George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton); The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa and Southwest Africa; Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline; The Social Sciences in the Looking Glass: Studies in the Production of Knowledge; and other books.