This introductory chapter reflects on the conceptual building blocks of the book: transnationalism, virile imperialism, the hybrid media–political system, celebrity politics, and participation in the political. It then describes the imperialist political figures – Wilhelm II, Bernhard von Bülow, Joseph Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes, Leopold II, and Theodore Roosevelt – media events, and digital and analogue media and political sources that form the backbone of the book. The chapter introduces the argument that the hybrid media ensemble around 1900 created a new type of ‘publicity politician’ operating in a system of ‘transnational media politics’. In this system of media politics, the publicity politician placed media management at the centre of politics and gained hitherto-unimaginable visibility on the world stage. This mass mediation broadened political participation – and thereby politics itself. Yet this democratic participation through media simultaneously jeopardized democratic participation through institutions, as representative parliaments had to vie for media attention with these media-savvy and mediagenic publicity politicians. The concepts of the publicity politician and transnational media politics transform our understanding of politics around 1900. These fin-de-siècle publicity politicians, in turn, are essential for comprehending the relationship between media and personalized politics in subsequent times – including today.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant reference of applied science changed. This chapter addresses the question: How could research be discussed using the old language of applied science previously used principally for pedagogy? Where was the continuity? The term’s meaning was constructed and reconstructed with the new organisations, such as the National Physical Laboratory and the newly incorporated civic universities. Therefore, the hectic emergence of a host of new organisations and awareness of research is of particular interest. In an era of growing foreign competition, Liberal politicians such as R. B. Haldane put their faith in applied science. Three key themes structure the analysis: the challenge of foreign powers, the growth of institutions, and the attraction of applied science to governments committed to maximising national efficiency but minimal interference in the market. The focus is on the years between 1899 and the outbreak of war.

Chapter 2 shows how transnational cooperation in Europe led to the ICI’s invention of transcolonial and emulative development in the 1890s. The ICI’s transcolonial development differed from the state-led investment programs of the 1930s but resembled the functional governance famous among the UN development agencies in the 1960s. For utilitarian, racist, and ethical reasons, tropical hygienists, free-trade capitalists, Social Christians, and colonial lawyers in the ICI assumed that only the intrinsic motivation of Africans and Asians themselves could make colonial development a success. In the 1890s, the ICI’s showcase project was the Matadí-Léopoldville railway line in the Congo Free State, which successfully combined international investment and emulative development. The ICI facilitated the transcolonial recruitment of 10,000 indigenous workers for the construction by establishing rules for their employment. Although many workers died on the construction site, ICI members propagated a “soft” development that allegedly combined economic with ethical standards. Christian ICI members promoted this “ethical” development policy. Rarely, however, the ICI’s “soft” development could live up to the expectations it raised. Instead, ICI members designed colonial law and manipulated customary law to use both as a legal basis for exploitation under the guise of “soft development.”

With Bülow becoming chancellor in 1900, Schmoller and his students became advisors to the government in many capacities. The southward shift of German interest into the Yangtze valley advocated by Hermann Schumacher took concrete form during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, itself an outgrowth of Germany’s seizure of Kiaochow in 1897 and German railway construction in Shantung. The Boxer intervention led to strained relations with Britain and encouraged an Anglo-Japanese alliance around a common fear of Russia. These developments were also tied up with British anxieties about decline during and after the Boer War in which Germany began to play the role both as model and menace. The writings and activities of Schmoller and his students played an important role in these perceptions. The Bülow tariff of December 1902 likewise contributed to growing trade frictions with Britain that encouraged Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for tariff reform and imperial federation and the coalescence of a German menace in the minds of many other British observers, misperceptions fed to an unusual degree by German naval propaganda and the rancorous debates over German tariffs.