Part II comprises the bulk of the volume and is a diachronic analysis of those contingent factors influencing the causes of each conflict. The author contributes to our understanding of these specific circumstances through a methodical analysis of six factors in each conflict: geophysical conditions; cultural geography (human settlement, infrastructure, economy); indigenous actors as one of the warring parties; German military personnel dispatched on behalf of the German Empire (origins, affiliations, ideological considerations and self-conceptions); external requirements (punishment, retribution, settlement, occupation; funding; legitimisation in parliament and the press); and ‘friction’. "[33] Idealists often volunteered for selection and appointment to government posts, while others with an entrepreneurial bent labored to swell the dividends at home for the Hanseatic trading houses and shipping lines. Egger approaches the history of this organisation with a ‘translocal, transregional and transnational’ perspective.23 Her goal is to write the history of the modern Christian mission as part of the history of the European, American and African societies involved, but also with a view to a ‘shared history of complex relationships and entanglements’.24, In doing so, Egger casts her chronological net wider than is usual, situating her analysis from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. Namibia, or South Western Africa has an area of 835,100 kilometers squared. Introduction on German Colonization in South West Africa South Western Africa was a German colony from 1884 until 1915. Karl Waldeck: "Gut und Blut für unsern Kaiser", Windhoek 2010. "[14] The acquisition and the expansion of colonies were accomplished in a variety of ways, but principally through mercantile domination and pretexts that were always economic. The colonies were romanticized. [74], To minimize dissent the German Colonial Press Law (written 1906-1912) kept the pugnacious settler press under control with censorship and prohibition of unauthorized publications. D.J. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. [33] Successful German plantation operators realized the benefits of systematic scientific inquiry and instituted and maintained their own stations with their own personnel, who further engaged in exploration and documentation of the native fauna and flora. "[21] Such exploratory missions required security measures that could be solved with small private, armed contingents recruited mainly in the Sudan and usually led by adventurous former military personnel of lower rank. Introduction on German Colonization in South West Africa. Part I (‘Male Sexuality and Prostitution in the Overseas Territories’) is a broad outline of sexuality and prostitution in the colonies written in a way that renders the book accessible to the non-expert while still engaging those more versed in the field of German colonial history. What does become clear is that indigenes were used as test subjects even more than the underclasses in Germany because of racial hierarchies.15 Clearly the colonial situation significantly altered discourse and practice. This is followed by three main parts, each consisting of several chapters. [80] Eugen Fischer studied 310 multiracial children, calling them "Rehoboth bastards" of "lesser racial quality". “Germany's Trade with Her Colonies, 1884-1914.”, Lahti, Janne. Germany cooperates economically and culturally with many countries in Africa and Asia, independent of colonial history. [29] Medical doctors the world over benefited from pioneering work into tropical diseases and German pharmaceutical discoveries "became a standard therapy for sleeping sickness and relapsing fever. Smuts' warnings were repeated in the press. The final part of the analysis brings in international perspectives and voices from the metropole as well as tackling the thorny idea of military ‘memory’ which has been used to support the thesis of continuity in German military violence from ‘Windhoek to Auschwitz’.49 Here, the author revisits some well-known material from parliamentary debates and foreign views, including the statements of Colonel Frederic J.A. Short-lived attempts of colonization by individual German states occurred in preceding centuries, but crucial colonial efforts only began in 1884 with the Scramble for Africa. All German possessions in Africa were confiscated by a superior Allied military presence from 1914 to 1918. In conclusion of his studies he advocated genocide of alleged "inferior races", stating that "whoever thinks thoroughly the notion of race, can not arrive at a different conclusion". For example, the number of reported cases in Cameroon was second only to that for malaria in 1911/12;9 in two districts in Togo in 1907/08, at least 40 per cent of the white population suffered from VD;10 and in East Africa in 1903/04 there were more VD patients than malaria patients among the ‘indigenous’ population.11 However, the discussion also shows the limitations of these statistics, particularly in relation to any group besides Europeans—groups defined by shifting colonial categories such as ‘indigenes’, ‘coloured’, ‘white’ or ‘mestee’. }, Washausen, p. 67-114; the West and East Africa firms, once the military command was able to harness this aggressiveness through training, the German Askari forces of the, Miller, p. 21, school system in German East Africa; Garfield, p. 83, "hundreds of thousands of African children were in school"; Schultz-Naumann, p. 181, school system and Chinese student enrollment in Kiautschou; Davidson, p. 100, New Zealand building on the German educational infrastructure, Miller, p. 68, German East