political economies re-mained powerful foundations for regional economic specialization.66

Faced with similar exigencies of industrial growth, European capitalists and states-men came to see the United States as an example of how to align the new industrialcapitalism with a newly assertive and expansive state. Their concerns did not centeron some passing trade dispute or specific policies of particular American administra-tions, but rather on the fundamental territorial position of the United States vis-a-visEurope and its comparatively Lilliputian component nations.67 Despite significant ter-ritorial growth during the nineteenth century—of Italy and Germany, in particular—national markets in Europe were small. Raw material supplies were remote and inse-cure. And Europe seemed caught between the Scylla of overpopulation and theCharybdis of emigration-fueled industrial labor shortages. We need to appreciatehow much this second great divergence—which, under the sway of a powerful mod-ernization narrative and a Cold War emphasis on “the unity of the West,” has cometo seem almost natural—was both surprising and threatening to contemporary Euro-pean elites, understanding as they did how economic power translates into militarymight.

THE NEWFOUND APPRECIATION FOR the spatial requirements of modern economies andtheir desire to match American power made a group of influential capitalists, states-men, and intellectuals in various European countries rethink their national economicstrategies. For European economies to prosper in a newly industrialized world of

64 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cam-bridge, 2011); Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900(Princeton, N.J., 2007); Andrew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880–1932 (New York, 2000).

65 Noam Maggor, “To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Popu-lism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West,” American Historical Review 122, no. 1(February 2017): 55–84.

66 Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien?, 14.67 Denicke, “Ein kolonialpolitisches Nachwort zur Reichstagsrede des Reichskanzlers vom 10.

Dezember 1891,” 3.

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heavy capital investments in fixed assets, concerned observers believed, access tocheap and reliable sources of raw materials, plentiful labor, and expanding marketswas crucial. Risking these prerequisites of industrial prosperity to global marketsposed unacceptable risks, not least because they increasingly perceived the globaleconomy as a battleground of competing national units.68 From these fears and op-portunities, a new imperialism was born.69 No strangers to the challenges of colonialadministration, European nations turned to the task of securing American-style terri-torial control over minerals, agricultural commodities, labor, and markets acrossmuch greater distances and a much wider diversity of populations.

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the incorporation of Africainto Europe seemed to offer a possible solution. Influential European elites per-suaded themselves that neighboring Africa could become the ouest, Westen, or occi-

dente of various European nations—or of Europe as a whole. However delusional theidea might have been, colonizing Africa seemed to promise a “powerful promotion ofeconomic independence and prosperity”—the labor, land, minerals, agricultural com-modities, and markets needed to better compete with the United States.70

University of Freiburg professor Karl Dove saw Africa as a “youthful land” whoseproductivity would increase over time: the more African land Germany controlled, heargued, the safer it would be against “American and other predatory trading.”71 Bel-gium’s King Leopold agreed, believing that African colonies could provide Belgian in-dustries with markets and raw materials.72 If administered properly, fantasized OctaveNoel, a professor at the Ecole des hautes etudes commerciales in Paris, African colo-nies would be a proper response to the “American danger,” supplying French industrywith cheap raw materials, attracting its emigrants, and serving as a market for Frenchgoods—the exact combination of factors that demonstrated to National Assemblymember and later prime minister Jules Ferry the tight and necessary link between in-dustrial development and territorial expansion.73 If France did not embark upon fur-ther colonization, its status in the world would greatly diminish. As Ferry put it in1890, “Colonial policy is the daughter of industrial policy.”74

Ferry was no outlier; indeed, one historian has remarked that these opinions weremet with “virtually unanimous approval.”75 When economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieupublished his De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes in 1874, he advocated akind of free-trade imperialism, but the second edition in 1882 stressed the need for

68 Etges, Wirtschaftsnationalismus, 275.69 See Tony Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-Industri-

alizing World since 1815 (New York, 1981), 35; Etges, Wirtschaftsnationalismus, 282.70 Denicke, “Ein kolonialpolitisches Nachwort zur Reichstagsrede des Reichskanzlers vom 10.

Dezember 1891,” 3.71 Karl Dove, “Der Sinn einer kunftigen Kolonialpolitik,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 33, no. 10 (1916):

156–158, here 158.72 G. N. Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa: Origins and Dynamics,” in Roland Oliver

and G. N. Sanderson, eds., The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 6: From 1870–1905 (Cambridge, 1985),96–158, here 126.

73 Noel, “Le peril americain,” 144. See also Herward Sieberg, Eugene Etienne und die franzosischeKolonialpolitik, 1887–1904 (Cologne, 1968), 77–90; Journal officiel de la Republique Francaise: Debats par-lementaires, Chambre des Deputes 10 (July–December 1885): 1665; Heiko Korner, Kolonialpolitik undWirtschaftsentwicklung: Das Beispiel Franzosisch-Westafrikas (Stuttgart, 1965), 41.

74 As cited in Korner, Kolonialpolitik und Wirtschaftsentwicklung, 41.75 Ibid., 42; Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (Basingstoke,

1996), 100.



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territorial expansion, warning explicitly of the “American danger.”76 Sorbonne econo-mist Charles Gide emphasized the connections between industrial prosperity andexport markets as well, worrying that territorially extensive countries had huge eco-nomic and military advantages over small countries like France.77 Thus threatened,France had to extend its territory, and since that was impossible within Europe itself,Africa was the most likely place; after France’s humiliating defeat against Prussia in1870–1871, this was all the more urgent.78

Such ideas increasingly found institutional expression: King Leopold formed theInternational African Association in 1876 and, along with various other associationsand journals specifically dedicated to colonialism, advocated for the benefits of terri-torial expansion. By the 1890s, the “colonial question” moved into the BelgianParliament.79 This push crested at the colonial exhibition of 1897, where not just theCongo’s products—coffee, cacao, and tobacco—but also 267 Congolese were on dis-play. In Germany, the Westdeutscher Verein fur Colonisation und Export had broughttogether members from German heavy industry to agitate for colonialism since 1881. Ayear later, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, supported by the Verein DeutscherEisen- und Stahlindustrieller and various chambers of commerce, brought merchants,industrialists, and professionals into the debate.80 Advocates of colonialization createdsimilar institutions in France, and during the 1870s, geographical societies supported bycommercial associations emerged. Twenty years later, these societies had 16,000 mem-bers.81 In 1890, the new Comite de l’Afrique francais, supported by the National As-sembly and the Senate, as well as the chambers of commerce of Marseilles and Lyon,upped the pressure.82 African colonialism had gained numerous powerful backers.

France’s Eugene Etienne proved a particularly articulate proponent of African ter-ritorial projects. Born in Oran, Algeria, in 1844, Etienne was a military officer and from1881 to 1919 a member of the National Assembly.83 In 1887 he became the head of theSous-secretariat d’Etat aux Colonies. Following in the footsteps of Ferry and others, he

76 Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris, 1874; 2nd ed., 1882). Seealso David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870,” Past and Present 210 (February 2011): 155–186, here 183; H. L. Wesseling, Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa, 1880–1914, trans. Arnold J. Pom-erans (Westport, Conn., 1996), 14.

77 Charles Gide, “A quoi servent les colonies?,” Revue de Geographie 18 (January–June 1886): 36–52, 141–147, here 47–50.

78 Ibid., 49–51.79 Vincent Viaene, “King Leopold’s Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party,

1860–1905,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 741–790, here 769.80 Lothar Wackerbeck, “Die deutschen Kolonialgesellschaften: Ihre Entstehung, Entwicklung und

Sonderstellung im Gesellschaftsrecht” (doctoral thesis, Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster,1977), 28–30; Bruno Kurtze, Die Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (Jena, 1913); Alex Haenicke, “WieDeutschland Kolonialmacht wurde,” in Rudolf Filzner, Deutsches Kolonial-Handbuch: Erganzungband1904 (Berlin, 1904), 28–60; Horst Grunder, “. . . da und dort ein junges Deutschland grunden”: Rassismus,Kolonien und kolonialer Gedanke vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1999), 64–92; “Aus demBericht ‘1884–1894’ der Abteilung Berlin der Deutschen Kolonialgessellschaft,” copy in Reinhard OpitzPapers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

81 Odile Goerg, “The French Provinces and ‘Greater France,’” in Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur,eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (Basingstoke, 2002), 82–101, here 85; Aldrich, Greater France, 104.

82 Marc Lagana, Le parti colonial francais: Elements d’histoire (Sillery, Quebec, 1990).83 Aldrich, Greater France, 100–102, 171. Another important organization was the Union coloniale

francaise, founded in 1893 by more than four hundred French entrepreneurs, which published the maga-zine La quinzaine coloniale.

