Matthew P Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of International History at Flinders University, AdelaidePeter Monteath is Professor of History at Flinders University, Adelaide

• 1. The savagery of empire – Matthew P. Fitzpatrick and Peter Monteath 2. ‘No alternative to extermination’: Germans and their ‘savages’ in Southern Brazil at the turn of the nineteenth century – Stefan Rinke3. ‘Far better than their reputation’: the Tolai of East New Britain in the writings of Otto Finsch – Hilary Howes4. The goddess and the beast: African–German encounters – Eva Bischoff5. Wine into wineskins: the Neuendettelsau missionaries’ encounter with language and myth in New Guinea – Daniel Midena6. Signs of the savage in the skull? German investigations of Australian Aboriginal skeletal remains, c. 1860 – Antje Kühnast7. ‘Scientific tourism’: colonialism in the photographs and letters of the young cosmopolitan Carl Heinrich Becker, 1900–02 – Ulf Morgenstern8. Through a German lens: the Australian Aborigines and the question of difference – Judith Wilson9. The savagery of America? Nineteenth-century German literature and indigenous representations – Nicole Perry10. Incompetent masters, indolent natives, savage origins: the Philippines and its inhabitants in the travel accounts of Carl Semper (1869) and Fedor Jagor (1873) – Hidde van der Wall11. Social Democrats and Germany’s war in South-West Africa, 1904–07: the view of the socialist press – Andrew G. BonnellIndex