This book traces the roots of German imperialist ideology by examining the German cultural sciences of the 19th century, a group of academic disciplines, such as anthropology, demography, cultural history, and psychology, that blossomed in the nineteenth century and took culture as their primary object of study.

Smith analyses the political implications of the patterns of thinking that emerged in the cultural sciences, tracing for example, the evolution of human geography from an attempt to understand human migration patterns to a justification for German expansionism. In so doing, Smith makes dramatically clear the close relationship between elements of Nazi ideology and certain theories of the cultural sciences, irrespective of the political opinions of the proponents of those theories.