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expounded tirelessly on the economic importance of colonies.84 Rapidly expanding in-dustry needed raw materials, labor, and markets, yet access to these essentials had be-come increasingly difficult: indeed, the world had entered a phase in which the last re-maining markets were falling under the sway of rivals. In those years, encouraged byEtienne, the slogan “mise en valeur des colonies” became central to the French admin-istration.85 In late November 1889, he summarized that increasingly popular position:

There are some facts that old Europe cannot ignore, because they are so obvious: that

America, having created her industry behind carefully closed doors, dreams of creating a

Zollverein reserved only for American products. Today, therefore, France must take careto procure her own market, that of her territory, that of her colonies . . . With the faster

and faster production of machines, it is necessary to expand consumption. So France must

go outside her own borders. She should go to Africa and to the Indies.86

Indeed, French hopes for the creation of a “new America” in Africa were wide-spread. Writer Jean-Gabriel Capot de Feuillide compared Algeria to the AmericanWest— l’ouest africain—and historian Augustin Bernard called Algeria the “Americaof France.”87 “Unite, go South!” proclaimed Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables,in 1876, a faint echo of the American “Go West.”88

Although many historians have found that American expansionism fell short ofEurope’s global imperialism, such sentiments suggest that to European imperialists,America’s integrated expanses served as a model for a fundamentally new imperialproject that they increasingly sought to embrace. And while they often rhetoricallyposited “Europe” against the United States, much of the politics of the 1880s, 1890s,and the first decade of the 1900s was national—with countries hoping to expand atthe possible expense of their national rivals.

Africa beckoned Europeans both abstractly and specifically. It was a potentialsource of raw materials, control of which, many believed, would distinguish “greatpowers” from minor players. In the melodramatic style typical of many European futur-ists, liberal politician Friedrich Naumann’s Nationalsozialer Verein argued in 1897 thatGermany needed to expand territorially, because “to live” required ever more access to“wheat, oil, cotton,” and other such materials.89 The president of the Deutsche Kolo-nialgesellschaft, Herzog Johann Albrecht zu Mecklenburg, hoped for minerals, cotton,and cacao from Germany’s African possessions.90 Businessmen agreed, including

84 Korner, Kolonialpolitik und Wirtschaftsentwicklung, 42; Sieberg, Eugene Etienne und die franzosi-sche Kolonialpolitik, 91; Francois Caron, Frankreich im Zeitalter des Imperialismus, 1851–1918 (Stuttgart,1991), 458.

85 Sieberg, Eugene Etienne und die franzosische Kolonialpolitik, 78.86 Cited ibid., 79, 92; see also Caron, Frankreich im Zeitalter des Imperialismus, 458.87 Korner, Kolonialpolitik und Wirtschaftsentwicklung, 35–36; Capo de Feuillide (pseud.), L’Algerie

francaise (Paris, 1856), 281, 294; Augustin Bernard, L’Algerie (Paris, 1930), 521.88 Victor Hugo, as quoted in Charles-Robert Ageron, “L’idee d’Eurafrique et le debat colonial

franco-allemand de l’entre-deux guerres,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 22, no. 3 (1975):446–475, here 446.

89 Quote from Friedrich Naumann, National-Sozialer Katechismus: Erklarung der Grundlinien desNational-Sozialen Vereins (Berlin, 1897), 7–8. See also A. Stapff, comments at the Dritte Generalver-sammlung des Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsvereins, Munich, October 14, 1911, as quoted in BerlinerBorsen-Courier, 9. January 1912.

90 “Veroffentlichungen der Gesellschaft, Bericht uber Tagung der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft zuKarlsruhe i. B.,” Vorstandssitzung am 4. Juni, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 20, new series 16, no. 24 (1903):



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AEG’s Rathenau, for whom it was clear that

[s]oon we will recognize that every part of the earth has substantial value, because eventhe least consequential contains or produces some raw materials . . . the world has been al-

most completely divided up . . . The time is rapidly approaching when natural resources

will no longer be willingly exchanged on markets. Hotly contested preferential goods suchas iron ore deposits will one day be worth more than battleships.91

For Rathenau and many others, commodity chains were to be nationalized and, omi-nously, militarized.

Advocates for colonial expansion harped on the importance of raw materials.When in 1903 French cotton manufacturers created the Association cotonniere colo-niale, they positioned their work as the solution to the United States’ domination ofthe world’s cotton markets, an effort to liberate France from the “American dan-ger.”92 Similar associations emerged in Belgium, Italy, and Germany, where the Kolo-nialwirtschaftliches Komitee, supported by Germany’s cotton industry and the impe-rial government, worked to encourage colonial cotton production.93 And it was notjust about cotton: rubber, according to an advocate of Africa’s integration into the Eu-ropean economy, was essential for the development of the automobile industry, andcopper was “intimately connected to industrial prosperity.”94 The entire electrical in-dustry depended on it, and thus the copper mines of Central Africa promised to se-cure Europe’s future.95 The response to the “American danger,” argued de Haulle-ville of Belgium, was to colonize Africa: “We can soon expect an economic rupturebetween Europe and America, an intolerable oppression of the Old World by theNew,” but “[f]ortunately Europe has found in Africa her terrain of defense.”96

235–237. There were also efforts to secure oil from Cameroon. See “Exploration of the possibilities of oildrilling in Cameroon,” note dated April 8, 1907, in Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, Akten zur Petroleum-gewinnung in den Kolonie, 1907–1914, Reichskolonialamt, R 8023, f443, BABerlin.

91 Rathenau, “Deutsche Gefahren und neue Ziele,” 269.92 Nautilus (pseud.), “Le coton au Soudan francais,” Revue des cultures coloniales 12–13 (1903): 302;

Ed.-C. Achard, “Le coton en Cilicie et en Syrie,” in “Documents economiques, politiques, & scien-tifiques” no. 3, supplement, L’Asie francaise 203 (June 1922): 19–64, here 21–23; Claude Malon, Le Havrecolonial de 1880 a 1960 (Caen, 2006), 184; Paul Bourdarie, “La lutte pour le coton colonial,” Bulletin dela societe de geographie commerciale du Havre, 3–4e trimestres 1905 (1906): 418–435; Peter Grupp,Deutschland, Frankreich und die Kolonien: Der franzosische “Parti colonial” und Deutschland von 1890 bis1914 (Tubingen, 1980), 57–58. The “American yoke” is also a trope in Knebel-Doeberitz, Besteht furDeutschland eine amerikanische Gefahr?, iv, 1.

93 Sven Beckert, “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton,” Jour-nal of American History 92, no. 2 (2005): 498–526; Karl Supf, “Zur Baumwollfrage,” Deutsche Kolonialzei-tung 17, new series 13, no. 20 (1900): 215–218, here 216–218; “Der Verbrauch der Rohbaumwolle derVereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 18, new series 14, no. 33 (1901): 327–328; “Deutsch-koloniale Baumwoll-Unternehmungen 1902–1903,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 20, new se-ries 16, no. 31 (1903): 311–313, here 311; Erich Prager, “Kolonialwirtschaft und Nationalvermogen,”Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 20, new series 16, no. 23 (1903): 223–224; “Baumwollbau in den deutschenKolonien,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 27, no. 17 (1910): 271–272; Dr. Warnack, “Die Baumwollnot,” Deut-sche Kolonialzeitung 27, no. 49 (1910): 816–817; “Der koloniale Baumwollbau und Handel und Industrie[sic],” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 30, no. 13 (1913): 214; Hans-Peter Ullmann, Der Bund der Industriellen:Organisation, Einfluss und Politik klein- und mittelbetrieblicher Industrieller im Deutschen Kaiserreich,1895–1914 (Gottingen, 1976), 172.

94 E.-L. Guernier, L’Afrique: Champ d’Expansion de l’Europe (Paris, 1933), 134, 138.95 Ibid., 151.96 Haulleville, Les aptitudes colonisatrices des Belges, 396; see also E.-M. de Vogue, Spectacles con-

temporains (Paris, 1891), 343.

