A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

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