George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa and Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. He is the editor of The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, also published by Duke University Press.