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Africa promised not only minerals and agricultural commodities, but also the la-bor to do all the digging and cultivating. There were tens of millions of Africans en-gaged in small-scale subsistence agriculture—as well as hunting, herding, and fish-ing—and some in Europe recognized their productive potential. Tellingly, when Fabriwrote about colonial spaces, he wrote not only of fertile areas, but also of areas where“a dense . . . population lives” that can be “educated” to “work.”97

Despite its seemingly abundant and under-employed labor, Africa was also to serveas a destination for millions of European immigrants, who would labor productively thereinstead of strengthening the rival United States.98 In a revealing echo of America’s disap-pearing Native American narrative, European colonial advocates commonly argued thatAfrica was a continent without sufficient numbers of people. Its vast spaces fed the imagi-nation and evoked parallels with the American West.99 French economist Michel Cheva-lier, who suggested that Algeria was France’s “West,” believed that the economic dyna-mism of the United States was partly the result of the possibilities of migration withinthat vast country itself, the ability of its citizens to move west.100 For France to follow theAmerican example, it needed not just to rule Africa, but also to settle it.101

Africa’s potential as a consumer market was an important corollary to its raw ma-terials, labor, and space. European settlers and Africans would provide a captive andexpanding pool of customers for European manufactured goods, and unlike the for-mer European colonies in North America, Africa would remain a subordinate marketfor the ever more productive European industries.102 By the 1880s, such thinking hadbecome “conventional wisdom.”103 King Leopold believed that Belgium was depen-dent “on its ability to exploit overseas markets and resources.”104 Without colonialmarkets, worried Naumann, Germans would “lose our heavy industry.”105 Africa, inthe minds of many European capitalists and statesmen, was a new “commodity fron-

97 Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Kolonien?, 88; see also Allgemeine Zeitung, November 6, 1886.98 Max Grunewald, “Afrika und das Emigrantenproblem,” as cited in Antoine Fleury, “Paneurope et

l’Afrique,” in Marie-Therese Bitsch and Gerard Bossuat, eds., L’Europe unie et l’Afrique: De l’idee d’Eur-afrique a la convention de Lome I (Brussels, 2005), 35–57, here 48. For the concerns about facilitating Euro-pean settlements in Africa, see Reichskolonialamt Akten AVI, Wissenschaftliche Sachen, Bd. 5, Juli 1909–Februar 1920—plus fruhere Bestande Wissenschaftliche Sachen, R 1001, ff6226–6229, BABerlin.

99 Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Afrika,” Paneuropa 5, no. 2 (1929): 1–19, here 2.100 As quoted in Kay Adamson, Political and Economic Thought and Practice in Nineteenth-Century

France and the Colonization of Algeria (Lewiston, N.Y., 2002), 74; see also Jean Walch, Michel Chevalier,Economiste Saint-Simonien, 1806–1879 (Paris, 1974), 131–151; Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Afrika,” 7; “Allge-meiner Deutscher Kongreß zur Forderung uberseeischer Interessen zu Berlin am 13.–16. September,”Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 3, no. 20 (1886): 688–695, here 695; Ernst Hasse, “Die Aufgaben der DeutschenKolonial-Gesellschaft gegenuber unseren Kolonien in Afrika,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9, new series 5,no. 6 (1892): 75–79, here 75.

101 Bernard, L’Algerie, 396, 399; Isabelle Merle, “Drawing Settlers to New Caledonia: French Colo-nial Propaganda in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Chafer and Sackur, Promoting the Colonial Idea,40–52, here 41–45.

102 Wackerbeck, “Die deutschen Kolonialgesellschaften,” 8; Erich Prager, ed., Die deutsche Kolonial-gesellschaft, 1882–1907 (Berlin, 1908); “Der Kongreß der drei Amerikas,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 6,new series 2, no. 35 (1889): 311; Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa,” 98; A. Fick, “Ist dieWelt vergeben?,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 1, no. 3 (1884): 51–54.

103 Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa,” 101, 103.104 Ibid., 98, 126; Viaene, “King Leopold’s Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial

Party,” 750–757. See also Gustav Schmoller, “Die Wirtschaftliche Zukunft Deutschlands und dieFlottenvorlage,” in Schmoller, ed., Handels- und Machtpolitik, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1900), 1: 1–38.

105 Naumann, National-Sozialer Katechismus, 10.



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tier”—an area of the world in which there was still uncommodified land and laborawaiting its integration into a new stage of European capitalism.106 It was to be a new“New World,” the European response to the emergence on the global economic andpolitical scene of the previous “New World.”

These concerns played a significant role in motivating the efforts to occupy Africanterritory that unfolded in the last decades of the nineteenth century.107 For centuries,Europeans had been constrained, with few exceptions, to coastal settlements in Africa,and very few of those.108 “They did not go inland,” as the Journal of Race Development,looking back across the entire nineteenth century, put it.109 But with the partition of Af-rica at the Berlin Conference in 1884, things began to change, with a new desire, at leastrhetorically, to “capture the interior.”110 To dominate this hinterland and the peoplewho inhabited it, state structures—including military garrisons and bureaucracies—hadto be forged, and for that to be done, territory had to be “nationalized” in ways strik-ingly similar to the incorporation of North America—where territorial control had sup-planted informal trade networks with Native Americans.111 It was not sufficient to traf-fic with African merchants for the products of African agriculture; production itselfhad to be controlled by European capitalists.112 And, as in the United States, that inte-gration could go hand in hand with continued differences in rights, political economies,and labor regimes. The 1884 Berlin Conference inscribed in maps and treaties the in-creasing importance of that territory and wrote the epitaph for Europe’s previous ef-

106 The concept of “commodity frontier” and its definition are from Jason W. Moore, “Sugar andthe Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation,and Industrialization,” Review 23, no. 3 (2000): 409–433.

107 On the actual history of European colonialism in Africa, especially its economic dimensions, see,among others, A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973); Gareth Austin,Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807–1956 (Rochester, N.Y.,2005); Herbert S. Frankel, Capital Investment in Africa (New York, 1938); Jane I. Guyer, Money Matters:Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities (Portsmouth,N.H., 1992); Joseph C. Miller, “The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic Age of Revolutions,”in David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York, 2010), 101–124; Jane I. Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa(Chicago, 2004); Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa,” 100; Michael Ralph, Forensics of Capi-tal (Chicago, 2015), 63; Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: TheDuala and Their Hinterland, c. 1600–c. 1960 (Cambridge, 1999); Klaus J. Bade, “Imperial Germany andWest Africa: Colonial Movement, Business Interests and Bismarck’s ‘Colonial Policies,’” in Stig Forster,Wofgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, eds., Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Con-ference, 1884–1885, and the Onset of Partition (Oxford, 1988), 121–147, here 131; Frank Thomas Gatter,ed., Protokolle und Generalakte der Berliner Afrika-Konferenz, 1884–1885 (Bremen, 1984), 103; ProtokollNr. 1, Sitzung vom 15. November 1884, ibid., 98–117, here 101; Annuaire statistique de la France 21 (1901):265–266; Francesca Schinzinger, Die Kolonien und das Deutsche Reich: Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung derdeutschen Besitzungen in Ubersee (Stuttgart, 1984), 120, 126; G. N. Uzoigwe, “The Results of the BerlinWest Africa Conference: An Assessment,” in Forster, Mommsen, and Robinson, Bismarck, Europe, andAfrica, 541–552, here 543.

108 Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa,” 99; Protokoll Nr. 1, Sitzung vom 15. November 1884, 111.109 Cyrus C. Adams, “Foundations of Economic Progress in Tropical Africa,” Journal of Race Devel-

opment 2 (July 1911): 1–17.110 Protokoll Nr. 1, Sitzung vom 15. November 1884, in Gatter, Protokolle und Generalakte der Ber-

liner Afrika-Konferenz, 101.111 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region,

1650–1815 (New York, 1991).112 Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa,” 98. The increasing importance of the state in secur-

ing raw materials (though in this case during World War II) is also emphasized by William G. Clarence-Smith, “The Battle for Rubber in the Second World War: Cooperation and Resistance,” Commodities ofEmpire Working Paper no. 14, November 2009, 1–19, here 13.

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forts to integrate Africa into the global economy through mechanisms of Smithiantrade. As a Lagos newspaper put it in 1891, from the perspective of the considerableAfrican commercial establishment in that city, “[a] forcible possession of our land hastaken the place of a forcible possession of our person.”113

AFRICA WAS A TEMPTING TARGET because its relative lack of formal political institutionsrecognizable to foreign observers blinded Europeans to the strength of its social struc-tures and, at least initially, offered a rewarding set of spoils. In the long run, of course,measured by the exaggerated expectations of its advocates, the project failed: Africawas not America, little European capital was forthcoming, labor was difficult to mobi-lize, the colonial state remained weak, European immigration was minimal, and withfew exceptions (such as in German Southwest Africa), the tabula rasa that character-ized much of the American West did not come to Africa.114 But there were other

FIGURE 4: Hungry for Territory: A Scene from the 1884 Berlin Conference. Drawing by Adalbert von Roßler,published in Uber Land und Meer Allgemeine Illustrierte Zeitung 53 (1885): 308.

