Colonization and colonialism are connected chronologically, ideologically, and rhetorically through the pursuit of a white man's republic.

America as part of its Grossstaatbildung initiated negotations with Denmark, whose Kleinstaat-status left it little if any leverage in international negotiations.

Scandinavian immigrants were primarily concerned with economic betterment in a post-war laissez-faire–based economy but helped Old World countrymen, though not nonwhites, navigate free-market pitfalls.

Draft resistance, even among republican voters, was widespread. To counter draft resistance based on citizenship claims, the State Department clarified and broadened the definition of citizenship.

Liberty and equality, attainable in America for white Protestants such as Scandinavian immigrants and equated with landownership and social mobility, were key pull factors in the antebellum era.

After the Civil War, Scandinavian editors advocated a conservative approach to questions of race and gender equality instead of using the war as a stepping stone to reinventing citizenship rights.

Why Pergamon? Our story began with ten Roman commissioners, who in 188 BCE drew up a new map for cis-Tauric Asia after the defeat of Antiochos III at Magnesia-under-Sipylos. That map was an artifact of the Settlement of Apameia. A century-old Mediterranean interstate system had broken down at the end of the third century, and the Romans’ map proposed just two pieces of a new geopolitical order, the partition of the Anatolian peninsula between two allies, Rhodes and Pergamon. The failure of Rhodes to integrate or even retain control over its share along the south coast in Lycia and Caria is emblematic of the fact that enforcement of the settlement fell to the actors on the ground. The Romans withdrew and did not soon return, even as Pan-Anatolian wars between Pontos, Pergamon, Bithynia, and their respective allies embroiled the entire region for a decade. While a cunning and opportunistic diplomacy had helped put the Attalids in a position to win an empire, sovereignty over these vast new territories and peoples was never guaranteed. This was the basic assumption of an inquiry into the mechanics of imperial rule, rapid state formation, and the ideological tendencies of the Pergamene kings. My central argument was that the Attalids creatively employed noncoercive means to capture control of Greek cities and Anatolian rural communities, ultimately, making local civic culture depend on their tax revenues.

The ramified monetary system of the Attalid kingdom is described and its relationship to other monetary systems of the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period explained. The character of the cistophoric coinage was neither fully royal nor civic, but should rather be understood as a “coordinated coinage” that required the cooperation of both polis and Attalid authorities. Local monetary needs could dictate the shape of the money supply, as in the signal case of Tralles. The burden and profits of epichoric coinage at regional scale were shared, while the kings ceded symbolic space on the coin types for representations of civic identity. Cooperation can also be glimpsed in countermarks and proxy coinages. Unlike Ptolemaic Egypt, the Attalid kingdom was not a closed currency zone, though the cistophori helped integrate vast new territories. Their reduced weight standard economized on silver, but Pergamene mines existed in Anatolia and should be factored into explanatory models.

Cultural diplomacy was a central plank of the Attalid campaign to secure an empire. Yet the nuances of Attalid cultural politics and the dynasty’s own cultural hybridity remain poorly understood. Intellectuals associated with the Library of Pergamon, such as Polemon of Ilion and Demetrios of Skepsis, promulgated a distinctly Pergamene vision of the Panhellenic community, which emphasized the primacy of place and the cultural parity of East Greece. Demetrios provided learned support for the Attalid claim to the mantle of Priam of Troy and a kingdom of cis-Tauric Asia. That the Attalids sought to present themselves as Anatolian kings is also evident in their choice of the tumulus as a tomb type and in the form of urbanism evinced in their royal capital. By design, Pergamene cultural universalism was not only Panhellenic but also Pan-Asian: in a founding myth, victory over the Galatians secured Attalid Asia. However, a different playbook was required to draw urbanizing Pisidians or Phrygian temple dependents away from Galatian and Bithynian rivals and into the Attalid fold.

In the sunny, austere central hall of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, wrapping around the room’s walls like a serpent, then rising halfway to the ceiling on marble steps, stands a strident, if also fragmentary statement of empire. It is an unfinished wedding cake of a building. Tourists recline languidly on its ascent, like guests with nowhere to sit. The room is just too small; it is overtaken by the object on display: the Great Altar of Pergamon. The Altar, with its two sculptural friezes, the outer depicting the Battle of Gods and Giants, the inner, the tale of Telephos, son of Herakles and heroic ancestor of the Attalid dynasty, was discovered in 1871, the year in which the Second German Empire was born. The engineer Karl Humann stumbled upon the marble fragments while building infrastructure for Ottoman Turkey, making the Altar as we know it a pure product of German, French, and British competition for influence in the Middle East. Today, Turkey has regained confidence, and officials from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation expect Ankara to ask for it back.

An overview of the settlements of the Attalid kingdom is presented, and the impact of the Attalid state on rural Anatolia is assessed. In a countryside dominated by small-scale communities, villages, and towns, Pergamene officials interfaced with a wide variety of civic organizations. Unlike the other Hellenistic dynasties, the Attalids rarely undertook coercion-intensive urbanization projects or forced synoicism. Rather, the Attalids tended to leave communities in place and culturally autonomous, instead focusing their efforts on shaping the body politic and improving fiscal legibility by opportunistically fostering civic institutions of any type. As a result, soldier-settler towns with the status of katoikia ascended to polis-like prominence. Their representatives gained access to royal interlocuters without trading an indigenous Anatolian identity for the trappings of the Greek city, while the Attalids gained a host of new subjects in the countryside, including the emergent Mysians. Surgical interventions in the countryside after 188 BCE shored up select towns like Toriaion and Olbasa with polis institutions and territories.