20 results
Frontmatter
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 4 - The German colonial empire
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 36-65
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Between 1884 and 1919, Germany amassed one of the largest colonial empires of the epoch. Most territories were ceded during the first months of the First World War, and Germany was officially dispossessed of her colonies at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, when her former territories were handed over to the mandate powers. In geographical terms, the German colonial empire was focused on Africa, where it acquired its first territories in 1884 and 1885. Germany’s expansion was an integral part of the larger ‘scramble for Africa’ that substituted the ‘informal imperialism’ of control through military influence and economic dominance by that of direct rule. It was initiated with France’s move into Tunisia in 1881 and with the British take-over in Egypt in 1882, and formalized in 1884 with the ‘Congo Conference’, called by Bismarck and held in Berlin to settle competing claims over the Congo and West Africa. At the conference, in the absence of representatives from Africa, the European powers (including the Ottoman empire) laid down rules for the continent such as free access to the Congo and Niger rivers and the freedom of missionary activity in all of Africa. The most momentous of the provisions was the definition of colonial territories by the criterion of ‘effective occupation’, which triggered a rush to take possession of lands not yet annexed by European powers.
The smaller areas in north-eastern China and in the Pacific were added only in 1897 and 1899. German expansion into east and south-east Asia, too, was an element in a larger European (and Japanese) contest over commercial privileges, strategic military bases, and spheres of influence in the region. Also in the following years, colonial lobbyists continued to disseminate plans, and more often fantasies, to further enlarge the colonial empire. Among the places preferred by colonial lobbyists were Morocco (which forced Germany into deep foreign policy crises in 1905 and 1911), the Belgian Congo (as an ingredient in plans to create a German Central Africa), the Portuguese possessions (parts of Angola and Mozambique), Brazil, Chile, and the Middle East. But these projects added more to the diplomatic difficulties of the Kaiserreich than to its empire. With the annexation of Kiaochow, Samoa and New Guinea, German expansion had come to an end.
Chapter 1 - Introduction
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 1-14
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The German colonial empire lasted a mere thirty years, and is thus one of the most short-lived of all modern ‘colonialisms’. Consequently, it has not occupied centre-stage in most accounts and overviews of German history. The colonial experience was deemed marginal and insignificant, compared both to the long histories of the British and French empires, and also to the towering impact, on German history and beyond, of subsequent events: the First World War, the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In recent years, however, interest in Germany’s colonial past has made a remarkable comeback, both in academia and in the wider public sphere, and this mainly for three reasons.
Firstly, Germany’s colonial project may have lasted only three decades, but it was a significant and integral part of the period of high imperialism before the First World War. For anyone interested in a comparative and global perspective on modern empires, the German example is in many ways an instructive and illuminating case. Germany was a colonial late-comer. Only after unification in 1871, which replaced the thirty-eight sovereign German states with a unified nation-state under the leadership of Prussia and Chancellor Bismarck, did the acquisition of colonies emerge as a realistic political project. Powerful pressure groups as well as reckless colonial pioneers in Africa forced Bismarck, to some extent against his will, into government support for the occupation of the first colonial territories in 1884. In the autumn of that year, Bismarck invited the European powers to the Berlin Conference: this in many ways formalized the scramble for African possessions. In 1884/85, Germany acquired large territories in Africa in today’s Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanzania. In the late 1890s, smaller possessions in East Asia (Shandong province in China) and the Pacific (Samoa, New Guinea, and a number of Pacific Islands) were added. After those of Britain, France, and the Netherlands, this was the fourth largest colonial empire at the time.
Chapter 2 - Colonialism before the colonial empire
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 15-20
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Pre-histories
Any retelling of German colonial history usually begins with an introduction that traces the history of overseas possessions back as far as the early modern era. Such accounts assume that demonstrating that there was already a tradition of German expansion can help to explain the development of colonialism from the 1880s onward, whether in terms of continuities of ideas or continuities in the social groups involved. More recently, Susanne Zantop has suggested a similar link on the level of cultural and discursive history. In an examination of the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German literature on Latin America – before the expansion of the German empire, in other words – she attempts to identify ‘unconsciously expressed colonial fantasies’ which she sees as the root of the desire for expansion. For Zantop, these literary representations acted almost like a set of instructions for the colonial movement of the 1880s: ‘Imaginary colonialism anticipated actual imperialism, words, actions. In the end’, she summarizes, not without exaggeration, ‘reality just caught up with the imagination’.
