A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
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new territory. The Reichstag would also frequently be reluctant to vote new funds for<br />
colonial expansion. It was not the Reichstag alone that believed this, for even a settlers’<br />
newspaper questioned high military costs. 41 Yet these are exceptions to the rule rather<br />
than indications of an absence of expansionist sentiment in <strong>German</strong> colonialism. As will<br />
be demonstrated below, with only occasional aberrations, expanding control was the<br />
dominant discourse within the political aspects of <strong>German</strong> colonialism.<br />
Before investigating <strong>German</strong> colonial policy, it is necessary to give some<br />
structure to the following discussion by sketching out the dominant features of the<br />
government’s policy. Through the re-organizations of the colonial administration<br />
discussed above, imperial policy separated from AA strategy and became based upon<br />
individual cases instead of decisions united around a single policy. Given the plurality of<br />
interests, and the tangle of priorities, personalities and pressures at work within the<br />
colonial expansion, the government’s policy was often inchoate and uncoordinated. 42<br />
Another dominant theme was the government’s attempts to emulate British colonial<br />
policy, likely in awareness of the successes of British colonialism. 43 These tensions<br />
combined to render <strong>German</strong> colonial policy greatly divergent diachronically and often<br />
contradictory synchronically. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a deterritorialized<br />
bureaucracy reveals how this difference and contradiction is caused by the extension of<br />
social, cultural, economic and political desires. It is this presence of alterity, ambiguity<br />
and heterogeneity in policy that many older histories fail to comprehend.<br />
The reasons for the differences in policy and the transformations throughout the<br />
colonial period were not only based in <strong>German</strong>y and Europe, but also resulted from<br />
changing circumstances in the colonies. With the collapse of the charter companies and<br />
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