113 Cited in Uzoigwe, “The Results of the Berlin West Africa Conference,” 543.114 Some of the reasons for this failure become clear when we compare the African campaign to the

great transformation of the United States. Chief, perhaps, among the differences was a stark lack of capi-tal. In 1914, only 4 percent of French foreign investments went to Africa, despite the country’s extensiveterritorial claims on the continent. Other countries kept their investments at similarly low levels. More-over, colonial governments had few resources, making all but impossible the kind of legal, bureaucratic,and physical infrastructure improvements that characterized newly acquired U.S. territories. Further-more, with the significant exceptions of Algeria, the highlands of Kenya, and South Africa, few Euro-



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ideas about how to respond to the “American danger”—preeminent among them theidea of creating a supranational “European” economy.115

The dream of an integrated European economy came to the fore in the 1870s andunfolded in parallel to the discussions on African colonialism.116 Again, concernsabout the economic power of the United States took center stage. “Europe,” accord-ing to French writer Emile de Girardin, needed to integrate before competition fromthe U.S. drove the continent “into industrial ruin and social revolution.”117 For PrimeMinister Luigi Luzzatti of Italy, it was clear that “Europe must combine if she wishesto live.”118 German economist Thomas Lenschau agreed: the “American danger”could be confronted only if European states built some kind of economic union.119

Many such voices emerged, some quite dramatic. The German ambassador atSt. Petersburg saw the need for Europe to unite in the face of “rising, brutal, and arro-gant overseas powers.”120 The European states needed to forge a union to jointly de-fend their interests and rights against the United States, chimed in Noel, who had alsobeen at the forefront in calling for the territorial conquest of Africa.121 Aachen chemi-cal manufacturer Leo Vossen observed in 1908 that “large states, because they uniteall climates and raw materials, can be self-sufficient . . . The same can’t be done by Eu-ropean states,” which meant that they needed to unite to retain their economic posi-tion in the world.122 The Moniteur universel agreed: “if it is not to be possible to unitethe states of the Old World in a commercial league against America, which is throwingitself into the industrial arena with the exuberant force of Hercules in the cradle, thefirst condition must be to wipe out all types of divisions or hatreds between thesestates.”123 “We must oppose the American invasion,” asserted Republique francaise,“with a solid barrier that is difficult to overcome.”124 La riforma sociale seconded thiscall for a European Zollverein to counter U.S. power.125

peans settled in Africa, in radical contrast to the United States. In perhaps the starkest contrast, Ameri-can territorial expansion went hand in hand with political integration—which, though by no means apeaceful process, did, in contrast to Africa, lead eventually to the complete incorporation of the new ter-ritories into the nation itself. Wesseling, Divide and Rule, 14.

115 Auswartiges Amt, Akten betreffend den Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, R 901, f2501,BABerlin.

116 See, for example, Battaglia, Ein Zoll- und Wirtschaftsbundnis zwischen Osterreich-Ungarn undDeutschland, 22–25. See also Paul von Leusse, Der Frieden mittelst des deutsch-franzosischen Zollvereins(Strassburg, 1888); Guillaume de Molinari, “Union douaniere de l’Europe centrale,” Journal des econo-mistes 5 (February 1879): 309–318; Albert Schaffle, “Mitteleuropa und Weltbritannien,” Die Zukunft 7(May 12, 1894): 252–263.

117 As cited in L. Bosc, Zollalliancen und Zollunionen in ihrer Bedeutung fur die Handelspolitik derVergangenheit und Zukunft, trans. S. Schilder (Berlin, 1907), 314.

118 Translation of an article in Il popolo romano, as cited in “Has Europe Abandoned Its Plan ofCombining against Us?,” 172.

119 Lenschau, Die amerikanische Gefahr, 47.120 “Telegram from Botschafter v. Schon, St. Petersburg, to Auswartiges Amt, February 24, 1906, in

vol. 5, R 16379 (1906) Generalia no. 13, Amerika, Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amts, Berlin.121 Noel, “Le peril americain,” 143. An identical argument was also made by the Fremdenblatt (a Vi-

enna publication of the Austrian Foreign Office), as cited in “Has Europe Abandoned Its Plan of Com-bining against Us?,” 171.

122 Auswartiges Amt, Akten betreffend den Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, R 901, f2500,BABerlin.

123 Auswartiges Amt, Akten zum Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, R 901, f7556, BABerlin.124 “Le Zollverein et l’union donaniere,” Republique francaise, May 9, 1903.125 Flora, “Il pericolo americano,” 467.

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What that “union” should look like and how it could be accomplished was notclear, and indeed, a confusing multitude of proposals emerged, revealing a lack ofconsensus about what constituted “Europe.”126 Since “Europe” was neither a givennor a natural unit of geographic space, its imaginary had to be constructed.127 In 1878,Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari suggested to Bismarck the idea of a customsunion linking Germany, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Aus-tria, modeled after the German Zollverein of 1834.128 In October 1890, Italian primeminister Francesco Crispi met with German chancellor Leo von Caprivi in Milan todiscuss the possibility of a customs union between their countries.129 In 1899, a groupof French economists developed an idea for a Mediterranean customs union, includ-ing northern Africa, that would be explicitly directed against the United States’ ex-panding presence in the world.130 And in 1903, Julius Wolf advocated a customs unionbetween Germany and Austria-Hungary, arguing that their common “enemy” madesuch a coming together necessary.131 Further ideas included Leroy-Beaulieu’s call fora customs union between France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland;French diplomat Guy de Contenson’s hope for some kind of European customsunion, as part of a complete political unification of France, Italy, and Spain, along withtheir respective colonies, to be governed by a parliament in Paris; and Italian economistTullio Martello’s hope for a French-Italian customs union.132 Driven by the “vehe-mence” of American competition, industrialists and their associations in Germany, Bel-gium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, and France supported such moves.133

126 Grucza, “Bedrohtes Europa,” 131.127 Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds., Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical

Approaches (Hampshire, UK, 2010).128 N. Orloff, Paris, to “Mon cher ami,” August 3, 1878; Gustav Moulinari to Bismarck, September 2,

1878; and Gustav Moulinari to ?, Paris, September 25, 1878, all in Auswartiges Amt, Akten zum Mittel-europaischen Wirtschaftsverein, 1878–1901, R 901, f7556, BABerlin.

129 Olivieri, “L’immagine degli stati uniti nella stampa liberale a Roma e Napoli,” 356.130 Association internationale economique des amis de la paix, Zollverein europeen, 34e annee, Bulle-

tin specimen, January 1, 1899, Paris, copy in Auswartiges Amt, Akten zum Mitteleuropaischen Wirt-schaftsverein, R 901, f7556, BABerlin.

131 Julius Wolf, “Utopie und Moglichkeit,” Die Industrie: Zeitschrift fur die Interessen der osterreichi-schen Industrie 8 (April 11, 1903), in Auswartiges Amt, Akten betreffend des Mitteleuropaischen Zollver-eins, R 901, 7f557, BABerlin.

132 Bosc, “Unions douanieres et projets d’unions douanieres,” 216; Leroy-Beaulieu, Economiste francais,October 11, 1879, 433; Economiste francais, November 1, 1879, 529; G. de Contenson, “L’Alliance latinereduite au regime economique et colonial,” La nouvelle revue 21 (April 1, 1903): 353–365; Tullio Martello,Lo “Zollverein” italo-francese e gli Stati Uniti d’Europa (Bologna, 1905), 9. See also Vico Mantegazza, AgliStati Uniti, il pericolo americano (Milan, 1910).

133 For the quote see Wolf, Materialien betreffend den Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, 39. On theefforts to organize, see Aufzeichnung eines Gespraches mit Herzog Ernst Gunther, Berlin den 18. Juni1908, in Auswartiges Amt, Akten betreffend den Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, R 901, f2500,BABerlin. The idea of some form of European integration was supported by all major groups of Germanindustrialists, including the Bund der Industriellen; the Centralverband deutscher Industrieller; theChambers of Commerce of Aachen, Bochum, Cologne, Essen, Hagen, and Saarbrucken; the associationsof steel industrialists and cotton manufacturers; representatives of the chemical industry; bankers; andindividual companies, including Alfred Krupp AG and Siemens. A total of seven hundred individualsand associations joined. For details see Mitgliederverzeichnis des Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsvereinin Deutschland, Berlin 1904, in Auswartiges Amt, R 901, fol. 2; and Resolution der Generalversammlungdes Oberschlesischen Berg- und Huttenmannischen Vereins in Kattowitz, in Auswartiges Amt, R 901,f2499, both in BABerlin. Similar associations emerged in 1904 in Budapest and in 1905 in Vienna, withmajor local industrialists at the forefront. See Neue Freie Presse, April 4, 1905. By 1909, a group ofBelgian industrialists and merchants founded the Union economique internationale, Association Belge,



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THE CREATION OF A CUSTOMS UNION of contiguous European states to counter the“American danger” was an idea that at times competed with and at others comple-mented the drive toward African colonization. Whereas nationalism provided a sparkfor colonizing Africa, it replaced cooperative unionism with zero-sum extraterritorialexpansion. As Charles Tilly has shown, European state formation had been a compet-itive project for nearly a millennium.134 African colonialism proved a much better fitthan a European customs union for the nationalist economic competition expressedby the escalating arms race on the European continent.

