Magic Lantern Empire examines German colonialism as a mass cultural and political phenomenon unfolding at the center of a nascent, conflicted German modernity. John Phillip Short draws together strands of propaganda and visual culture, science and fantasy to show how colonialism developed as a contested form of knowledge that both reproduced and blurred class difference in Germany, initiating the masses into a modern market worldview. A nuanced account of how ordinary Germans understood and articulated the idea of empire, this book draws on a diverse range of sources: police files, spy reports, pulp novels, popular science writing, daily newspapers, and both official and private archives.

Empire as World and Idea: Colonialism and Society in Germany1. Estrangement: Structures and Limits of the Colonial Public Sphere2. World of Work, World of Goods: Propaganda and the Formation of Its Object3. No Place in the Sun: The People's Empire4. Carnival Knowledge: Enlightenment and Distraction in the Cultural Field5. Ethnographic-Fantastic: Working-Class Readers at the Colonial Library6. The Hottentot Elections: Colonial Politics, Socialist PoliticsMagic Lantern Empire: Reflections on Colonialism and SocietyAbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndex