Frontiers of Empire

Robert L. Nelson is the author of German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge, 2011), and edited Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through the Present (2009). He has won fellowships from the Killam Trust, the Humboldt Foundation, and was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar.

'In this brilliant volume, Nelson masterfully reconstructs the complex, consequential, and hitherto obscure life of the settlement planner Sering. As Sering outfitted the colonial gaze with what Nelson calls 'utopian goggles', the resulting reverberations were global, shifting, and disastrous for Germany and Eastern Europe.' Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, University of Tennessee

• 1. Settler colonialism and how to tell a story: inner colonization and biography; 2. The Frontiers of youth: Kaiserreich, part one; 3. Career beginnings, eastern interests: Kaiserreich, part two (1883–1897); 4. Settling in: Kaiserreich, part three (1897–1914); 5. The radicalization of inner colonization: world war one, 1914–1918; 6. Sering the star: the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933; 7. Sering's journey comes to an end: the third Reich (1933–39); 8. The legacy of Max Sering and inner colonization: the second world war and its aftermath; Conclusion.