As nationalist and imperialist feeling surged, some states soon considered anotherresponse to the “American danger”: forceful expansion within Europe. Imperialistswithin the Habsburg Empire hoped for expansion into the Balkans, while their Italiancounterparts looked toward the Mediterranean. This vision gained particular tractionin Germany. There, desires for continental expansion had a long history, but WorldWar I awoke the appetites not just of German military planners, but also of Ger-many’s leading businessmen, who advocated the violent creation of territorially de-fined commodity chains. Steel industrialist Hermann Rochling demanded control ofiron ore deposits in eastern France; Walter Rathenau suggested that a customs unionbe forced on France; Carl Duisberg eyed Belgian coal deposits. August Thyssen,meanwhile, advocated for the territorial incorporation of iron ore deposits, coal-min-ing areas, and other resources from Belgium to France to the Caucasus, supported bya huge Central European customs union that, he admitted, could be constructed onlyby force.135 Acquiring colonies could also be part of the project.136 Industrialist HugoStinnes eyed the control of vast areas of Europe, along with Morocco, the BelgianCongo, and territories bordering the German colony of Togo.137 Another strand ofGerman expansionist thought advocated expansion into the Balkans and the OttomanEmpire, with the hope, among other things, that cotton for German industry could beproduced in Mesopotamia and Egypt, envisioned as part of a new German empire.138

The intellectual groundwork for these ideas had been laid by the late nineteenthcentury, and they emerged directly from discussions of the “American danger.” At aMitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein meeting, Erich Klien of the Chamber of Com-merce of the Saxon city of Leipzig, for example, fantasized about the incorporation of

hoping to join some kind of German-Austrian customs union. See Auswartiges Amt, Akten betreffendden Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, R 901, f2501, BABerlin. See also Etges, Wirtschaftsnationalis-mus, 302.

134 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).135 Reinhard Opitz, Europastrategien des deutschen Kapitals, 1900–1945 (Cologne, 1977), 26; Denk-

schrift Hermann Rochlings an den Statthalter von Elsass-Lothringen, v. Dallwitz, betreffend franzo-sischer Erzgebiete, Flin, August 31, 1914, reproduced ibid., 211–215; Kriegzieldenkschrift WalterRathenaus an Bethmann Hollweg, September 7, 1914, ibid., 221–225; Denkschrift von August Thyssen,uberreicht durch den Abgeordneten Erzberger, September 1914, Antwortschreiben Carl Duisbergs anGustav Stressemen betr. Belgien, March 3, 1915, ibid., 299–301.

136 Heinrich Class of the Alldeutscher Verband welcomed, for example, the incorporation of theCongo into the German economy. See Class, “Die Kriegszieldenkschrift des Vorsitzenden des Alldeut-schen Verbandes,” September 1914, ibid., 226–266, here 257.

137 “Gemeinsame Denkschrift von Hermann Schumacher und Hugo Stinnes,” November 16, 1914,ibid., 275–290, here 282.

138 Wirklicher Geheimrat Szerenyi, Staatsekretar, speech at “Konferenz der MitteleuropaischenWirtschaftsvereine in Dresden, am 17. und 18. Januar 1916,” Protokolle der Verhandlungen, copy inAuswartiges Amt, Akten betreffend den Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsverein, 1916–1918, R 901, f2502,BABerlin; see also Paul Rohrbach, Die Bagdadbahn (Berlin, 1902).

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parts of Poland into Germany. This, he argued, would provide ample agricultural pro-duction for future wars, as well as a place for German investments.139 The AlldeutscherVerein advocated a slew of equally radical ideas, including the possible incorporationof much of Eastern Europe, including Russia, but also Mexico, South Africa, SouthAmerica, Borneo, and New Guinea into a German empire.140 In 1895 its president,Ernst Hasse, wrote a pamphlet predicting Germany’s scope in the year 1950.141 Heenvisioned the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, parts of Italy, Hungary,the Balkans, and parts of Russia integrated into Germany, peacefully if possible, vio-lently if necessary.142 Hasse predicted that this enlarged Germany would have 200million inhabitants—a territory and population, he asserted, finally extensive enoughto compete with the United States.143

THESE UNILATERAL EXPANSIONIST PLANS failed with Germany’s defeat in 1918. As a re-sult, Africa again became the focus of attention—initially in France and Belgium, butby the mid-1920s in Germany and Italy as well. While national ambitions for individ-ual African colonies persisted (with France, for example, holding out hope that phos-phate production in its North African possessions would insulate it from the worldmarket), during those interwar years a new idea rose to prominence: the integrationof Africa as a Pan-European, rather than competitive, project to counter the “Ameri-can danger,” fusing the “European idea” with the project of dominating Africa.144

That Pan-European impetus toward Africa had its own history. In a way, the BerlinConference had been an effort at European cooperation, and in the early twentiethcentury, French colonial circles had discussed making African exploitation a Pan-Euro-pean or at least a Franco-German project.145 In 1903, the Societe des etudes colonialeset maritimes had advocated the coming together of European powers to economicallydominate Africa.146 After World War I, these voices rose to prominence, not least be-cause the war demonstrated to all parties how dependent they had become on theUnited States. On the German political right, such fears took on hysterical overtones,but they were just as widespread among the Allies, who had painfully experienced theirdependence on American economic and military assistance—including armaments andthe raw materials needed to make arms—to preserve their national integrity.

139 Speech at “Konferenz der Mitteleuropaischen Wirtschaftsvereine in Dresden, am 17. und 18.Januar 1916,” Protokolle der Verhandlungen, copy in Auswartiges Amt, Akten betreffend den Mitteleuro-paischen Wirtschaftsverein, 1916–1918, R 901, f2502, BABerlin.

140 See Karl Kaerger, Germania Triumphans! Ruckblick auf die Weltgeschichtlichen Ereignisse derJahre 1900 bis 1915 von einem Grossdeutschen (Berlin, 1895).

141 See Alldeutscher Verein, Sitzung des Geschaftsfuhrenden Ausschusses, August 16, 1895, R 8048,f9, BABerlin; Ernst Hasse, Grossdeutschland und Mitteleuropa um das Jahr 1950: Von einem Alldeutschen(Berlin, 1895), pt. 3.

142 Ibid., pts. 5–13.143 Ibid., pt. 14; “Deutschlands Weltstellung und der Weiterbau am deutschen Nationalstaat,” All-

deutsche Blatter, January 7, 1894, 5–8.144 Rene Goepfert, “Les phosphates algeriens et l’agriculture francaises: L’exploitation du gisement

du Djebel-Onk” (doctoral thesis, Universite de Paris, 1925).145 Ageron, “L’idee d’Eurafrique et le debat colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deux guerres,” 447.

Eugene Etienne, for example, supported this project.146 Emile Baillaud, “L’exploitation du coton en Afrique occidentale,” Bulletin de la Societe des etudes

coloniales et maritimes 241 (1903): 115–121, here 121.