In fact, there was a history of German possessions in foreign territories, and there were many more such plans and projects, mostly of ephemeral character. They included the colonial experiments in Venezuela, initiated by the Welser, an important family of merchants and bankers in Augsburg, between 1528 and 1556. Large land concessions granted by the Spanish emperor Charles V enabled the Welser to participate in the exploitation of raw materials (the main objective was gold), slavery, and long-distance trade of luxury goods characteristic of colonialism in the sixteenth century. Another example of the mercantilist variety of colonialism was the foundation of ‘Gross Friedrichsburg’ on the west African coast (in present-day Ghana) by the Great Elector in 1683. As the state of Brandenburg was also able to secure possession of St Thomas, one of the Antilles islands, it succeeded in participating in the triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. But the African holdings, which were gradually extended, were sold to the Dutch in 1717 as Brandenburg was not equipped to compete with the maritime powers of the day and thus not able to safeguard its possessions. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the German states did not participate in colonial expansion. This was a peculiarity among the European countries and a result not least of the relatively minor role the various German states played in European power politics.
Acknowledgements
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp xii-xii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 11 - German colonialism and its global contexts
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 169-185
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The dynamics of German colonialism extended not only to Europe but also into the world, far beyond the ‘protectorates’ and overseas possessions. The formally acquired territorial colonial empire was not a separate sphere that can be understood in isolation from the increasing integration of the world – integration caused by capitalist structures, imperialist intervention, cultural exchange, and migratory flows. German colonial history was embedded in global events and linkages in many ways.
We can identify three different levels of global entanglement. Firstly, the imperialists’ expansionary plans often extended beyond the existing colonial territories; there was no shortage of visions of an enlarged empire. This fact is well established and is usually mentioned in traditional accounts of colonial history. There are many examples for these larger expansionary ambitions. Most prominent among them was the media campaign by nationalist groups hailing from the educated classes and organized in the Pan-German League, for Germany to seize western Morocco. While the government and industry favoured a liberal open door policy, nationalist circles claimed Morocco to be an ideal location for German settlement. These debates fed into the two Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, in which Germany attempted to employ gunboat diplomacy to limit France’s ambitions in the region, but ultimately failed and became increasingly diplomatically isolated. Another region of imperialist aspirations was central Africa, where protagonists of imperialism like Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden saw a ‘German India’ in the making. These proposals date from the early 1880s, but surfaced regularly in the following decades. The creation of Mittelafrika, centred on the Belgian Congo, was one of the official German objectives of the First World War. In public discussion, mainly on the nationalist fringe, a series of further territorial aims were put forward, among them in South Africa and in Latin America, in particular in Brazil.
Index
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 224-233
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
German Colonialism
- A Short History
- Sebastian Conrad
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011
-
Germany was a latecomer to the colonial world of the late nineteenth century but this history of German colonialism makes clear the wide-reaching consequences of Germany's short-lived colonial project. Sebastian Conrad charts the expansion of the empire from its origins in the acquisition of substantial territories in present day Togo, Cameroon, Namibia and Tanzania to new settlements in East Asia and the Pacific and reveals the colonialist culture which permeated the German nation and its politics. Drawing on the wider history of European expansion and globalisation he highlights the close interactions and shared vocabularies of the colonial powers and emphasises Germany's major role in the period of high imperialism before 1914. Even beyond the official end of the empire in 1919 the quest for Lebensraum and the growth of the Nazi empire in Eastern Europe can be viewed within a framework of colonialism whose effects resonate to the present day.
