The Discourse of British and German Colonialism

Convergence and Competition

Felicity Rash, Geraldine Horan, Felicity Rash, Geraldine Horan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138333062
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429821028
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This volume compares and contrasts British and German colonialist discourses from a variety of angles: philosophical, political, social, economic, legal, and discourse-linguistic. British and German cooperation and competition are presented as complementary forces in the European colonial project from as early as the sixteenth century but especially after the foundation of the German Second Empire in 1871 – the era of the so-called 'Scramble for Africa'. The authors present the points of view not only of the colonizing nations, but also of former colonies, including Cameroon, Ghana, Morocco, Namibia, Tanzania, India, China, and the Pacific Islands. The title will prove invaluable for students and researchers working on British colonial history, German colonial history and post-colonial studies.

Part I

Historical and theoretical perspectives

1 Cutting up the world pie and what happened next

Felicity Rash and Geraldine Horan

In an article which appeared in the Kölnische Zeitung on April 22, 1884, three days before it was announced officially that Germany’s first colony in Africa¹ had been placed under the protection of the Imperial Government, Africa was compared with a large pie which the English had prepared for themselves at other people’s expense. ‘Let us hope,’ said the writer, ‘that our blue-jackets will put a few peppercorns into it on the Guinea coast, so that our friends on the Thames may not digest it too rapidly.’ It is the purpose of this pamphlet to show how Germany, after some years of careful preparation and in spite of much opposition, finally succeeded in peppering the British pie in Africa by establishing four important colonies upon the African continent.

(Lewin 1914: 3)²

1 Introduction

This volume explores the various connections and synergies between British and German colonialist discourses from the foundation in 1871 of the Second German Reich onwards, since this was the point in history when Germany and Britain first became serious rivals for world power. It offers contributions relevant to the study of archaeology, geography, literature, political science (the study of empire and geopolitics), sociology (the study of racism), and missionary history. The authors have understood discourse as social practice and human interaction in the broadest sense. We agree with Stuart Hall that ‘discourse’ is ‘a group of statements which provide a language for talking about… a particular type of knowledge about a topic’, in particular within the context of ideological discourses (Hall 1995: 201). We take ‘discourse’ to mean more than linguistic statements, however, and to refer to ‘the practice of producing meaning’ (ibid.) using all forms of communication, including actions. We therefore understand discourse analysis as transcending the study of individual (groups of) ‘statements’, and seek to determine the relationships between texts and developments over time within and between textual genres. Such analysis looks at linguistic manifestations of discourse as well as images and the modes of display of historical artefacts. It also takes account of the human actions, both individual and collective, which lie behind these phenomena.

There are a number of reasons to compare British and German colonialism during the period of High Imperialism³ and within a global context. Britain and Germany were major players in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ and other, smaller, areas of competition. From the late nineteenth century they were still looking for new opportunities for overseas expansion, while the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch were becoming less active; Belgian interest in the Congo was largely a personal enterprise. Although Germany’s time as a colonial power was brief, its quick and extensive entry into the ‘Scramble’ made the British take an increased interest in the progress not only of Germany but of other colonizing nations in relation to its own ambitions. While Britain saw itself as in danger of losing its position of supremacy within the world and was particularly concerned that German interests would encroach upon India via its ports in East Africa, official policies in relation to this threat changed over time. William Gladstone, who was Liberal prime minister from 1880 to 1885, believed it undesirable for Britain to seek more imperial responsibilities; Robert Salisbury, Conservative prime minister from 1886 to 1892, aimed to expand British overseas territories: his government allowed the greatest naval expansion ever in peacetime in Britain and oversaw the partition of Africa between Britain, Germany, France, Portugal, and Italy. While both Great Britain and Germany were influenced by and had contacts with other colonizing nations during the period of High Imperialism, the fact that they occupied neighbouring territories in South-West Africa (now Namibia) and South Africa and in East Africa (now Kenya and Tanzania) led to a relationship involving both rivalry and cooperation. It became as important to set boundaries, both territorial and political, as it was to interact across those boundaries on the best possible terms.

Ulrich Brand and Marcus Wissen (2017) explain the relationship between Britain and Germany as it developed during nineteenth-century liberal capitalism within the context of a wider European globalism. As a dominant power at sea and the most modern European industrial centre, Britain already had a major influence over global financial, communication, and trading structures, and the Berlin Colonial Conference confirmed common interests in global expansion and agreements as to the objectives and methods. The German Reich joined the globalizing nations, and German citizens increasingly participated in intercontinental migration, both transatlantic and to Africa. During the entire ‘long nineteenth century’ there was no getting away from the fact that British rule in India caused an imbalance of global power – this led to a certain amount of cooperation but also to tensions with Germany which grew stronger during the years leading up to the First World War; by 1914 Germany was the fourth largest European empire and ‘one of the major players in the process of globalization’ (Conrad 2011: 282).

