A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

colonialism. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher contended in 1961 that colonialism
represents a cumulative process of European expansion without determining goals
outside of strategic concerns. 8 Later leftist scholars like D.C.M. Platt and G.W.F.
Hallgarten have refined the Marxist economic dimension to colonialism. 9 Writing in
1966, Hannah Arendt believed that nationalistic mass political movements combined
patriotism and national chauvinism to precipitate actions like colonialism. 10 Inverting the
traditional relationship between the metropolitan centre and the colonial periphery, David
Fieldhouse declared that colonialism was encouraged by events in the colonies that
required the European powers to safeguard their strategic interests. 11 Alternately,
Wolfgang Mommsen and Jean-Paul Sartre argue a systemic character to colonialism that
rejects mono-causal explanation in favour of structural examination. 12 Finally, there is
another possible interpretation stressing the random and inchoate that sees no central
internal logic to colonialism. Moving away from the inquiry into rationales, more recent
studies of colonialism examine narrower aspects such as race, culture, society, gender
and power relationships.
The German expansion of control in Africa between the years 1884 and 1914 is
significant in several ways to the broader study of colonialism. The German conquest of
what are now the countries of Togo, Cameroon, Namibia and Tanzania is a relatively
under-explored area in colonial historiography when compared to histories of the
colonies of Portugal, Britain and France. While other countries had successful colonies
for the most part outside of Africa, Germany’s territories in the Pacific and China were
unusually pale shadows of its African colonies. The late and intense entry of Germany
into colonialism also holds particular interest for the scholar of colonialism. Moreover,
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