A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
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colonialism. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher contended in 1961 that colonialism<br />
represents a cumulative process of European expansion without determining goals<br />
outside of strategic concerns. 8 Later leftist scholars like D.C.M. Platt and G.W.F.<br />
Hallgarten have refined the Marxist economic dimension to colonialism. 9 Writing in<br />
1966, Hannah Arendt believed that nationalistic mass political movements combined<br />
patriotism and national chauvinism to precipitate actions like colonialism. 10 Inverting the<br />
traditional relationship between the metropolitan centre and the colonial periphery, David<br />
Fieldhouse declared that colonialism was encouraged by events in the colonies that<br />
required the European powers to safeguard their strategic interests. 11 Alternately,<br />
Wolfgang Mommsen and Jean-Paul Sartre argue a systemic character to colonialism that<br />
rejects mono-causal explanation in favour of structural examination. 12 Finally, there is<br />
another possible interpretation stressing the random and inchoate that sees no central<br />
internal logic to colonialism. Moving away from the inquiry into rationales, more recent<br />
studies of colonialism examine narrower aspects such as race, culture, society, gender<br />
and power relationships.<br />
The <strong>German</strong> expansion of control in Africa between the years 1884 and 1914 is<br />
significant in several ways to the broader study of colonialism. The <strong>German</strong> conquest of<br />
what are now the countries of Togo, Cameroon, Namibia and Tanzania is a relatively<br />
under-explored area in colonial historiography when compared to histories of the<br />
colonies of Portugal, Britain and France. While other countries had successful colonies<br />
for the most part outside of Africa, <strong>German</strong>y’s territories in the Pacific and China were<br />
unusually pale shadows of its African colonies. The late and intense entry of <strong>German</strong>y<br />
into colonialism also holds particular interest for the scholar of colonialism. Moreover,<br />
3