Foreword
Volker R. Berghahn

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Geoff Eley and James Retallack

Chapter 1. Making a Place in the Nation: Meanings of "Citizenship" in Wilhelmine Germany
Geoff Eley

Chapter 2. Membership, Organization, and Wilhelmine Modernism: Constructing Economic Democracy through Cooperation
Brett Fairbairn

Chapter 3. "Few better farmers in Europe"? Productivity, Change, and Modernization in East-Elbian Agriculture, 1870-1913
Oliver Grant

Chapter 4. The Wilhelmine Regime and the Problem of Reform: German Debates about Modern Nation-States
Mark Hewitson

Chapter 5. Lebensreform: A Middle-Class Antidote to Wilhelminism
Matthew Jefferies

Chapter 6. Imperial Socialism of the Chair: Gustav Schmoller and German Weltpolitik, 1897-1905
Erik Grimmer-Solem

Chapter 7. "Our natural ally": German Social Democrats, Anglo-German Relations, and the Contradictory Agendas of Wilhelmine Socialism, 1897-1900
Paul Probert

Chapter 8. The "Malet Incident," October 1895: A Prelude to the Kaiser's "Krüger Telegram" in the Context of the Anglo-German Imperialist Rivalry
Willem-Alexander van't Padje

Chapter 9. Colonial Agitation and the Bismarckian State: The Case of Carl Peters
Arne Perras

Chapter 10. The Law and the Colonial State: Legal Codification versus Practice in a German Colony
Nils Ole Oermann

Chapter 11. Max Warburg and German Politics: The Limits of Financial Power in Wilhelmine Germany
Niall Ferguson

Chapter 12. Continuity and Change in Post-Wilhelmine Germany: From the 1918 Revolution to the Ruhr Crisis
Conan Fischer

Chapter 13. A Wilhelmine Legacy? Coudenhove-Kalergi's "Paneuropa" as an Alternative Path towards a European (Post-)Modernity, 1922-1932
Katiana Orluc

Chapter 14. Ideas into Politics: Meanings of "Stasis" in Wilhelmine Germany
James Retallack

Notes on Contributors
List of Publications by Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann

What was distinctive-and distinctively "modern"-about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question, these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently "bourgeois" formation in German public culture, the contributors suggest new ways of interpreting its reformist potential and advance alternative readings of German political history before 1914. While proposing a more measured understanding of Wilhelmine Germany's extraordinarily dynamic society, they also grapple with the ambivalent, cross-cutting nature of German "modernities" and reassess their impact on long-term developments running through the Wilhelmine age.

James Retallack is Professor of History at th Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. As a recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from the Humboldt Foundation, in 2002-03 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Göttingen.