The truly global nature of British and German colonialism and their discourses is illustrated in the chapters of this volume which offer perspectives on European initiatives – missionary, political, scientific, and cultural – China (Musolff), Japan (Rademacher), India (Dutta), Morocco (Lmustapha Mamaoui and Bychou), Cameroon (Gouaffo), German East Africa, now Tanzania and Kenya (Cloete), South Africa (Lindner), South-West Africa, now Namibia (Kaapama and Lindner), southern Africa, Anatolia, Australia, Brazil and Russia (Manz), and Poland and Ireland (Horan).

1.1 A tangle of terminology

The term ‘colonialism’ refers in its most general sense to the implanting of settlements by groups of people, a ‘colony’, on a territory which is distant from their home (Said 1993: 9; see Jonas Hübner in this volume).⁴ When applied to European migrations from the discovery of the New World onwards, a ‘colony’ is increasingly seen as a region which is invaded and then ruled by foreign ‘owners’ after which it becomes a ‘neu geschaffenes politisches Gebilde’ [new political construction] attached to a distant ‘motherland’ (Osterhammel and Jansen 2012: 16). Jonas Hübner’s chapter in this volume traces the gradual change in the conception of a ‘colony’ as a group of people to that of a territory acquired by an organized power, often by force: by ‘colonization’. Osterhammel and Jansen add to this definition the notion that colonizers, who are usually in a numerical minority, dominate colonized peoples and justify their actions by claiming their own cultural superiority over those peoples (ibid.: 20).⁵ The term ‘imperialism’ refers to the formation of an empire under the control of a national state, often as an extension to an existing empire. Imperialism is different from colonialism in that it belongs to a wider system of Weltpolitik [world politics] according to which colonies are not ends in themselves but ‘Pfänder in globalen Machspielen’ [pawns in global power politics] (ibid.: 27).

Eleni Kefala defines ‘colonialism’ as a ‘particular historical manifestation of coloniality, where ‘coloniality’ is seen as founded upon the racial classification of the world’s population and as forming part of the basis of the world-system of capitalism’ (Kefala 2011: 1). Coloniality is a ‘thorough and far-reaching global pattern of power’ that still persists today, creating vertical relations that lead to domination, conflict, and exploitation; colonialism is, more specifically, a form of political and administrative domination (ibid.).

Foucault’s concept of a dispositif, also referred to as an ‘apparatus’, suitably fits colonialism since it incorporates the view that colonialism’s strategic function is always bound to power relations. Combining speech, thought, actions, and behaviours, it is an ensemble of heterogeneous elements, both spoken and unspoken: discourses, institutional and administrative mechanisms, laws, architectural installations, scientific, moral, philosophical, and philanthropic theories. The dispositif is also the mesh which can connect these elements. Significantly, the type of connection made between the elements can function to justify, reinterpret, or mask specific practices (Foucault 1978: 119f.). Giorgio Agamben extends the definition of dispositif or ‘apparatus’ to include ‘literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings’ (Agamben 2009: 14). Ingo Warnke and Daniel Schmidt-Brücken accept Agamben’s 2009 definition of dispositif as pertinent for colonialism, since it combines multisemioticity, discursivity, materiality, power, and knowledge, in fact ‘eine heterogene Gesamtheit, die potentiell alles Erdenkliche’ [a heterogeneous totality, potentially everything conceivable] (Warnke and Schmidt-Brücken 2017: 944). They rightly assume that it is insufficient to examine colonialism from the point of view of particular themes, such as international trade, or events, such as the foundation of colonial associations, or time frames, such as 1884–1914 for Germany (ibid.: 945): the analysis of political language within its historical context is as important as that of non-linguistic features. Warnke and Schmidt-Brücken therefore stress the importance of a future ‘theoretische(r) Erweiterung ereignisorientierter Diskursgeschichte zu einer dispositivorientierten historischen Pragmatik’ [theoretical expansion of event-oriented discourse history toward a dispositif-oriented pragmatics] alongside the collection, safeguarding and digit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• PART I: Historical and theoretical perspectives
• PART II: The ‘Scramble’ for Africa
• PART III: The ‘scramble’ for the wider world
• Index