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One of the most important contributors to this debate was Austrian aristocrat Rich-ard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, whose 1923 Pan-Europa was translated into nearly everyEuropean language.147 He advocated the creation of a gigantic European free-tradezone, explicitly modeled after the American union and motivated by fears of the U.S. asa “leading power”: “Today, the United States is the wealthiest, most powerful, and mostprogressive empire in the world,” Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote in his bestseller, “a countryin the process of dividing up . . . the peoples and raw materials of the world.”148 Amer-ica’s great advantage was its “tremendous economic territory” containing plentiful rawmaterials, allowing for cheaper production thanks to a more rational division of labor.149

Coudenhove-Kalergi was clear on what needed to happen. Europe had to inte-grate its own market and “expand that market by opening up Africa.” In his view, “toa large extent, Europe’s economic future rests on Africa.”150 Central to his thinkingwas indeed the idea of what he called Eurafrica, a geographic unit that stretched fromthe North Cape to the Congo.151 “Africa could offer Europe raw materials for its in-dustry, food for its people, land for its surplus population, job opportunities for its un-employed, [and] markets for its sales.”152 Only a united Europe could dominate theAfrican continent, and the failure to achieve it would result in Europe losing out inthe struggle for raw materials and markets.153 Coudenhove-Kalergi saw Africa as “thetropical garden of Europe” and “Europe’s plantation,” as well as “the great challengethat the twentieth century poses to Europe.”154 “One day,” he explained, “our descen-dants will live in world cities on the shores of the Congo River.”155

Coudenhove-Kalergi believed so fervently that Africa was inextricably a part ofEurope that he included Africa in his calculation of Pan-Europe’s resources. WesternAfrica and the Congo, he estimated, contributed 16 million square kilometers of landand 53 million people to Pan-Europe (which itself contained only 5 million square ki-lometers of land but 300 million people)—for a total that compared favorably to theUnited States.156 “A joint project of the white race,” Pan-Europe would turn Africainto “the future granary and raw material source of Europe.”157 For Coudenhove-Kalergi, Africa was the “tropical supplement of Europe”: Europe was “the head ofEurafrica, and Africa its body.”158

Coudenhove-Kalergi was not alone in suggesting joint European exploitation anddomination of Africa.159 Belgian Member of Parliament Jules Destree recommended

147 Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa (Vienna, 1923). For translations and sales, seeAnita Prettenthaler-Ziegerhofer, “Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi, Founder of the Pan-EuropeanUnion, and the Birth of a ‘New’ Europe,” in Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria, eds., Europe in Cri-sis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957 (New York, 2012), 89–109. On Coudenhove-Kalergi,see also Fleury, “Paneurope et l’Afrique.”

148 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa, 13–15, 16.149 Ibid., 68–69.150 Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Afrika,” 4.151 Ibid., 23.152 Ibid., 3.153 Ibid., 18.154 Ibid., 13, 19.155 Ibid., 8.156 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa, 37–38.157 Ibid., 156–157; Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Afrika,” 1.158 Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Afrika,” 1, 3. This is also emphasized by Fleury, “Paneurope et l’Afrique,” 40.159 Ageron, “L’idee d’Eurafrique et le debat colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deux guerres,” 457,

460.

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the establishment of a federation of European states interested in Africa, with a fed-eral committee that would strive “to develop the agricultural and mineral riches ofAfrica’s vastness through great works.”160 Socialist Albert Sarraut, twice French primeminister, who had long championed French economic autarky, looked to Africa to re-alize this goal: faced with “the menace of America and Asia . . . Europe must reservethe African market and create an inexhaustible supply of raw materials.”161 Anotherformer French prime minister, Joseph Caillaux, followed suit in 1933: “I increasinglypersuade myself that Africa is the great reserve—reserve of raw materials, reserve ofmarkets—for Europeans.”162

The most extensive French statement on the need for the Pan-European exploita-tion of Africa, however, was E. L. Guernier’s L’Afrique: Champ d’expansion de l’Eu-

rope.163 “Alone among the continents, Africa does not have a history,” Guernier pro-claimed, which meant that colonialization would advance the “uncivilized races” whilesimultaneously improving life in Europe.164 Taken by what he saw as the enormous“space” (espace) of Africa, he advocated a joint European penetration of the continentthat would provide virtually all the raw materials needed by European industry and al-low Europe to “break free from the grip of the external”—namely, the United States.165

His long list of Africa’s potential economic contributions to Europe included the com-modities that could either be produced in or extracted from Africa: wheat, rice, corn,oils, copper, cotton, iron ore, petroleum, and rubber, among others.166 European immi-gration would follow, as would the construction of a trans-African railroad connectingTangier to Cape Town, modeled on the celebrated North American transcontinen-tals.167 A Conference Euroafricaine would plan the “economic penetration,” and theresult would be two hundred years of peace and prosperity.168

That similar ideas spread to Germany was not surprising, given that Germany lostall its colonies in the wake of World War I. Ideas of “Africa for Europe” rose to thefore, with the former functionary of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, Hans Zache, ar-guing in 1928 that Africa should become an immense plantation for Europe.169 Themost far-reaching and utopian project, however, came from a German engineer, Her-man Sorgel. The Atlantropa movement he inspired was a loose association of individ-uals who believed that Europe and Africa should be forged into a single economicspace. The organization developed painstakingly detailed plans, going so far as to sug-gest that the Mediterranean be partly drained to bridge—quite literally—the divide be-tween Europe and Africa. Visions of huge dams and transcontinental railroad lines, in-

160 As cited ibid., 448.161 As cited ibid., 462, 466. On Sarraut, see also Yves Montarsolo, “Albert Sarraut et l’Idee d’Eur-

afrique,” in Bitsch and Bossuat, L’Europe unie et l’Afrique, 77–95.162 Joseph Caillaux, D’Agadir a la grande penitence, as quoted in Ageron, “L’idee d’Eurafrique et le

debat colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deux guerres,” 463. There are others who thought along similarlines, for example Henry de Jouvenel, a publicist. See Jouvenel, “Bloc africain et Federation europeenne,”La Revue des vivants 1 (January 1930): 1–7, here 2–3.

163 Guernier, L’Afrique.164 Ibid., vii, 55.165 Ibid., 3, 5, 91.166 Ibid., 102–103, 131.167 Ibid., 55, 194.168 Ibid., 187, 3.169 Hans Zache, Fur oder gegen Kolonien (1928), as cited in Ageron, “L’idee d’Eurafrique et le debat

colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deux guerres,” 453.



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cluding a 9,000-mile railroad from Berlin to Cape Town, were crucial to this project.170

The irrigation of the Sahara, in turn, would create vast new agricultural lands thatwould give Europe more “living space” to produce grains and cotton, sugar and pota-toes.171 Atlantropa, unlike Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europe, was perhaps an utterlyimpractical scheme inspired by utopian engineers, but seemingly utopian projects, fromthe Panama Canal to the Trans-Siberian Railway, had come to fruition elsewhere.172

For Atlantropa advocates, the United States was both an inspiring model and afeared impetus. Sorgel admired the U.S.: “Why does America . . . need no colonies?”he asked, and his answer was straightforward: “Because it has states in all zones ofthe earth. It is autarchic. It can produce and supply its pepper just as easily as its pota-toes, its textiles just as easily as its industrial raw materials, its metals, its chemicalsetc.” He modeled Atlantropa after the United States, seeing Africa as the site of agri-culture and mining, and Europe as a processing zone.173 “Africa is the great undertak-

FIGURE 5: Integrating Europe with Africa: Sorgel’s Atlantropa Plans, 1932. Archiv des Atlantropa Instituts,Deutsches Museum, Munich.

170 Herman Sorgel, Atlantropa (Zurich, 1932), xii, 10, 55. On Sorgel see also Philipp Nicolas Leh-mann, “Infinite Power to Change the World: Hydroelectricity and Engineered Climate Change in theAtlantropa Project,” American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (February 2016): 70–100; Dirk van Laak,Weiße Elefanten: Anspruch und Scheitern technischer Großprojekte im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1999).

171 Sorgel, Atlantropa, 22, 41, 96.172 Ibid., 82.173 Ibid., 80.

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ing of the future Europe,” and with Africa’s raw materials, Atlantropa would becomethe world’s dominant power.174 “What we need is space,” he argued, “large-scale ter-ritorial unity that can face the rivalries of entire parts of the world . . . Only Africa andEurope can resist its threatening neighbors America and Asia.”175

With the rise of fascism in Italy, ideas of Eurafrica took wing there as well. Africa,Italian politician Giuseppe De Michelis argued in 1935, was properly seen as an ex-tension of Europe, promising raw materials, agricultural commodities, labor, places ofsettlement for European emigrants, and, most important, a very large territory thatcould be “opened up” by European capital.176 In the spring of 1938, a congress of Af-rica experts at the Reale Academia d’Italia in Rome concluded that “Africa is the fu-ture of Europe.” “Africa,” philosopher and president of the proceedings Francesco

FIGURE 6: Creating the “Eurafrican living space.” From Paolo D’Agostino Orsini, “Note Geo-economicheSull’Eurafrica,” Geopolitica 2, no. 2 (1941): 90–96, here 94.

