"Ian Klike's Life, Earth, Colony is an outstanding achievement. While the significance of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel for discourses of imperial expansion and settler colonialism in Wilhelmine Germany has been increasingly noted in recent historiography, Klinke is the first to unpack these issues in their full complexity. By training a zoologist, Ratzel offered a naturalist perspective in which expansion and colonization were projected as inherent processes of the natural world, as typical (and by implication as legitimate) for arctic lichens and ant communities as they were for European societies in the nineteenth century. Klinke argues that this biologism, which culminated in the concept of Lebensraum , was shaped by necropolitics, a preoccupation with death and decay in which 'biology, race, and sovereignty were fundamentally fused.' Informative and provocative in equal measure, Klinke's study will be of great value to all those interested in ideologies of European colonialism, the development of ecological theory, and the origins of Geopolitik .".