An Empire of Merchants? German Shipping, Commercial Interests and Imperial Ambitions from Latin America to Hamburg, 1888−1918

Abstract Historians of Germany and of Germans have increasingly turned a global, transnational lens on their subject. This turn has been especially fruitful for Imperial Germany (1871–1918) and its overseas imperial expansion and Weltpolitik. At the same time, global and transnational approaches demand histories of Germany and Germans that do not default to the rise and fall of state projects. This article capitalizes on the generative tension between new scholarship on Imperial Germany’s state aspirations and recent research on ‘Germans abroad’ that has decentred the nation-state. It does so by focusing on a group of Germans for whom these historiographical problems were central preoccupations: German overseas merchants and firms. How did German firms inspire, engage, adapt and ignore Weltpolitik? Using the history of mercantile shipping and its reception in Latin America, this article argues that while commercial actors took an active interest in Germany’s more robust pursuit of world status, that interest showed little appreciable change from long-standing patterns of Hanseatic commercial aspirations. It was the Great War—not Weltpolitik—that recast their political imaginaries.