The colonial turn in the recent historiography of the German Empire has been based upon the claim that the colonial encounter has profoundly shaped not only the colonial societies in Africa and Oceania, but equally the German society of the 'Kaiserreich'. This volume traces the colonial entanglements, performances, and spectacles in the rising industrial and harbour city of Mannheim in Southwest Germany. Systematically asking for specific localizations and institutionalizations of the encounter with the overseas colonies, the contributions in the volume underline the need to provincialize monolithic understandings of the imperial metropolis.