Abstract The colonial project required the construction of infrastructure both to integrate overseas territories into the global economy and to make colonial rule possible. Building telegraph lines, ports and railroads necessitated large numbers of workers, making the ‘labour question’ the central challenge facing colonial powers. This article scrutinizes two railway construction projects in early twentieth-century German Southwest Africa: the privately constructed Otavi railway in the north, built between 1903 and 1906, and the state-run railway between Lüderitzbucht and Keetmanshoop in the south, built between 1906 and 1909. It argues that in both cases, albeit to different extents, the colonial state and the construction companies involved used two key strategies to meet the problem of labour scarcity. They tapped into transimperial labour networks, hiring hundreds of Italian workers as well as Africans from the neighbouring British Cape Colony and Ovambos from the borderlands between the German colony and Portuguese Angola. Additionally, they forced thousands of Herero and Nama, incarcerated in concentration camps as a consequence of the genocidal war that started in 1904, to work at the railway sites in terrible conditions. With these various groups present, the building yards were sites of colonial transactions that allow us to glimpse the different positions the colonizers and the various groups of labourers filled in the hierarchy of the colonial order and how this order was shaped.

Abstract Following the German Empire’s occupation of Jiaozhou Bay in 1897, Qingdao was claimed as a ‘leased territory’, while Shandong was regarded as a German ‘sphere of influence’. Subsequently, the Germans, exploiting their seized sovereignty over railways and mines, constructed the Qingdao-Jinan railway, which penetrated deep into the hinterland of Shandong. From the outset, the Chinese government and all sectors of society embarked on firm resistance to the German colonialists’ intentions and acts of aggression and expansion using railroads, and for their resistance they adopted a diverse array of tactics and methods, ranging from violent armed struggle to non-violent economic competition. This resistance not only proves the subjective status and initiative of the colonized in the colonies, but also comprehensively demonstrates the pragmatism, applicability and flexibility that the colonized often show in relation to the colonizer, approaches that can be more scientifically and rationally examined and interpreted from the perspective of ‘colonial transactions’.

Abstract Is there anything left to say about the Peasants’ War of 1524/25? This article takes up that challenge by demonstrating how the ‘monetary turn’ evident in the later decades of the fifteenth century and early decades of the sixteenth century explains an often-overlooked item amongst peasants’ complaints: the nature of their financial exploitation by feudal lords and their administrators. Such monetary concerns had featured prominently on lists of peasant grievances since the 1460s and fed into Empire-wide discourses on good governance and imperial reform. At their core, this article suggests, was the debasement and lack of the small change coins that peasants used in daily exchanges and to pay taxes and other levies. This article explores these very real monetary grievances and the challenges of righting them, generating a new thread to weave into explanations of the nature and timing of the German peasant revolt of 1524/25.

Abstract In 1951, two large-scale investigations into illegal abortions were carried out in Weinheim and Garmisch. The first part of this article draws on the police and judicial sources generated by the investigations to examine gender relations and perceptions of abortion in both southern German towns. Abortion was normalized within the predominantly working-class communities targeted. Moreover, women’s sexual behaviour and men’s and women’s defences attest to the (increasingly recognized) female assertiveness of the late 1940s and early 1950s. While the judicial authorities readily validated women’s resoluteness, this entailed letting their male partners off the hook. However, before defendants faced their verdicts in court, politicians and civil society had judged the investigations themselves to be scandalous. The second section of this article uses media reports, citizens’ letters and parliamentary debates to examine how popular outrage largely bypassed the issue of abortion. Instead, the scandal became a discursive site for coming to terms with Nazism. While the court trials evinced women’s determination, the discourse surrounding the scandal foregrounded female victimization, thus bolstering narratives of national victimization under Nazism and Allied rule. However, betraying genuine anxieties about whether German citizens were fit to be democrats, activists and politicians harnessed the scandal to consolidate West German national identity as a democracy based on the rule of law. The deliberate sidelining of abortion in the public discourse actively privatized reproductive concerns. Together, the investigations and the scandal’s discussion underscore how the consolidation of a democratic Rechtsstaat in West Germany was predicated on the rule of socially conservative law.

Abstract This article highlights the regular soldier’s place in political rhetoric that urged the Habsburg Monarchy’s inhabitants to view support for the war against Revolutionary and Imperial France as a moral imperative. It establishes how military honour as a system of sociality and social disciplining, founded on contemporary ideals of virtue and natural law, promoted acts of selfless citizenship within a newly formed standing army that supported Habsburg state-building in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The article then shows how regular soldiers of the Monarchy’s army were continually represented by the government and its supporters as selfless servants of the state, eliciting acts of loyalty in different places from those untouched by mandatory wartime demands. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the educated middle class (Bürgertum) contributed to the Habsburg war effort through decades of localized wartime philanthropy. This article argues these people were motivated to do so through social and cultural changes that made self-identifying with the conscripted poor possible. By participating in civic society in this way, a generally progressive prewar segment of the population actively placed their view of the world within the constraints of the reactionary wartime Habsburg state by meeting military exigencies.

Journal Article Writing and Rewriting the Reich: Women Journalists in the Nazi and Post-War Press Get access Writing and Rewriting the Reich: Women Journalists in the Nazi and Post-War Press. By Deborah Barton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2023. xiii + 360 pp. $85.00 (hardback/e-book). Jennifer Lynn Jennifer Lynn Montana State University Billings, USA jennifer.lynn1@msubillings.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, ghae034, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghae034 Published: 08 July 2024

Journal Article Metternich, the German Question and the Pursuit of Peace: 1840–1848 Get access Metternich, the German Question and the Pursuit of Peace: 1840–1848. By Barbora Pásztorová. Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. 2022. vii + 184 pp. £90.00 (hardback/e-book). Erik de Lange Erik de Lange King's College London, UKUtrecht University, the Netherlands e.delange@uu.nl https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9475-3729 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, ghae008, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghae008 Published: 23 March 2024