Fitzpatrick's sensitive evocation of the agency of indigenous rulers makes clear how they often managed to exploit German attention to magnify their own status, defeat local rivals or deflect settler exploitation.
Matthew P Fitzpatrick is a professor of international history at Flinders University, Adelaide. He is the author of Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871-1914, and Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism in Germany, 1848-1884. Winner of the Chester Penn Higby Prize, he has also been a Humboldt Fellow at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster, Germany.