Illustrations
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp vi-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 7 - Colonial society
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 100-123
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
It is impossible to speak of a single ‘colonial society’. In fact, the colonies were made up of a number of different societies. A large local population, itself often extremely heterogeneous, can be contrasted with a small minority of European (or American, or Japanese) inhabitants. These two groups were clearly delineated and separated, in theory and often in practice. Colonial policy was devised largely to produce and maintain this difference, although this does not necessarily mean that colonialism excluded the possibility of any kind of integration. In fact, the French policy of assimilation, practised most commonly in northern Africa, aimed to achieve cultural homogenization. (The policy was by no means egalitarian, however: Algerians who wanted to obtain French citizenship had to abandon Islam.) Integration went even further in the Japanese empire, where, according to the policy of assimilation (dôka), colonial subjects in Taiwan and Korea were, in principle, treated like Japanese citizens, though with some discriminatory limitations. This policy was based on ideological beliefs about ethnic affinity and the cultural closeness of eastern Asian countries with a shared history of Confucianism; and it was based on repression, as the forced name changes of Koreans testify. These examples show that colonialism could cover a wide range of different degrees of distinction and assimilation. These could range from integration, sometimes forcible, to apartheid. A tension existed between these different forms of colonial policy. But at a more fundamental level, this tension was an inherent part of the colonial project. Strategies of difference and of convergence, in complex and ambivalent ways, went hand in hand. The differentiation between the colonial masters and the colonized, a differentiation that was increasingly expressed in terms of ‘race’, stood in opposition to the concept of ‘elevation’ preached by the proponents of the cultural mission that was one of the main ideologies driving the colonial project. At the same time, the colonizers always felt that those at home suspected them of adapting too much to local conditions – of going native. This double tension – colonial difference vis-à-vis the civilizing mission on the one hand, and going native on the other – formed the deep ideological structure of colonialism.
Chapter 3 - Pressure groups, motivations, attitudes
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 21-35
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Between 1884 and 1899, the German empire acquired colonies in Africa, in north-eastern China and in the Pacific. By the end of the process it was the fourth-largest European empire. For a long time such a development had seemed very unlikely. Chancellor Bismarck, in particular, had declared his opposition to the acquisition of colonies on many occasions, because he felt they involved immeasurable risks for both Germany’s foreign policy and its finances. ‘For as long as I remain Chancellor’, he declared as late as 1881, ‘we will not become involved in colonialism’. (see Illustration 3.) Given this background, the question of most interest to historians was for many years: why did Bismarck change his mind in 1884? Explanations offered include psychological interpretations of the desire of the ‘Iron Chancellor’ for expansion, responses to the power of public pressure, and a desire to create a conflict with England with the intention of frustrating the policies that Friedrich III, next in line to the imperial throne, and believed to be a liberal Anglophile, was expected to pursue. The most prevalent view taken, however, was that Bismarck was attempting to bring his country closer to France; he hoped that shared colonial interests in expanding and preventing English supremacy would prevent France from plotting revenge against Germany. By contrast, the theory of ‘social imperialism’ proposed by historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler denied the primacy of foreign policy and focused on economic policy and, most importantly, on the goal of redirecting domestic social tensions to the colonies.
Chapter 12 - Memory
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 186-201
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The end of Germany’s formal colonial rule did not put an end to colonialism. This was true quite literally for the German colonies: in 1919, the German colonial empire was dissolved on the grounds that ‘Germany’s failure in the field of colonial civilization’, as the indictment of the Allied powers read, ‘has become all too apparent to leave the thirteen to fourteen million natives again to the fate from which the war has liberated them’. Liberation, however, did not imply sovereignty. Instead, the former colonies became mandates of the newly founded League of Nations and were transferred to the victorious powers (mainly France and England but also Japan, Belgium, and Portugal). In terms of international law they were no longer colonial territories, but in terms of the practice of rule, there was little difference. Moreover, colonial structures continued well into the post-war period. After 1945, and even after decolonization, the now-independent nations were still characterized by colonial modes of dependence, colonial world views and memories of the colonial era.
Colonialism had its after-effects in Germany, too, even if they differed markedly from the situation in the former colonies and followed a dynamic of their own. After 1918, the territorial empire was a thing of the past, but it lived on in the German imagination and in some expansionist projects at least until the Second World War. Social and economic structures and discursive patterns shaped by the colonial influence continued to affect German society in a number of ways and were still apparent even in post-1945 West Germany.
Chapter 5 - The colonial state
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 66-87
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Although the era of colonial power, and especially that of German colonialism, was a short one, it had one long-lasting effect: it led to the creation under international law of territorial states that aspired to a state monopoly on power and to fixed external borders. This took place in regions where boundaries had previously been imprecise and constantly changing, and where there had been a wide variety of different types of political order with very different degrees of centralization. Especially in Africa, German colonization introduced a completely new principle of political organization, which was reinforced under British and French rule after the First World War.
