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At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and Germany emerged as the two most rapidly developing industrial nation-states of the Atlantic world. The elites and intelligentsias of both countries staked out claims to dominance in the twentieth century. In Militarism in a Global Age, Dirk Bönker explores the far-reaching ambitions of naval officers before World War I as they advanced navalism, a particular brand of modern militarism that stressed the paramount importance of sea power as a historical determinant. Aspiring to make their own countries into self-reliant world powers in an age of global empire and commerce, officers viewed the causes of the industrial nation, global influence, elite rule, and naval power as inseparable. Characterized by both transnational exchanges and national competition, the new maritime militarism was technocratic in its impulses; its makers cast themselves as members of a professional elite that served the nation with its expert knowledge of maritime and global affairs.
American and German navalist projects differed less in their principal features than in their eventual trajectories. Over time, the pursuits of these projects channeled the two naval elites in different directions as they developed contrasting outlooks on their bids for world power and maritime force. Combining comparative history with transnational and global history, Militarism in a Global Age challenges traditional, exceptionalist assumptions about militarism and national identity in Germany and the United States in its exploration of empire and geopolitics, warfare and military-operational imaginations, state formation and national governance, and expertise and professionalism.
Dirk Bönker is Laverack Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University.
"This terrific book displays Dirk Bönker's intellectual range and acuity. Threaded through the book is a persuasive argument that German and American navalism were foundational to state-building in both countries and that it had a highly racialist and gendered basis—his material on how the U.S. Navy squeezed out nonnatives and nonwhites is stunning. This is international history at its best."
Geoff Eley, Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan, author of The Future of Class in History :
"Militarism in a Global Age is ambitious and original, entirely successful in its comparative purpose, and intensively grounded in the fullest of archival research. Dirk Bönker makes a decisive contribution to both German and U.S. history, situating the resulting synthesis in the context of transnational and global history. This book will have a major impact."
"In American history, it is often taught that while the great powers of Europe were engaged in an arms race... the U.S. remained aloof and relatively sane by comparison. A modest but growing number of historians dispute this view, particularly the notion of U.S. detachment. Bönker is one of those and presents undeniable evidence that the US was anything but aloof. This evidence comes from the planners and strategists themselves, whom Bönker quotes heavily.... The parallels are striking; at times, the US desire for worldwide dominance surpasses the aims of Imperial Germany."
"Bönker's study expands significantly on recent work that interprets the kaiser's navy in a nonexceptionalist framework, stressing global dynamics rather than the peculiarities of modern Germany: the kaiserreich was not a unique case; its navy was not the expression of special conditions, as Eckart Kehr, Volker R. Berghahn, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler had argued. However, Bönker does not overstretch this interpretation. His study is far too much informed by meticulous archival research and an awareness of the specific historical contexts on both sides of the Atlantic for him to embrace the revisionist interpretation wholeheartedly."
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