"The devil's handwriting": Precolonial discourse, ethnographic acuity, and cross-identification in German colonialism

Abstract

Seeks to overcome the split between discourse-based and economic or material approaches to the explanation of colonialism. He tracks the formation of "native policy" at the core of colonial rule in the German colonies of Samoa, Qingdao, and Southwest Africa. Economic forces and international military aims do not explain the variation among the very different native policies that emerge in these colonies. Their true determinants are a combination of three factors: precolonial racial/ ethnographic discourse; colonial officials' competition with one another through claims of superior ethnographic knowledge; and the degree and nature of colonizers' imaginative identification with the colonized (Sinophilia, for example). Economic interests never impinge directly on colonial practice; they are always mediated by the details of European ethnographic representations.