ABSTRACT
It might at fi rst seem strange to fi nd an essay on the Frankfurt National Parliament and the 1848 Revolution in a volume on German colonialism, as indeed, for obvious reasons, most histories of German imperialism and colonialism begin in about 1880, or perhaps the late 1870s, at about the same time as the rise of racist doctrines, and at least a couple of decades before the fi rst episodes of modern genocide. Some scholars, however, have attempted to trace the history, or pre-history, of German imperialist thinking back into the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the present discussion is at least in part intended as a contribution to that literature. The 1848 Revolution and, even more particularly, the Frankfurt National Assembly have in this context been seen as the abortive “moment of birth of German imperialism” (in Hermann Hiery’s phrase), when plans for extensive expansionist policies overseas and for handling the problem of German mass emigration were for the fi rst time loudly and seriously canvassed in a political setting, if without concrete results. Hans Fenske has even gone so far as to suggest that, had the Frankfurt liberals remained in power at the head of a united German nation state, they would have pursued an imperialist and colonialist course that might have triggered the competitive imperialist land-grab of the 1880s decades earlier.1