174 Ibid., 109, 107.175 Ibid., 100, 105.176 As cited in Fleury, “Paneurope et l’Afrique,” 49.



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Orestano argued, “belongs to Europe”—indeed, Ethiopia was “our Far West.”177 Fas-cist Italy became one of the main carriers of the Eurafrica idea during the 1930s, andthe tropes were, as always, hope for raw materials and markets—in short, as Romangeography professor Paolo D’Agostino Orsini put it, the “realization of the Eurafri-can living space.”178 As fascist ideologue J. Mazzei saw it, the twentieth century wasthe moment the “problem of economic space was born,” and Eurafrica was its solu-tion.179 The only issue was speed: Europe had to act soon, before the United Statesbecame so powerful that such expansions would no longer be possible.

NOT EVERYONE, OF COURSE, HAD GIVEN UP on unilateralism. In January 1933, when theNazis took power in Germany, ideas of “economic space” took on new urgency. Thisdiscourse was embedded within the discussions on the “American danger,” and, in-deed, as historian Adam Tooze has argued convincingly, “America should provide thepivot for our understanding of the Third Reich.”180 Within this general search for“economic space,” ideas of Eurafrica persisted and enjoyed new mass support, as didefforts to regain African colonies.181 Nazi bureaucrats and a diverse group of industri-alists drew up new plans for integrating Africa into a German-dominated Europeaneconomy, going so far as to set up training programs for future colonial administra-tors.182 There were some simultaneous French efforts to appease Hitler by giving Ger-many access to the African colonies it had lost during World War I, and to “Europe-anize” Africa—to create Eurafrique, and as late as 1943, Swiss journalist and fascistideologue Paul Gentizon continued to propagate the idea of Africa as Europe’s “ulti-mate reserve for space and raw materials.”183 But Nazi Germany was not inclined to

177 “Discorso di Francesco Orestano, presidente del convegno,” in Reale accademia d’italia, Con-vegno di scienze morali e storiche, 4–11 ottobre 1938-XVI: Tema: l’Africa (Rome, 1939), 38–50.

178 Paolo D’Agostino Orsini, “Note Geo-economiche Sull’Eurafrica,” Geopolitica 2, no. 2 (1941): 90–96, quote from 95. See also Ageron, “L’idee d’Eurafrique et le debat colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deux guerres,” 471. See also Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo; Marco Antonsich, “Eurafrica: Dot-trina Monroe del fascismo,” Limes: Rivista Italiana di geopolitica 3 (1997): 261–266, here 262; AlessandroLessona, Realizzazioni e propositi del colonialismo italiano (Rome, 1935); Ernesto Lama, Premesse edaspetti di politica economica coloniale (Rome, 1937).

179 Jacopo Mazzei, Italia e Africa settentrionale nel problema economico mediterraneo (Firenze, 1942),19. See also Ernst Hasse, “Uberseeische und Festlandspolitik,” March 12, 1904, memo, in AlldeutscherVerband, Allgemeiner Schriftwechsel, 1904, R 8048/188, f206–207, BABerlin.

180 Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (NewYork, 2007), xxiv, 10.

181 “Aufzeichnung uber die Unterredung zwischen dem Fuhrer und dem Grafen Ciano im Haupt-quartier am 25. Oktober 1941,” in Andreas Hillgruber, ed., Staatsmanner und Diplomaten bei Hitler: Ver-trauliche Aufzeichnungen uber Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes 1939–1941 (Frankfurt am Main,1967), 632–633; Reinhard Opitz, “Zur Kolonialpolitik des deutschen Imperialismus in den Jahren derFaschistischen Diktatur, 1933–1945, Vorwort-Skizze,” unpublished book manuscript, Reinhard OpitzPapers, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. See also Chantal Metzger, “L’Allemagneet l’Eurafrique,” in Bitsch and Bossuat, L’Europe unie et l’Afrique, 59–75, here 68, for details on some ofthese plans.

182 See for that story Willeke Sandler, “‘Colonizers are born, not made’: Creating a Colonialist Identityin Nazi Germany, 1933–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2012); Sandler, “‘Here Too Lies Our Lebens-raum’: Colonial Space as German Space,” in Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann and Maiken Umbach, eds.,Heimat, Region, and Empire: Spatial Identities under National Socialism (Basingstoke, 2012), 148–165. Seealso the important work by Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London 2008).

183 Metzger, “L’Allemagne et l’Eurafrique”; Ageron, “L’idee d’Eurafrique et le debat colonialfranco-allemand de l’entre-deux guerres,” 468–472; Paul Gentizon, Europe, reveille-toi! L’Amerique atta-que l’Afrique, ton espace vital, ton avenir (Paris, 1943), 14.

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support a Pan-European domination of Africa; indeed, the Nazis were so adamantabout German domination that they created a propaganda movie to discredit Sorgel’sPan-European Atlantropa project.184

Ideas of integrating Africa both complemented and conflicted with the core goalof the Nazi state: the creation of a contiguous territorial empire in Europe, a projectthat now seemed possible in the wake of the Habsburg Empire’s disintegration fifteenyears earlier.185 Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s president of the Reichsbank, had allegedlypromised Coudenhove-Kalergi in January 1933: “You will see! Hitler will create Pan-Europa.”186 Hitler and his supporters wholeheartedly embraced this project, project-ing dreams of colonial empire onto Europe’s East.187 When economist and SS mem-ber Ferdinand Zimmerman gave his inaugural lecture at the University of German-occupied Prague in 1941 (fresh off the publication of his The Rise of the Jews), hepraised the United States for having grasped the importance of a “greater indepen-dent economic space and the concept of greater space as a modern form of nationaleconomic thought”—an almost perfect example for Germany itself.188 Hitler was justas focused on the U.S., writing in 1928 that the significant expansion of German terri-tory was the only way to confront the American danger.189 For him, the United Statesposed a threat because of its access to raw materials and a large market, as well as its“vast open space.”190 In the fall of 1941, when German troops invaded the SovietUnion, Hitler compared “Operation Barbarossa” to the conquest of the AmericanWest, calling the Volga Germany’s Mississippi, and equating Russians to NativeAmericans.191 He declared:

The struggle for hegemony in the world is decided for Europe by the possession of Rus-

sian territory; it makes Europe the place in the world most secure from blockade . . . The

Slavic peoples . . . are not destined for their own life . . . We will supply the Ukrainianswith headscarves, glass chains as jewelry, and whatever else colonial peoples like.192

The “Generalplan Ost” presented detailed plans for ethnic cleansing and coloni-zation. Upon the territorial integration of Europe, according to Hitler’s nightmarishvision, Germany would become the new “land of unlimited opportunity” (here Hitlertook up a trope created by Ludwig Max Goldberger, who in 1902 had invented this

184 Ein Meer Versinkt, dir. Anton Kutter (Bavaria-Filmkunst, 1936).185 For the Habsburg Empire’s presence in Central and Eastern Europe, see Andrea Komlosy,

“Habsburgermonarchie, Osmanisches Reich und Britisches Empire—Erweiterung, Zusammenhalt undZerfall im Vergleich,” Zeitschrift fur Weltgeschichte 9, no. 2 (2008): 9–62.

186 As quoted in Ageron, “L’idee d’Eurafrique et le debat colonial franco-allemand de l’entre-deuxguerres,” 473.

187 See the essays in Gregor Thum, ed., Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom ostlichen Europa im20. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 2006).

188 Ferdinand Fried (pseud.), Antrittsvorlesung Uni Prag, November 19, 1941, reproduced in Opitz,Europastrategien des Deutschen Kapitals, 835; Ferdinand Zimmermann, Der Aufstieg der Juden (Golsar, 1938).

189 Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitlers zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928 (Stuttgart, 1961),120, 122.

190 Adolf Hitler, June 13, 1943, in Hitler, Monologe im Fuhrerhauptquartier, 1941–1944, ed. WernerJochmann (Bindlach, 1980), 398. See also Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History andWarning (New York, 2015), 12–21.

191 Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, 469–470. On Native Americans, see “Conversation with Dr.Todt and Gauleiter Sauckel, Fuhrerhauptquartier, October 17, 1941,” in Hitler, Monologe im Fuhrerhaupt-quartier, 90–92, here 91.

