Over a decade ago the US historian Charles Maier predicted that in the context of a globalized world the legacy of colonialism and western predominance will sooner or later become the object of pathbreaking intellectual and political debates. [1] On the background of a long-standing tradition of imperial history, so far English publications have dominated the field of colonial history with a focus on the British Empire and the „classical“ European colonial powers. Therefore the volume by the Erfurt historians Claudia Kraft, Alf Lüdtke and Jürgen Martschukat represents a welcome cultural approach to the rapidly growing literature in the German speaking countries. As the editors state it is not just their aim to delineate the possible current readings of a history of colonialism, but also identify the manifold plural – locally or regionally painted – narratives. Furthermore the articles address the often invisible intricacies of colonial history – „those actors and practices, events and ambiguities, which escape the academic grand narratives“ (p. 1). Most authors of the book are committed to a trend of „entanglement“-historiography which encompasses the reciprocal relations between colonizers and colonized as well as between colonies and European respectively North American metropoles. It is along these lines that the seminal article by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler „Between Metropole und Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda“ is reprinted in German. Therein they articulate that „Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself“ (p. 26).