Staging a monarchical-federal order: Wilhelm I as German Emperor

This article argues that the German emperor Wilhelm I drew on self-staging, symbolic acts and monarchical federalism to establish himself as the new polity’s figurehead after 1871. By drawing on cultural approaches to political history, this article demonstrates that because the imperial office was embedded in a federal context and institutional and geographical dominance was therefore ruled out, Wilhelm used travel, ceremonial and speeches to appeal to the German population via their regional monarchs for popular support. In so doing, Wilhelm deliberately cultivated the empire’s monarchical-federal political structure to accommodate the German states’ differing responses to the king of Prussia now being German emperor and the nascent popular cult around his persona. In addition, this article argues that Wilhelm’s aim was not just to generate popular support for himself, but also to provide a monarchical understanding of the polity and oppose other political centres of gravity, in particular the Reichstag and its parliamentary understanding of the German Empire. As such, this article demonstrates that self-staging and symbolic acts provided the first Kaiser with a distinct political agency, thereby challenging scholars’ assumptions of Bismarck’s personal and political dominance. It shows that Germany’s composite nationhood was not a limitation to Wilhelm’s establishing the Hohenzollern dynasty as Germany’s imperial monarchy, but rather that his self-staging, symbolic acts and monarchical federalism were crucial for this purpose. It thus questions the historiographical notion that this shift did not happen until Wilhelm II’s 1888 accession and his German-national conception of his public persona, the office and the German Empire

Towards the Centre: Early Neoliberals in the Netherlands and the Rise of the Welfare State (1945-1958)

Although scholars have recently taken an increased interest in the history of neoliberalism, the ‘breakthrough’ of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan still captures most of their attention. Consequently, the neoliberal project is primarily taken as Anglo-American, while its early history is mostly studied to explain the political shift of the 1980s. This article focuses on the early neoliberal movement in the Netherlands (1945–58) to highlight the continental European roots of neoliberal thought, trace the remarkably wide dissemination of neoliberal ideas in Dutch socio-economic debates and highlight the key role of these ideas in the conceptualisation of the Western European welfare state

The Citizenship Experiment: Contesting the Limits of Civic Equality and Participation in the Age of Revolutions

The Citizenship Experiment explores the fate of citizenship ideals in the Age of Revolutions. While in the early 1790s citizenship ideals in the Atlantic world converged, the twin shocks of the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolutionary Terror led the American, French, and Dutch publics to abandon the notion of a shared, Atlantic, revolutionary vision of citizenship. Instead, they forged conceptions of citizenship that were limited to national contexts, restricted categories of voters, and ‘advanced’ stages of civilization. Weaving together the convergence and divergence of an Atlantic revolutionary discourse, debates on citizenship, and the intellectual repercussions of the Terror and the Haitian Revolution, Koekkoek offers a fresh perspective on the revolutionary 1790s as a turning point in the history of citizenship

Introduction to the Special Issue 'Enlightenment and Modernity'

These introductory remarks present a brief overview of the question of the Enlightenment’s relationship to modernity. It charts the emergence of a novel sense of historicity connected to eighteenth-century usage of the term ‘enlightened’ and the belated, late twentieth-century attempts to connect this usage to modernity. The three contributions to this special issue are then introduced and the commonalities and divergences between them are highlighted

From Laboratory Lichens to Colonial Symbiosis. Melchior Treub Bringing German Evolutionary Plant Embryology to Dutch Indonesia, 1880–1909

In this article I demonstrate that Buitenzorg formed an important site for developmental botany or plant embryology. The research station at Buitenzorg was not only a place for colonial big science, but also a hotspot for new transformations in biology. This article focuses on the evolutionary science practice of Buitenzorg’s director Melchior Treub and on how he adapted a German style of laboratory biology to the reality of the colonial tropics. In Buitenzorg, plant embryology evolved from a European taxonomic Hilfswissenschaft into a leading sub-discipline of colonial agricultural science. Studying cooperation in nature, Treub was extra keen on experimenting with new forms of political cooperation in the empire

Staging a monarchical-federal order: Wilhelm I as German Emperor

This article argues that the German emperor Wilhelm I drew on self-staging, symbolic acts and monarchical federalism to establish himself as the new polity’s figurehead after 1871. By drawing on cultural approaches to political history, this article demonstrates that because the imperial office was embedded in a federal context and institutional and geographical dominance was therefore ruled out, Wilhelm used travel, ceremonial and speeches to appeal to the German population via their regional monarchs for popular support. In so doing, Wilhelm deliberately cultivated the empire’s monarchical-federal political structure to accommodate the German states’ differing responses to the king of Prussia now being German emperor and the nascent popular cult around his persona. In addition, this article argues that Wilhelm’s aim was not just to generate popular support for himself, but also to provide a monarchical understanding of the polity and oppose other political centres of gravity, in particular the Reichstag and its parliamentary understanding of the German Empire. As such, this article demonstrates that self-staging and symbolic acts provided the first Kaiser with a distinct political agency, thereby challenging scholars’ assumptions of Bismarck’s personal and political dominance. It shows that Germany’s composite nationhood was not a limitation to Wilhelm’s establishing the Hohenzollern dynasty as Germany’s imperial monarchy, but rather that his self-staging, symbolic acts and monarchical federalism were crucial for this purpose. It thus questions the historiographical notion that this shift did not happen until Wilhelm II’s 1888 accession and his German-national conception of his public persona, the office and the German Empire