Hamburg Free Traders and the Business of Empire, 1897–1941

Abstract Recent debates among historians and in public have concerned the links between German colonialism and imperialism before the First World War and the Nazi regime and its crimes. While a maximalist position on German colonial continuities is unsustainable, the possibility of important imperial legacies stretching into the Nazi period and the argument for a German colonial Sonderweg , or “special path,” are not logically coextensive. This article explores the transformation of Wilhelmine German liberal imperialism by focusing on commercial interests in Hamburg. It argues that empire's strongest legacy was its absence, an absence that created ambivalent possible futures and blurred the line between liberal and illiberal avenues to German power and international order. This blurriness offers an end-run around problematical attempts to narrate Nazism as little more than an extreme expression of global patterns and around untenable notions of German exceptionalism.