This book intervenes into longstanding debates about Imperial Germany's peculiarity linked to its authoritarian traditions, the failure of liberalism, the domestic origins of its overseas imperialism, and its role in the outbreak of the First World War first sparked by the historian Fritz Fischer in the 1960s. It is also informed by debates about liberal imperialism in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, as well as discussions on the origins of Nazism. The introduction questions Fischer’s interpretation by drawing on recent literature that has revealed the many common features of Western liberalism and liberal imperialism. The book explores the global influences shaping German “World Policy” by analyzing the extensive travel, writings, and activity of the economists Henry Farnam, Ernst von Halle, Karl Helfferich, Hermann Schumacher, and Max Sering, all of whom were taught by or closely associated with the economist Gustav Schmoller. These men were unusual because of their extensive travel and experiences overseas, their later influences on the policies of Bernhard von Bülow and Alfred Tirpitz, as well as their strong impact on Germany wartime policy.

This chapter analyzes the role that the dreadnought arms race with Britain began to play in Germany asa surrogate for its largely failed “World Policy” and how that contributed to a growing German debt crisis. In the six years before the outbreak of war, keeping to a set ratio of German and British battleships was increasingly linked with Germany’s “world status” and national honor in the minds of the German public, and Schmoller and his students had played a key role in shaping these perceptions. Even so, it put impossible strains on German public finances, the reform of which became the last major campaign of Bülow’s career and to which von Halle and Schmoller contributed actively. This reform fell far short and ultimately cost Bülow his chancellorship. Matching Franco-Russian military expansion would add additional fiscal burdens and a heightened sense of insecurity. One of the few remaining prongs of "World Policy," the Baghdad railroad, faced impossible hurdles that Karl Helfferich was enlisted to overcome. Ultimately a grand bargain between Britain and Germany around Mesopotamian oil cleared the remaining hurdles for its completion just weeks before the outbreak of war.