The colonial states controlled by the German empire were set up in a belief that the model of European state systems could simply be applied to the colonies. But in fact the practice on the ground turned out to be very different from the theory. The colonial state was not simply an extension of the western European model, but, as Jürgen Osterhammel suggests, ‘a political form in itself’. And colonial states themselves were organized in a variety of very different ways. Even the laws and regulations that were applied differed greatly from one colony to the next. The structures of colonial power varied according to regional differences and different types of colony, and they followed different chronologies. But they were also affected by local geography and by the dynamics of local societies. The level of control desired by the colonial state also depended on the objectives being pursued for each colony. In trading colonies like Togo, the state’s presence was limited to a small number of administrators whose task was primarily to secure the economic exploitation of the region. By contrast, in settlement colonies such as German South-West Africa and plantation colonies such as Cameroon, the presence of German settlers and the demands for labour by German landowners led to the state taking more control over local territories. In addition, any analysis of colonial power needs to differentiate between different time periods, because the structures of colonial state power changed – drastically in some cases – during even the short period of German domination.
Chapter 8 - Knowledge and colonialism
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 124-135
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In recent years, prompted by the rise of postcolonial studies and the interrogation of the cultural roots of colonialism, an intense debate has taken place about the relationships between power, knowledge, and the scholarly disciplines in the colonial context. Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and of the western ‘order of knowledge’ as an epistemological precondition for imperialism was central to the development of this debate. From the late eighteenth century onwards, European expansion went hand in hand with an explosion of interest in the world outside Europe and in exploring that world. Initially this took the form of travel reports, but it soon moved into academic disciplines as well.
That knowledge and power are closely linked has been a paradigmatic assumption of historians building on the work of Michel Foucault. This insight also applies to colonial history. Generating knowledge about the countries outside Europe was a necessary precondition for colonial conquest; but the colonial experience, conversely, also left its traces in the different forms of western knowledge. Knowledge and scholarly research were not instruments of neutral, ‘objective’ description. Rather, they could not and cannot be separated from hierarchies of power and mechanisms of rule. At its most self-evident, this means that academic research made an indispensable contribution to the European conquest of the world. Engineering, land surveying, weapons technology, vaccination and medical research, legal theories, Oriental studies, ethnology, linguistics – the entire arsenal of academic disciplines was pressed into service for the territorial conquest of the planet.
Chapter 10 - Colonialism in Europe
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 153-168
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
For some years, there has been increasing discussion about the extent to which imperial expansion and colonial forms of rule were evident not only in Africa and Asia but also in Europe. The best-known examples include English control of its ‘Celtic fringe’ in Ireland and the role of the Hapsburg Empire in central Europe. Similar suggestions have recently been made about German history. In analytical terms, the debate about German history has two separate starting points. Firstly, Hannah Arendt’s conceptual differentiation between ‘continental’ and ‘overseas’ imperialism leads to the suggestion that German expansion into Poland and Russia, especially the expansion during the Second World War, can perhaps be seen as a form of continental empire-building. Secondly, the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ focuses on the domestic use of colonial forms of rule.
Heuristically, these perspectives have proven to be very fruitful, and they have opened up spaces for analytical questions outside the purview of traditional approaches that equated colonial territories, by definition, with overseas possessions. At the same time, it is important to be precise about the status and level of ‘coloniality’, and to clarify whether the links under investigation are rhetorical and metaphorical, economic, or indeed overlapping social practices. As much as it is illuminating to understand the reach and pervasiveness of colonial constellations, it is just as crucial to recognize the differences, not least the legal differences, between ‘domestic colonialism’ and foreign colonialism. Otherwise, there is a danger that the concept of ‘colonialism’ will become so broadly conceived that it covers, more or less indiscriminately, any kind of rule at all. This should be borne in mind over the following paragraphs, in which I briefly outline three current debates on the European dimension of German colonialism. They have to do with ‘internal colonization’ in the eastern provinces of Prussia, with the question of a link between the Herero war and the Holocaust and finally with the colonial character of Nazi expansion in eastern Europe.
