The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (review)

Recent years have seen a minor explosion of new work about German colonialism, much of it informed by postcolonial perspectives. In this study, Steinmetz places the histories of three German colonies in “precolonial” contexts. He attempts to explain the radical differences among the “native policies” adopted by German authorities in Southwest Africa (Namibia), Samoa, and Qingdao (the capital of the German navy’s small protectorate in China) as a consequence of ethnographies of the indigenous peoples of those colonies constructed before the full assertion of German colonial authority. It is a remarkable effort, based on a prodigious range of primary research. It should attract widespread engagement from historians of empire and from cultural and social theorists—both for many impressive contributions and for a few intriguing but problematical interpretations. The book has much to offer anyone who is interested in any aspect of colonialism—more than can be discussed in this brief review. One of its questionable aspects does, however, require comment.

As a historical sociologist, Steinmetz aims at re-asserting the significance of social limits to autonomous action and to discursive construction of reality. He advances a theoretical approach that combines a Lacanian analysis of symbolic and imaginary identification with Bourdieu’s concept of a social field in an attempt to define the “colonial state.”¹ He describes native policy mainly as a result of projections by German colonial authorities of their own class origins onto the array of existing ethnographical representations of the particular peoples whom they claimed to rule. The approach is serviceable, but the attempt leads Steinmetz to exaggerate the political autonomy of the three colonial states that he discusses and to underestimate the breadth of the array of factors that impinged on the aims and framed the imaginations of their administrators.

This problem arises in part because Steinmetz’s approach does not seem to recognize “politics” as a field. He thus misses a vital feature of modern colonialism clearly displayed by the German colonies: The field of colonial politics was not co-extensive with the colonial state but incorporated the public politics of the imperial metropole. In two of Steinmetz’s cases, metropolitan interventions shaped by domestic political considerations were decisive. The strongest influence on German policy in Southwest Africa was the way that the colony was portrayed in German domestic politics as a prime location for white settlement. This portrayal had much more to do with ideology in Germany than with the environmental realities of Namibia. The changes in policy and leadership that occurred during the Herero War of 1904/5 were largely informed by the ways in which the German public and the Reichstag viewed the attempt to exterminate the Herero. The shift that Steinmetz describes in Qingdao toward a native policy respectful of Chinese culture depended heavily on Alfred von Tirpitz’s decision to use Qingdao as a showplace for the efficiency, modernity, and social and cultural broadmindedness of the German Navy. His imagined target was a public opinion that cut radically across German class lines.

Steinmetz’s interpretation works best for Samoa: Even there, however, the success of Governor Wilhelm Solf’s policy of protecting “traditional” Samoan culture (and of projecting himself as a person able to govern traditionally because of cultural understanding gained as an educated bourgeois) depended on Samoa’s relative insignificance in German public opinion after 1900 and Solf’s skill at presenting his image positively in Germany.

Steinmetz’s general approach could be usefully applied to the whole field of colonial politics, even though Steinmetz does not do so. It could certainly help to establish the relationships between imperialist ideologies and colonial interests. Both economic and ethnographic imaginaries were at work in shaping colonialism, and in Germany they were vastly more significant than the measurable economic impact of the colonies. Historians investigating these subjects in the future will find much...