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

The Devil’s Handwriting offers an extremely rich and careful historiography of how precolonial discourse informed colonial native policy in three German colonies. Specifically, the analysis documents the multiple, fragmented and fluid discourses of the “other” circulating in Europe and more particularly Germany prior to the age of colonialism, traces how one particular strand of pre-colonial discourse rather than another was invoked in native policy formulations, and explains how these pre-colonial discourses shaped specific colonial policies.

The book’s central argument is that pre-colonial discourses influenced native policy through the mediation of three mutually interactive mechanisms: patterns of resistance and collaboration by the colonized, symbolic competition among colonizers, and colonizers’ cross-identification with images of the colonial subjects. Consistent with the author’s epistemological orientations, rather than assigning causal priority to any one factor, Steinmetz argues that the specific patterns of mediation of these factors are historically contingent. For example, pre-colonial German discourse alternately represented the Witbooi people of Southwest Africa as noble savages or unreliable agents of mimicry. Intra-elite competition between the new middle-class and the old aristocracy in the colonial state field, along with the cross-boundary identifications that German colonial officials formed with specific Witbooi images, helped channel one strand of discourse or another into the formulation of native policy. And such discursive processes mattered – the theme of mimicry was later invoked to justify the exceptionally brutal treatment of the Witbooi people after their 1904 revolt. In contrast, the Samoan uprisings received a milder response from the colonizers, in part because German officials had long mobilized an ethnographic representation of the Samoans as endangered noble savages that deserved German protection. In Germany’s Qingdao, the pre-1905 rule of difference was very much informed by a Sinophobic discourse, although the “cultural difference” here was defined primarily in terms of the colonial subjects’ racial inferiority. In contrast to the Ovaherero in Southwest Africa, however, the Chinese were not seen as amenable to assimilation, given their attachment to their own culture; these ethnographic representations of the Chinese shaped a native policy that focused on exterior behavior rather than “subjective transformations” (Southwest Africa) or “cultural reproduction.” (Samoa)

By tracing how ethnographic representations shaped native policy through the mediation of symbolic competition, cross-boundary identification and patterns of resistance, Steinmetz convincingly demonstrates why pre-colonial ethnographies generated tangible consequences. However, it would be inaccurate to suggest that Steinmetz dismisses the roles of economic and political forces in his analysis. For example, the author details how the goal of land extraction shaped German policies toward the Ovaherero and describes concretely the political logic behind the creation of a Witbooi reservation after 1894. Similarly, his analysis reveals how the capacity of the Chinese state was a force for the Germans to continually reckon with in managing a colony on the Chinese mainland. The centrality of discourse in Steinmetz’s analysis, I suggest, should be read as complementing rather than rejecting the emphasis on economic and political structures in earlier theories of colonialism. While the book does not explicitly suggest a theoretical model for synthesizing the two approaches, it has paved important ground for such theoretical developments in future research.

At the same time, The Devil’s Handwriting proposes important ways in which sociologists can draw upon abstract insights of cultural studies for systematic, empirical inquiries. Steinmetz does so by incorporating Bourdieu’s and Lacan’s theories to re-conceptualize theories of Orientalism, explicating the mechanisms through which Orientalist discourses are mediated and channeled into specific social fields. In turn, the empirical analysis in The Devil’s Handwriting amounts to a critical reformulation of the self/other dichotomy. In particular, the cultural exchange efforts in Qingdao are shown to point beyond the very claim of European cultural supremacy that justified colonialism in the first place. Placed in a comparative framework, the uniqueness of...