Africa, Tanga, shelling of hospital by HMS, Lewthwaite, p. 149-151, in Samoa "German authorities implemented policies to draw [locals] into the stream of economic life," the colonial government enforced that native cultivable land could not be sold; Miller, p. 20, in German East Africa "new land laws sharply curtailed expropriation of tribal acreage " and "African cultivators were encouraged to grow cash crops, with technical aid from agronomists, guaranteed prices and government assistance in marketing the produce.". [16], The German Colonial empire got its start around 1884, and in those years they acquired several territories in Africa: German East Africa (including present-day Burundi, Rwanda, and the mainland part of Tanzania); German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia), German Cameroon (including parts of present-day Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Central African Republic, Chad and Nigeria); and Togoland (present-day Togo and parts of Ghana). For example, during the Boxer War, American officials condemned the conduct of German punitive expeditions, and their own forces refrained from razing villages. As of today, no country outside Europe uses German as an official language, although in Namibia, German is a recognized national language and there are numerous German placenames and architectural structures in the country. German Colonies After World War I, all of Germany's African colonies were taken away and made mandate territories by the League of Nations. German South West Africa, German Deutsch-Südwestafrika, a former German colony (1884–1919) that is now the nation of Namibia, in southwestern Africa. One is the 100th anniversary of the Herero rebellion that culminated in one of the first genocides in modern history. The German flag soon became a beacon for thousands … More than 950,000 Germans immigrated to the US in the 1850s and 1,453,000 in the 1880s, but these were personal migrants, unrelated to the German Empire (created 1871) and later colonial plans. [85] Furthermore, the wide acceptance among intellectuals of social Darwinism justified Germany's right to acquire colonial territories as a matter of the ‘survival of the fittest’, according to historian Michael Schubert. "[58] In deliberations the British "War Cabinet had confidence that natives everywhere would opt for British rule"; however, the cabinet acknowledged "the necessity to prove that its policy toward the German colonies was not motivated by aggrandizement" since the Empire was seen by America as a "land devouring octopus"[60] with a "voracious territorial appetite". However, the map shows Namibia. Klein-Venedig ("Little Venice"; also the etymology of the name "Venezuela") was the most significant part of the German colonization of the Americas, from 1528 to 1546, in which the Augsburg-based Welser banking family to the Habsburgs was given the colonial rights by Emperor Charles V, who was also King of Spain and owed debts to them for his Imperial election. Every African protectorate built rail lines to the interior,[37] every colony in Africa and the Pacific established the beginnings of a public school system,[38] and every colony built and staffed hospitals. [77], During the Herero genocide Eugen Fischer, a German scientist, came to the concentration camps to conduct medical experiments on race, using children of Herero people and multiracial children of Herero women and German men as test subjects. Namibia colonization and Revolution. So what difference did colonialism make? The most innovative contributions (which, incidentally, are also of great interest to social and cultural historians) include information on ideology and the passage to war; environment and the enemy; and diseases and injuries. The German Empire in Africa, circa 1913. [69] Despite this, the leadership in Berlin committed the nation to the financial support, maintenance, development and defence of these possessions. One of the author’s most provocative claims is that the colonial public health struggle was an essentially modern one; with the ‘focus on disciplining the population through surveillance and normalization … modern medicine sought to transform society and define who belonged in the nation-state and who did not according to the authority of scientific knowledge’.4 He thus works not only within a Foucauldian framework, but picks up on the idea of colonial space being a ‘laboratory of modernity’, a space where technological, racial, social and medical innovations could be tested out on a subservient population before being applied to the metropole.5 Walther pushes this thesis further, considering the colonies not as a testing ground, but as a place where doctors could apply knowledge and understanding.6 This is an important qualification to make and has further implications for how historians see the nature of knowledge transfer between colony and metropole. After the conquest of African decentralized and centralized states, the European powers set about establishing colonial state systems. [68] Only Togoland and German Samoa became profitable and self-sufficient; the balance sheet for the colonies as a whole revealed a fiscal net loss for the empire. Closer scrutiny of these tables, however, shows a patchiness of data that is only briefly reflected on in the text.17 The gaps in the data become particularly apparent when looking at Table 6, showing venereal diseases in German South West Africa from 1902/03 to 1911/12, where statistics are missing for half the years. [79] Those experiments included sterilization, injection of smallpox, typhus as well as tuberculosis. These trading houses conducted themselves as successful Privatkolonisatoren [independent colonizers] and concluded treaties and land purchases in Africa and the Pacific with chiefs and or other tribal leaders. Hermann Detzner and one Captain Nugent, R.A., had charge of a joint project to demarcate the British and German frontiers of Cameroon, which was published in 1913. Kuss argues ultimately that any lessons from colonial wars were ‘lost amid the impact of the First World War’.56 Although this may be true of the military establishment, this narrow focus is perhaps too limited. [58] To "allay President [Woodrow] Wilson's suspicions of British imperialism", the system of "mandates" was drawn up and agreed to by the British War Cabinet (with the French and Italians in tow),[59] a device by which conquered enemy territory would be held not as a possession but as "sacred trusts". 