Ask most people to name a German colony, and you will likely be met with silence.

By 1914, the German Empire controlled the third-largest colonial territory on Earth - larger than Spain's, Portugal's or Belgium's - stretching across Africa and the Pacific. Yet this empire has almost entirely vanished from popular memory, both inside Germany and beyond it.

This book tells the story Germany itself has spent a century trying to forget. From the rushed, opportunistic scramble for territory in 1884, to the extractive and brutally administered colonial economy that followed. From the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904-08 - recognised by historians as the first genocide of the twentieth century - to the parallel catastrophe of the Maji Maji Rebellion, which killed hundreds of thousands through deliberately engineered famine. From the documented ideological and personnel connections between German colonial racial science and the Nazi regime that would follow two and a half decades later, to the empire's abrupt collapse in the First World War and its redistribution at Versailles under the thin diplomatic cover of the mandate system.

And finally, to the century of silence, denial and minimisation that followed - and Germany's still-contested, still-unfinished reckoning with what it did, continuing to this day.

This is not a book about ranking atrocities. It is an attempt to give a specific, historically significant and largely forgotten history the sustained attention it has always deserved.

Part of The History of... series.