192 Adolf Hitler, September 17, 1941, in Hitler, Monologe im Fuhrerhauptquartier, 62–63.



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phrase to describe the United States)—not least because of his policy of depopulatingthe newly captured territories to make them correspond more closely to the AmericanWest’s alleged “emptiness.”193

HITLER WAS RIGHT TO FEAR the United States, as it was America’s enormous economicresources, along with the Soviet Union’s willingness to sacrifice millions of lives, thatfoiled his grand plans to create “living space.” The Eurafrica project, however, sur-vived the war’s end, at least initially; in fact, Sorgel’s Atlantropa fantasy experienced arenaissance in the late 1940s and the 1950s.194 Even in the United Kingdom, severelyweakened by the war, ideas of Eurafrica took off for the first time, with Foreign Secre-tary Ernest Bevin arguing at a 1948 cabinet meeting that Europe needed the “re-sources of Africa” to withstand U.S. and Soviet pressures.195 For France as well,accessing African resources was key to resisting U.S. dominance.196 In 1949, an Asso-ciation des Amis du Sahara et de l’Eurafrique emerged to further such plans.197 Andthen there was the 1952 “Plan Eurafrique,” forged by none other than the Council ofEurope.198 A new territorial organization of European capitalism remained on theagenda, continuing to link European unification and the control of Africa with fears ofAmerican dominance. So powerful was this connection that it formed part of the founda-tion of the European Economic Community, according to a group of Swedish politicalscientists.199 As late as 1950, Coudenhove-Kalergi argued on the occasion of receivingthe prestigious Charlemagne Prize in honor of his work for European unification that

the renewal of the Carolingian Empire in the spirit of the twentieth century would be a de-

cisive step toward the unification of Europe. A new empire would be created, whose pop-ulation would be larger than the United States of America, and its territory, from the Bal-

tic to Katanga, would be equal in size only to the Soviet Union. With a huge internal

193 Ludwig Max Goldberger, Das Land der unbegrenzten Moglichkeiten: Beobachtungen uber das Wirt-schaftsleben der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Berlin, 1905); Adolf Hitler, June 13, 1943, in Hitler,Monologe im Fuhrerhauptquartier, 398.

194 For a—rather superficial—survey, see Guy Martin, “Africa and the Ideology of Eurafrica: Neo-Colonialism or Pan-Africanism?,” Journal of Modern Africa Studies 20, no. 2 (1982): 221–238.

195 Anne Deighton, “Ernest Bevin and the Idea of Euro-Africa from the Interwar to the PostwarPeriod,” in Bitsch and Bossuat, L’Europe unie et l’Afrique, 97–118, especially 111.

196 Anthony Adamthwaite, “Britain, France, the United States and Euro-Africa, 1945–1949,” ibid.,119–132.

197 Karis Muller, “Iconographie d’eurafrique,” ibid., 9–33, here 9. For a more detailed discussion,see Papa Drame and Samir Saul, “Le projet d’Eurafrique en France (1946–1960): Quete de puissance ouatavisme colonial?,” Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 4, no. 216 (2004): 95–114. For Africanperspectives, see Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and FrenchAfrica (Princeton, N.J., 2014).

198 Metzger, “l’Allemagne et l’Eurafrique,” 75; Muller, “Iconographie d’eurafrique,” 12.199 Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, “Building Eurafrica: Reviving Colonialism through European

Integration, 1920–1960,” paper presented at the EUSA Twelfth Biennial International Conference, Bos-ton, March 3–5, 2011; Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, “Bringing Africa as a ‘Dowry to Europe,’” Inter-ventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 3 (2011): 443–463; Peo Hansen, “EuropeanIntegration, European Identity and the Colonial Connection,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 4(2002): 483–498; and, most comprehensively, Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold His-tory of European Integration and Colonialism (London, 2014).

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market of 200 million people and nearly inexhaustible reserves of raw materials, it couldcreate within a short time a flourishing economy, as it has never been known in Europe.200

The national liberation movements spreading in post–World War II Africaquashed European dreams of creating a Eurafrican economic space. As these move-ments showed, Europeans could never have replicated the spectacular successes ofthe expanding United States, not least because the hegemony that the American stateand private capitalists exercised in the American West was not possible in Africa,where social institutions, though severely weakened, never experienced the almost to-tal collapse faced by the native peoples of North America.201

After two world wars had shown the limits of nationalism, the project of territoriallyreorganizing European capitalism was eventually realized in a different form: the crea-tion of the European Union. Perhaps ironically, that project had the explicit support ofthe United States and was directed against a new “danger”: the Soviet Union. In a fur-ther irony, the Union came to fruition just as a new stage of capitalist development be-gan freeing capitalists from the territorial confines of the nation-state—particularlythose that empowered their workers or hindered the transnational flow of their capital.Although states still mattered, neither the sharp congruence between national capitaland particular nation-states nor capitalists’ desire for territory that had influenced stateplanning and policies from the 1870s to the 1950s remained a powerful trope.202

Today, a capitalism detached from territorial control shines brightly in Singapore’sdevelopment model, neither Apple nor Carrefour is interested in nationally con-trolled commodity chains, and a global elite of entrepreneurs mingle annually atDavos celebrating the possibilities of a cosmopolitan capitalism, while the WashingtonConsensus presses free trade upon African economies. Within this sea of globalism,however, different concepts of the territorial organization of capitalism have beenmaking a comeback as well. In 2017, government policymakers in the United Statesfantasized about nationalizing commodity chains, like their counterparts a centuryearlier, neither remembering nor heeding the warnings of the “age of catastrophe”—the Indian wars in the American West, the horrors of King Leopold’s Congo, or thekilling fields of Eastern Europe.203 At the same time, hopes for new territorial fron-

200 Coudenhove-Kalergi, acceptance speech, Karlspreis, Aachen, 1950, http://www.karlspreis.de/de/preistraeger/richard-nikolaus-graf-coudenhove-kalergi-1950/rede-von-richard-nikolaus-graf-coudehove-kalergi.

201 On the social power of Africans under the conditions of colonialism, see Frederick Cooper, Africain the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), 21. Notwithstanding Hamalai-nen’s brilliant account of the emergence of state structures among America’s native peoples, faced withthe bureaucratic, militarily powerful, infrastructure-generating state of the post–Civil War era, even theComanche Empire was dismantled and annihilated in almost no time. See Hamalainen, The ComancheEmpire.

202 The idea that states matter less under the conditions of an ill-defined “globalization” is one ofthe most misguided assumptions of much of current social science—and public discourse.

203 The “age of catastrophe” is a concept taken from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A Historyof the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1995). It is read here extended in time and also in a more global andless Eurocentric perspective in the light of the critique by Aditya Mukherjee, “What Human and SocialSciences for the 21st Century? Some Perspectives from the South,” paper presented at the NationalCongress on “What Human and Social Sciences for the 21st Century?,” in “Actes du premier congresdu reseau national des MSH,” Caen, 2012, 83–89.



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tiers, both in extraterrestrial space and undersea, are alive and well, embraced by na-tionalists and globalists alike.204 In a surprising way, the question of the relationshipbetween capital, territory, and the state that had been at the core of debates on the“American danger” for more than seventy years is again being pondered in newspa-pers all around the world, signaling that the relatively stable territorial regime of thepast decades may be in flux once more.

Then and now, the relationship between capital, territory, and the state can be un-derstood only from a global perspective: it is, most fundamentally, a question of theinteractions between the particular needs of capitalists and states, refracted by socialconflict, at particular moments across the world as a whole. As a focus on those whotrumpeted “American danger” has shown, capitalism, even in its most nationalist vari-ants, is always global, and can be analyzed only as such, with close attention to theparticular and ever-changing forms of spatiality.205 The relationship between eco-nomic and political spaces continues to shift in unforeseen and uncharted ways. Anddespite an apparent incoherence over time, this diversity of spatial regimes, like thediversity of systems of labor, might be one of the secrets of capitalism’s enormous eco-nomic, political, and ideological dynamism.206

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University in Cam-bridge, Massachusetts. Most recently, he is the author of Empire of Cotton: AGlobal History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), and co-editor with Seth Rockman ofSlavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Currently he is finishing two co-edited books:Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (Bloomsbury,2018) with Dominic Sachsenmaier, and American Capitalism: New Histories (Co-lumbia University Press, 2018) with Christine Desan.

204 See, for example, the efforts of various powers to gain access to maritime mining grounds. An-dreas Rinke and Christian Schwagerl, “Deutschlands 17. Bundesland,” Cicero 8 (2012): 77–82.

205 Luxemburg, Akkumulation des Kapitals; David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geog-raphy (Edinburgh, 2001).

206 On the diversity of labor regimes under capitalism, see Seth Rockman, “The Unfree Origins ofAmerican Capitalism,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives andNew Directions (University Park, Pa., 2006), 335–361; Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World:Essays Toward a Global Labor History (Leiden, 2008); Sven Beckert, “La main-d’œuvre du capitalisme:Revolution industrielle et transformation des campagnes cotonnieres dans le monde,” Le mouvement so-cial 4, no. 241 (2012): 151–165.

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