Contents
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp v-v
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 13 - Selected readings
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 202-223
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
In the wake of Said, Orientalism, published in 1978, and particularly since the 1990s, the field of colonial studies has undergone dramatic transformations. For a good account of the changes in perspective over the past century, see the lucid and well-informed overview by Patrick Wolfe, ‘History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism’, American Historical Review 102 (1997), 388–420. Good introductions into the field of post-colonial studies are provided by Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, New York (Columbia University Press) 1998 and Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford (Blackwell) 2001. One of the seminal and frequently cited works of this new strand of scholarship is Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton (Princeton University Press) 2000. For critical perspectives, see Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder (Westview Press) 1997; and recently Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley (University of California Press) 2005. For fresh perspectives, see also Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue (eds.), Imperial Formations, Santa Fe (School for Advanced Research Press) 2007.
For overviews of the history of colonialism that also provide the context of German colonialism, see the older study by David K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century, 2nd edition, London (Macmillan) 1982 [1966] and the more recent book by H. L. Wesseling, The European Colonial Empires 1815–1919, Harlow (Pearson Longman) 2004. For a more analytical approach, see the outstanding textbook by Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Princeton (Wiener) 1997, and the concise and very useful Empire: A Very Short Introduction by Stephen Howe, Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2002.
Chapter 6 - Economy and work
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 88-99
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
One of the main motivations for Germany’s acquisition of colonies was the promise of rich financial rewards. But these hopes remained largely unfulfilled; in economic terms, Germany profited very little from its colonies. However, the economies and societies of the colonies themselves were deeply transformed by imperialism. Characteristic features of colonial economies included a monopoly (by the colonial state) on taxation, control over currencies, and controls over imports and exports. Of even greater significance for the societies affected were changes to market structures, to production, and to ownership, in particular of land. At the same time, it is important to remember that colonial economies were not created out of nothing; there were many continuities, both in agricultural production and in terms of links to export markets. Large parts of Africa were already engaged in trade links with other parts of the world in pre-colonial times; trade connections across the Indian ocean, for example, linked the eastern coast of Africa with the Arabian peninsula and with south Asia. In many instances, for example in western Africa, the colonizers continued to use the export infrastructure and links that had been there before they arrived. The persistence of pre-colonial trade links was even more pronounced in the case of Kiaochow; even after the takeover by the Germans, Japan remained its most important foreign trading partner.
Colonial economic policy:
Most of the colonial conflicts – within the colonial administration, between different colonial interest groups, between Germans living in the colonies, and finally between Germans and the colonized populations – had to do with economic policy. There were three main competing visions of economic development propagated by different colonial interest groups in Germany (although in practice these often overlapped). The first was a plantation economy, made up of large areas of monoculture worked by native labourers, focusing on the export trade. This model required high levels of capital investment and large amounts of labour (in 1912, almost 12,000 people were employed on plantations in Cameroon), often recruited only with the use of force. Brutal treatment and inadequate conditions caused many deaths among plantation workers. While the colonial governments, for example that in East Africa, claimed that the abolition of slavery was one of the main objectives of German colonialism, the plantation owners established new forms of bonded labour that had high mortality rates too.
Maps
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp xi-xi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 9 - The colonial metropole
- Sebastian Conrad, Freie Universität Berlin
- Translated by Sorcha O'Hagan
-
- Book:
- German Colonialism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2011, pp 136-152
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
One of the most innovative ideas to come out of the field of post-colonial studies and more recent studies on empire has been the suggestion that the histories of the colonizers and the colonized should be examined within one coherent analytic field. For a long time, historiography was dominated by a perspective that interpreted colonial contacts in terms of influence and diffusion. In this view, European expansion led to irreversible changes in indigenous societies, changes that could be interpreted as being either positive (cultural mission and modernization) or negative (oppression and exploitation). Thus Europe, it was believed, had radically changed the world without itself being greatly affected by those changes. This one-sided view has recently been replaced by a perspective that no longer views European history and colonial history as separate entities, but accepts that the numerous links and processes of exchange that existed between them were constitutive for both.
This approach has brought interesting results for British history in particular; it has revealed the extent to which colonial links shaped the dynamics of British society and economy, everyday life in the metropole, and British nationalism. Such a change in perspective can also be useful for understanding German society. Because the German colonial empire lasted for a much shorter period, it is not surprising that the effects are less obvious, can be found primarily in the areas of representation and popular culture, and were themselves shorter-lived. Yet here, too, we can identify cases of ‘double inscription’, as Stuart Hall has termed the complex interactions between metropole and colony. Wilhelmine Germany, in diverse and not always obvious ways, was shaped and influenced by the effects of the colonial encounter.