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.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, politicians operated within an increasingly hybrid system of media politics. Media became a mass phenomenon, gained commercial and journalistic independence, and assertively claimed to represent public opinion. This chapter sets the scene by describing this diversifying media environment in which politicians operated. It highlights the technological advances that enabled ‘mass’ media; censorship and freedom of the press; media landscapes including political and religious newspapers, as well as regional, national, and transnational news flows; the commercialization of media; and changing journalistic cultures. These developments interconnected with social changes such as increasing literacy and urbanization; democratization and a bolstered notion of public opinion; and a reflexive modernity. Media became increasingly hybrid in terms of interacting media technologies and formats, political and commercial newspapers, and their social and political functions. This media hybridity defined the new transnational system of media politics that political figures inhabited around 1900.