The conclusion summarises the main findings of the book and tentatively goes beyond them. When it comes to thought and practice of fin-de-siècle colonial war and violence, we should emphasise essential comparability and connectivity instead of national particularities among the British, German and Dutch empires. It is suggested this research finding might apply to other Western colonial empires as well. At the same time, a number of smaller aspects in which we might actually find national differences is noted. Taking up the transimperial mobility of ideas and experiences of colonial warfare noted throughout the book, the conclusion then asks what questions these findings raise for thinking about the temporality and spatiality of empires more generally. Finally, it touches on continuities in war and violence beyond 1914, both in later colonial wars as well as in the fighting of the First World War in Europe. It tentatively suggests that continuities were considerable in the first case and much lower in the second case.

The conclusion summarises the book and reflects on what is at stake in reconceptualising the transformation of European banking as extroverted financialisation. It contemplates recent financial endeavours to ‘improve’ our global financial architecture and finds most somewhat lacking in their ability to introduce a global financial system that serves social rather than financial ends. In fact, missing the implications of EF, some of these endeavours have the potential to worsen, rather than improve, the threats of credit crunches and crises. Alternatively, we might be better off to consider more radical solutions that tackle the very nature of USD debt creation and the financial architecture itself.

This chapter foregrounds practices of colonial warfare, focussing on the transimperial knowledge behind scorched earth and extermination. The first section identifies devastation and hunger war as the most common practice of colonial war, specifically colonial in the way it was racialised, applied ubiquitously and considered self-evident. In line with the book’s argument, it is argued that the contestation and final abandonment of the method by the Dutch in Aceh represent less of a national particularity than it might appear. The second section departs from conventional approaches to colonial genocide and explores how exterminatory practices were part of Western thought on colonial warfare. There were specific war contexts in which extermination became thinkable, even if these were not held to apply to the majority of colonial wars. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, extermination was an inherent and at the same time relatively minor presence in thinking on colonial war. Engaging with theories of German colonial particularity, the chapter applies these findings to the genocide in German South West Africa, showing how the actions and motivations standing behind it fit into broader transimperial patterns.

There is a certain flip-flop mentality at play when it comes to assessing the green revolution. In many popular accounts, in reflections by scientists, or in policy discourses, the green revolution often comes across as all good or all bad. In the context of the prevailing charged debate around the subject, it may be better to assess the green revolution with a historical contextualization that highlights the contingencies and pitfalls of agrarian transformation. Its history reveals that HYVs are no magic wand that can transform agrarian lives for the better anywhere, anytime. A historical analysis also implores us to not to criticize the green revolution for not solving every problem of poverty and underdevelopment.

Tarai was a landmass running along an east-west axis just to the south of the Himalayan ranges and was a part of Himalayan Kumaun ecology. At the stroke of independence, the colonialists had made plans to clear the Tarai and settle it with Indian soldiers returning from World War II. The task of actual clearing fell on the sovereign Indian government as the pressure to settle refugees piled on top of the plan to settle soldiers. With the nation struggling to meet its food requirements a new vision was born to turn the Tarai into a “granary” for the province. Under these contingencies, the Tarai became a landmass wherein new settlers were encouraged to perfect the art of productive agriculture. The post-colonial developmentalist state set up a model state farm to propagate such practices. To the outside developer and modernizer, Tarai came across as empty though, in fact, it was inhabited by a limited number of hill communities and villages. As Tarai was turned into a farming land with settlers from beyond, a local democratic movement for autonomy erupted in the region that called into question the method of land settlement and transformation.

Chapter 2 challenges three conceptions that dominate political economy accounts of financialisation: (a) that financialisation is best understood as a process of marketisation; (b) that financial systems transform in response to external drivers (i.e., marketisation) as ‘national varieties’ conceptually outside the global economy; and (c) that German finance is best conceptualised as a bank-based system which transformed into a hybrid from the 1990s onwards. Critically analysing the debate about the Americanisation of global finance, this chapter shows that the concept of marketisation captures the expansion of markets but struggles to identify fundamental transformations within markets themselves. As a result, political economy scholars rarely study banks in their own rights and underestimate the power and weaknesses of banks as agents of financialisation. Instead, this chapter introduces the theoretical building blocks of the concept of extroverted financialisation, which frames the analysis of the book. EF has four features that each represent a new imperative in global markets for European banks and that have shaped their responses to the rise of US finance: (a) the rise of liability management; (b) the need for USD; (c) the institutional specificity of US money markets; and (d) the contradictions of contemporary banking.

Knowledge about colonial warfare’s violence was transferred between empires in complex ways. Though differing in degree and over time, British, German and Dutch actors were willing to observe and learn from the colonial wars of others. Writings on colonial warfare became increasingly transimperial in scope from the 1890s onwards, even if this came too late to shape practice and was often distorted by authors’ own agendas and national stereotypes. Observer missions in foreign colonial campaigns were also regular, though their focus was seldom on colonial violence. Whether actively transferring or not, these modes of observation fed knowledge into an ‘imperial cloud’ (Kamissek/Kreienbaum) and reveal that the practitioners of colonial war rarely found the violence of others conspicuous, a fact which gives the lie to exceptionalist historiography. Actual transfers mainly took place through the intra- and transimperial mobility of European and non-European, mostly non-elite, individuals. They lived in frequently highly transnational colonial societies, and a striking number moved from one colonial frontier to the next, forging recurring connections I denote as the ‘routes of violence’.

Discussing the historiography, this section posits the need to move away from national-exceptionalist theories of colonial violence and the military-historical search for national doctrines of colonial warfare, instead recognising the extreme violence of fin-de-siècle colonial wars as part of a transimperial Colonial Way of War. Research should take into view several empires and the shared thought behind such violence. Europeans racialised colonial warfare and infused it with performative aims and imperial anxieties. Such racialised notions eventually became more important than structural constraints in determining extreme colonial violence. Cross-imperial connectivity explains the highly transimperial character of this knowledge, a connectivity that rested mainly on human, colony-to-colony mobility and on transnational colonial populations. Researching this requires rethinking ideas of imperial networks and reservoirs of knowledge. The introduction also offers definitions of ‘knowledge’ in relation to colonial warfare and of ‘extreme’ violence (arguing that there was a qualitative difference between colonial and ‘European’ wars at the time) and discusses sources and periodisation.

Chapter 6 delves into the heart of Deutsche Bank’s transformation towards a US investment bank. It situates the changes of Deutsche’s business model within its play of catch with US banks: To compete in Eurodollar markets, German banks had to find a way to institutionalise their connections to US money markets to improve their access to USD. The attempts to adopt liability management (LM) drove Deutsche’s partial uprooting from its home market to relocate to the US. This challenges the dominant narrative of a US imposition, instead recognising that the trajectory of change was driven by Deutsche’s strategies of extroversion. Tracing the specific practices of Deutsche’s foreign acquisitions and strategies on US money markets, this chapter reveals that Deutsche had to progressively change its traditional practices to accommodate the imperatives of LM. This transformation went from a change in funding strategies to acquire more USD to the corresponding adaptations on Deutsche’s asset side – from corporate loans to US residential mortgage-backed – or ‘toxic’ – securities. This chapter thus presents Deutsche’s move away from the centre of Germany Inc. towards a US investment bank as an outcome of the imperatives of extroverted financialisation.