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The German Colonial Imagination
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German History continues its series of virtual round-table discussions with this forum on the German colonial imagination, a topic very much at the centre of current historical controversy. By European standards, the period of formal German colonialism was extremely brief. Yet work inspired by cultural and literary studies has suggested that a ‘colonial imagination’ was much more deeply rooted in German society than the brevity of the political experiment suggests. This in turn has led to a reassessment of colonialism's role, for example, in the evolution of German liberalism and nationalism. Colonial historians have not always welcomed these new developments, some arguing that the culturalist perspective tends to be Eurocentric, and accords too little agency to the colonized. Alongside methodological controversies, the longue durée of the colonial legacy has come under renewed scrutiny. In particular, a more sustained engagement with Germany's colonial history, real and imagined, has inspired new work