Grimmer-Solem’s Learning Empire traces the circuits by which six university economists in Germany came to influence their country’s economic, foreign, colonial, and social policy in the decades preceding World War I. Grimmer-Solem, deploying the tools of intellectual historians to examine these professors and their worldviews, mounts a robust, multifaceted inquiry into Germany’s response to globalization in the long nineteenth century. In an innovative turn, he does so not through the use of familiar diplomatic and military documents but through the mobilization of the personal papers of German social scientists who, though mostly forgotten today, nonetheless enjoyed prominence in fin-de-siècle Europe. The reclamation of this source base is a significant achievement in itself.
Learning Empire mainly situates its findings within the voluminous historiography on modern Germany. Yet, the book also makes valuable contributions to growing secondary literatures about transnational entanglements, global flows of ideas, and the relationship between European liberalism and...