The colonial turn in the recent historiography of the German Empire has been based upon the
claim that the colonial encounter has profoundly shaped not only the colonial societies in
Africa and Oceania but equally the German society of the »Kaiserreich«. This volume traces the
colonial entanglements performances and spectacles in the rising industrial and harbour city
of Mannheim in Southwest Germany. Systematically asking for specific localizations and
institutionalizations of the encounter with the overseas colonies the contributions in the
volume underline the need to provincialize monolithic understandings of the imperial
metropolis.
