Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa is a truly remarkable achievement, one of the most powerful and illuminating works to emerge so far in the effort to recast historical thinking beyond national scales. At its core, it is an inter‐imperial history of German colonialists attempt to transplant New South cotton varietals and labor regimes to Togo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but Zimmerman embeds this project in rich, wide‐ranging, multilayered intellectual, social and political contexts, weaving this story into an account of the violent conjunctures of racial ideology and globalizing capitalism and the historical roots of modern social knowledge. Elegantly wrought, subtly argued and carefully researched, it is a model of global history writing that provides one of the most convincing histories available of the forging of racialized power in the modern world. As Zimmerman demonstrates, the racial commonplace that German and New South ideologues constructed in dialogue—that Africans and their descendants in the New World possessed both an exceptional capacity for agricultural labor and an exceptional absence of self‐disciplining morality—authorized exceptional exercises of state power on both sides of the Atlantic, while leaving an imprint on the conceptual vocabulary that scholars of society—including historians—bring to their work.
