Max Weber in the Pan-German League

Max Weber began his academic career as an economic historian with a strong specialisation on the situation of agricultural workers in East Elbia. For several reasons during the 1890s, to garner support for his ideas, he engaged with the Pan-German League, something that later provoked a general condemnation of his early work. However, Weber’s policy recommendations—closure of the border to Russian-Polish migrant labourers and ‘Germanisation’ of Poznan and West Prussia by means of ‘inner colonisation’—were little more than a return to Bismarck’s policy and differed completely from the policy of expropriation and dissimilation to which the Pan-Germans turned in the years before the First World War.