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Book Project

Shaping an Interconnected World: Hamburg, Germany, and the Transformation of Interdependence, 1880-1974

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Photo: Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

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My book project, “Shaping an Interconnected World: Hamburg, Germany, and the Transformation of Interdependence, 1880-1974,” is a history of Germany’s political and economic interactions with the world told through the port city of Hamburg. The project uncovers unknown German enthusiasm for liberal internationalism in the interwar period; reveals how imperial collapse encouraged affinities between erstwhile free traders and the Nazi party; and shows how the renovation of German liberal imperialism provided the raw material for contemporary Germany’s position as a world power defined by economic might.

Beneath these findings is the discovery that Hamburg supplied a fulcrum for the transition from a world of economic integration knit together by formal empires to one of globalization contested by international orders, post-imperial powers, post-colonial states, and private firms. Hamburg’s merchant capitalists and politicians foresaw—and sought to manage—this transition, turning Hamburg into a seismic experiment in ordering interdependence after empire. This experiment in shaping an interconnected world, I argue, proved foundational not only for the Federal Republic of Germany, but also for the architecture of postwar global economic governance.

Photo: Stiftung Warburg Archiv, Hamburg Blankenese.

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