A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

Lastly, Deleuze and Guattari’s paratactic questioning of absolute and linear causal
relationships could perhaps threaten the place of meaning in history. But the search for
the diverse motivations for German colonialism and African responses to expansionism
illustrates how an open approach to cause-effect interactions reveals both the contiguities
between specific historical moments and the broader picture of social, cultural, economic
and political relations. Deterritorialization’s mixture of telling detail and over-arching
structure depicts colonialism in a manner that bestows significant historical meaning.
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Deterritorialization reveals how the traditional approach to colonial history
exemplified within some historiography advances simplistic and over-stated arguments.
Similarly, the Marxist interpretations cannot capture colonial economics since they do not
seriously investigate how capitalism affected Africa. Similarly, the narrow works that try
to make colonial expansion explicable through isolated causalities cannot render a history
of colonial expansion on both the micro- and macro-level. It has been argued here that
the social cannot be separated from the cultural, commercial and political elements that
influenced the expansion. A more comprehensive interpretation needs to move away
from the metropolitan facets of German colonialism towards research into local events,
which can render a more holistic vision of colonialism. Examples of a more holistic
method are found in the work of Heyden and Zeller, Bechhaus-Gerst and Klein-Arendt,
Zimmerer, Kundrus, and Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox and Zantop. These interpretations
attempt to weave together the diverse strands of German colonial history into a
comprehensive vision. But even these fail in not excavating the broader trends beneath
colonial encounters. By not looking to the motivations for colonialism as the older
historiography has, they assume the presence of a definitive explanation for German