On June 15, 1888, a mere ninety-nine days after ascending the throne to become king of Prussia and German emperor, Frederick III succumbed to throat cancer. Europeans were spellbound by the cruel fate nobly borne by the voiceless Fritz, who for more than two decades had been celebrated as a military hero and loved as a kindly gentleman. A number of grief-stricken individuals reportedly offered to sacrifice their own healthy larynxes to save the ailing emperor.

Frank Lorenz Müller, in the first comprehensive life of Frederick III ever written, reconstructs how the hugely popular persona of “Our Fritz” was created and used for various political purposes before and after the emperor’s tragic death. Sandwiched between the reign of his ninety-year-old father and the calamitous rule of his own son, the future emperor William II, Frederick III served as a canvas onto which different political forces projected their hopes and fears for Germany's future. The book moves beyond the myth that Frederick’s humane liberalism would have built a lasting Anglo-German partnership, perhaps even preventing World War I, and beyond the castigations and exaggerations of parties with a different agenda. Surrounded by an unforgettable cast of characters that includes the emperor’s widely hated English wife, Vicky—daughter of Queen Victoria—and the scheming Otto von Bismarck, Frederick III offers in death as well as in life a revealing, poignant glimpse of Prussia, Germany, and the European world that his son would help to shatter.

China’s history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been framed as a long coda of imperial decline, played out during its last dynasty, the Qing. Quest for Power presents a sweeping reappraisal of this narrative. Stephen Halsey traces the origins of China’s great-power status in the twentieth century to this era of supposed decadence and decay. Threats from European and Japanese imperialism and the growing prospect of war triggered China’s most innovative state-building efforts since the Qing dynasty’s founding in the mid-1600s.

Through a combination of imitation and experimentation, a new form of political organization took root in China between 1850 and 1949 that shared features with modern European governments. Like them, China created a military-fiscal state to ensure security in a hostile international arena. The Qing Empire extended its administrative reach by expanding the bureaucracy and creating a modern police force. It poured funds into the military, commissioning ironclad warships, reorganizing the army, and promoting the development of an armaments industry. State-built telegraph and steamship networks transformed China’s communication and transportation infrastructure. Increasingly, Qing officials described their reformist policies through a new vocabulary of sovereignty—a Western concept that has been a cornerstone of Chinese statecraft ever since. As Halsey shows, the success of the Chinese military-fiscal state after 1850 enabled China to avoid wholesale colonization at the hands of Europe and Japan and laid the foundation for its emergence as a global power in the twentieth century.

As a study of the greatest middle class party of Imperial Germany, The Splintered Party is inevitably, in its broadest aspect, an inquiry into the weaknesses of liberalism in the Empire of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. How did the National Liberals, the dominant force in the Reichstag of the 1870s, become by 1914 a spent and divided power? Dan White explores this question from a new perspective, emphasizing regional circumstances as primary agents of the party’s decline. The resulting portrait underscores the paradox of the National Liberals: a party with strength in all areas of the Empire, a rarity before 1914, yet a party whose impact was undermined by divisions among its regional branches.

In The Splintered Party the former Grand Duchy of Hessen serves as a testing ground where the regional foundations of National Liberalism can be exposed. As Professor White points out, the party’s reversals on the Imperial plane after 1878—rejection by Bismarck, electoral defeats, internal splits—not only ended its early primacy in German affairs but also shifted political initiative from Berlin and the Reichstag delegation to the National Liberal branches in the states and provinces, which had maintained unity, power, and alliances with local government in spite of the upheaval above them. The consequences of this change become visible through close examination of the political and social structure in Hessen. On the regional level a liberalism based on the claim to majority representation by the notables (Honoratioren) of bourgeois society, a creed no longer plausible in national politics, remained defensible. Through the Heidelberg Declaration of 1884 the National Liberals of the German Southwest attempted to buttress this approach with an economic and social platform and, simultaneously, to make it the impulse of the national party’s revival. But they succeeded only in deferring National Liberalism’s adjustment to democratic politics and in subordinating their movement to the clash of regional and constituency interests. The result was a chronically splintered party.

Against the backdrop of this main theme, White delineates several additional features of the changing political and social scene in Imperial Germany—the local power of the notables, Bismarck’s skills as a political manager, the character of agrarian discontent and rural anti-Semitism, the steady advance of socialism. The uniquely German element in National Liberalism’s failure is assessed in a concluding comparison with the development of liberal politics in Britain and Italy.