The hastily improvised establishment of a colonial empire in 1884 generated a variety of political and legal problems for Germany. To what extent the colonies and their inhabitants would be integrated into the existing constitutional and legal framework of the Fatherland became an increasingly vexed question and one that the German authorities were ill prepared to deal with. Drawing on contemporary discourses of law, national identity, and race, this study explores the impact of Germany's colonial expansion on the theory and practice of citizenship, written from a postcolonial studies perspective and providing new insights into the history of transnational migration, racism, subaltern agency and national identity in the age of imperialism.