833–58. German Language and Architecture in the Former German Colonies of Sub-Saharan Africa *** Although Germany lost possession of its African colonies in 1918, traces of the German language and architecture remain there to this day. South Africa's J.C. Smuts, now in Britain's small War Cabinet, spoke of German schemes for world power, militarisation and exploitation of resources, indicating Germany threatened western civilisation itself. [50], Germany's overseas empire was dismantled following defeat in World War I. Its particular value lies in a broader approach that does not lose the specificity of each case study. Parts could conceivably be assigned as reading for students of colonialism, empire and military history. The Forum is located in the reconstruction of the ‘’Berlin Palace”, a symbol of the German colonial empire. Both the colonial authorities and settlers were of the opinion that native Africans were to be a lower class, their land seized and handed over to settlers and companies, while the remaining population was to be put in reservations; the Germans planned to make a colony inhabited predominately by whites: a "new African Germany". Some historians of German colonialism may already be familiar with these sources, but they offer further useful context, together with some new insights from, for example, French perspectives. Belgium gained Ruanda-Urundi in northwestern German East Africa, the United Kingdom obtained by far the greater landmass of this colony, thus gaining the "missing link" in the chain of British possessions stretching from South Africa to Egypt (Cape to Cairo), and Portugal received the Kionga Triangle, a sliver of German East Africa. In order to deepen this important part of the analysis, one might extend Walther’s reading of the slippages in colonial officials’ reports with further evidence—from missionary reports, for example. The book is not a systematic study in comparative history; several examples from the British context are instead woven into the discussion at choice moments in order to put the German case into perspective. It provides more detail on the actual treatment of those infected by venereal disease, and the increasingly coercive measures use to control them. The detailed discussion is backed, above all, by a plethora of statistics, which are included in a lengthy appendix. "Germany 2: Colonial Empire". German colonization was characterized by the use of repressive violence in the name of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. The study focuses on the ways in which the German colonial government exerted authority and power through biopolitics rather than, for example, the military or the police, with particular attention to both the extent and the limitations of this power.1 Focusing on the management of venereal disease in the German colonies, Walther shows the ways in which colonial authorities targeted the bodies of German military men and, ultimately, female prostitutes in their attempt to control public health. For the territories of Nazi Germany, see, German colonies and protectorates in 1914, Company land acquisitions and stewardship. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad SalamaRace, eds. [91] Other scholars, are skeptical and challenge the continuity thesis. In October 2011, after 3 years of talks, the first skulls were due to be returned to Namibia for burial. [42] For indigenous populations in some colonies native agricultural holdings were encouraged and supported. How an educator uses Prezi Video to approach adult learning theory Colonial German physicians and administrators tried to make a case for increasing the native population, in order to also increase their numbers of laborers. [86][87], On the other hand Germany's cultural-missionary project boasted that its colonial programs were humanitarian and educational endeavors. Readers learn, for example, that German doctors attributed the spread of syphilis above all to unmarried white working-class men, although they also blamed Arab and Muslim populations in the African colonies, as well as Japanese and Chinese people in the Pacific territories. . He reluctantly acquiesced to pleas for help to deal with revolts and armed hostilities by often powerful rulers whose lucrative slaving activities seemed at risk. A constant lack of supplies and land didn't help, and the next year Texas joined the United States. K. Ambos, ‘What does “Intent to Destroy” in Genocide Mean?’, International Review of the Red Cross, xci, no. [45] Anglo-German colonial issues in the decade before 1914 were minor and both empires, the British and German, took conciliatory attitudes. And in 2016–17 the German Historical Museum in Berlin staged a major exhibition on German colonialism that was attended by over 100,000 visitors. 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