Abstract
This chapter introduces the British factor in German colonial violence in German South West Africa as a new way of understanding colonial violence and the historical context of the Herero and Nama genocide. It shows how histories of colonial violence tends to remain within nationally defined compartmentalisations of the colonial world—a view which has been reinforced by pervasive notions of continuity from German South West Africa to the Holocaust. In addition to placing the book within broader relevant historiographies, this chapter lays the foundations for the remaining chapters and stresses the importance of trans-imperial contexts in understanding colonial violence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Hansard Millbank, cc155–164, ‘The Treaty of Peace’, Earl Curzon of Kedleston, House of Lords, 3 July 1919.
- 2.
For humanitarian intervention see Klose, Fabian (ed.), The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Practices from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge, 2016).
- 3.
Herero—or OvaHerero—refers to a broader ethnic and cultural Bantu-speaking group splintered into different political and tribal affiliations. At the turn of the twentieth century, they primarily resided around Windhoek and were mainly pastoralists. The Nama mainly resides in the southern parts of Namibia and in the Northern Cape and speak Khoekhoe. Like the Herero, they were also divided into different tribal groups and affiliations according to politics, location and culture among other factors.
- 4.
Administrators Office, Windhuk, Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany (London, 1918), p. 11.
- 5.
Administrators Office, Report on the Natives, p. 5.
- 6.
See Chap. 6.
- 7.
K. A. Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 85 (2018), p. 231.
- 8.
S. Potter and J. Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 16, 1 (2015).
- 9.
See for instance N. Ferguson, Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2004), pp. 295–96.
- 10.
A. Lester and F. Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance – Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 3–5. See also M. Mann, ‘“Torchbearer Upon the Path of Progress”: Britain’s Ideology of Moral and Material Progress in India. An Introductory Essay’ in H. Fischer-Tiné and M. Mann (eds.), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London, 2004), pp. 2–4.
- 11.
A. Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery and Humanitarianism’ in Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 216–17. See also Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 2. For a detailed account of the APS and its influence upon British colonial policy as a whole, see J. Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836–1909 (London, 2011).
- 12.
Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery and Humanitarianism’, p. 198. See also S. Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century – The Evolution of a Global Problem (Walnut Creek CA, 2003) and E. Cleall, ‘“In Defiance of the Highest Principle of Justice, Principles of Righteousness”: The Indenturing of the Bechuana Rebels and the Ideals of Empire, 1897–1900’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 40, 4 (2012), p. 605.
- 13.
Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian Intervention (Ithaca NY, 2011), pp. 11–12.
- 14.
M. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 4–5. For the Congo crisis in connection to GSWA, see Chap. 5.
- 15.
A. Conklin, ‘Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914’, American Historical Review, vol. 103 (1998), pp. 437–8. See also A. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, 1997) for a French case in which a consensus on the civilising mission legitimised imperialism.
- 16.
C. Kpao Saré, ‘Abuses of German Colonial History: The Character of Carl Peters as Weapon for völkisch and National Socialist Discourses: Anglophobia, Anti-Semitism and Aryanism’ in M. Perraudin and J. Zimmerer (eds.) German Colonialism and National Identity (New York, 2010).
- 17.
A. Perras, Carl Peters and German Imperialism, 1856–1918: A Political Biography (Oxford, 2004), p. 118.
- 18.
For colonial violence in German East Africa, see especially S. Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence (Cambridge MA, 2017), Chapter 3, here p. 72.
- 19.
See among others B. Madley, ‘From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe’, European History Quarterly, vol. 35, 3 (2005); J. Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beitrage zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster, 2011) and J. Sarkin, Germany’s Genocide of the Herero. Kaiser Wilhelm II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers (Cape Town, 2010).
- 20.
H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951) and A. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, [org. 1955] Translated by Joan Pinkham, (London, 1972). See also D. Stone, ‘Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt and Genocide Studies’, New Formations, vol. 71, 1 (2011).
- 21.
M. Bomholt Nielsen, ‘Selective Memory: British Perceptions of the Herero-Nama Genocide, 1904–1908 and 1918’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 43, 2 (2017).
- 22.
U. Lindner, ‘German Colonialism and the British neighbour in Africa before 1914’ in V. Langbehn and M. Salama (eds.), German Colonialism-Race, the Holocaust and Postwar Germany (New York, 2011), p. 255. See also B. Kundrus, ‘From the Herero to the Holocaust? Some Remarks on the Current Debate’, Africa Spectrum, vol. 40, 2 (2005).
- 23.
R. Kössler, ‘Genocide in Namibia, the Holocaust and the Issue of Colonialism’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 38, 2 (2012), p. 237. See also Kuss, German Colonial Wars pp. 2–4 and M. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past’, Central European History, vol. 41, 3 (2008).
- 24.
A. Eckl, ‘The Herero Genocide of 1904: Source-critical and Methodological Considerations’, Journal of Namibian Studies, vol. 3 (2014), pp. 38–41.
- 25.
See Chap. 7.
- 26.
L.G. Gann and P. Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, 1884–1914 (Stanford, 1977) p. ix-x. See also The Rulers of British Africa, 1884–1914 and The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884–1914 (both Stanford, 1979).
- 27.
See here R. Drayton, The Masks of Empire: The World History underneath Modern Empires and Nations, c. 1500 to the Present (London 2017).
- 28.
M. Legassick, Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land Dispossession and Resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800–1990 (Johannesburg, 2016), p. 160.
- 29.
See J. Darwin, The Empire Project – The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009).
- 30.
Several major publications have stressed the global and transnational nature and context of colonial empires. See for instance, Darwin, Empire Project and C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (New York, 2004). Also V. Barth and R. Cvetkovski, ‘Encounters of Empire: Methodological Approaches’ in V. Barth and R. Cvetkovski (eds.), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930 (London, 2015), pp. 21–3. Specifically for the notion of trans-imperialism see, for instance, J. Cromwell, ‘More than Slaves and Sugar: Recent Historiography of the Trans-imperial Caribbean and its Sinew Populations’ History Compass, vol. 12, 10 (2014), p. 778.
- 31.
See among others, S. Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2010); U. Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen: Deutschland und Grossbritanien als Imperiallmächte in Afrika 1880–1914 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2011); J. Leonhard and U. von Hirschhausen, Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century (Göttingen, 2011) and B. Naranch and G. Eley (eds.), German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham NC, 2014).
- 32.
See the otherwise excellent Prosser Gifford & Wm. Roger Louis Britain and Germany in Africa. Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven CT, 1967).
- 33.
See notably J. Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’ The English Historical Review, 112 (1997) and C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989).
- 34.
Potter and Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories’.
- 35.
Bomholt Nielsen, ‘Selective memory’, pp. 317–9. See also P. Grosse, ‘What Does National Socialism have to do with Colonialism? A Conceptual Framework’, in E. Ames, M. Klotz and L. Wildenthal (eds.), Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln NE, 2005), p. 118. Of course, there also exist transnational and even global histories of the Holocaust. See for instance J. Burzlaff, ‘Towards a transnational history of the Holocaust: Social relations in Eastern Europe’, Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, vol. 212, 2 (2020).
- 36.
Potter and Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories’. Also F. Cooper and A. Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a research agenda’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.) Tensions of Empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, (Berkeley, 1997).
- 37.
See S. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies. Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham NC, 1997).
- 38.
T. Dedering, ‘War and mobility in the Borderlands of South Western Africa in the Early Twentieth Century’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 39, 2 (2006), p. 276. More generally on colonial borderlands as sites of weakness, see for instance, J. Adelman and S. Aron, ‘From Borderlands to Borders. Empires, Nation-States and the Peoples in Between in North American History’, The American Historical Review, vol. 104, 3 (1999).
- 39.
H. Drechsler, Let us Die Fighting. The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism, 1884–1915 (London, 1980), p. 204. Also M. Fröhlich, Von Konfrontation zur Koexistenz. Die deutsch-englischen Kolonialbeziehungen in Africa zwischen 1884 und 1914 (Bochum, 1990), p. 266.
- 40.
U. Lindner, ‘Colonialism as a European Project in Africa before 1914? British and German concepts of Colonial Rule in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Comparativ, vol. 19, 1 (2009), p. 106.
- 41.
See Dedering, ‘War and mobility in the Borderlands’.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bomholt Nielsen, M. (2022). Introduction. In: Britain, Germany and Colonial Violence in South-West Africa, 1884-1919. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94561-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94561-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-94560-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-94561-9
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)