Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure, and the Making of German Southwest Africa

FAIN: FT-264958-19

Martin Kalb
Bridgewater College (Bridgewater, VA 22812-1599)

Research and writing leading to publication of an environmental history of German Southwest Africa (1884-1915).

My book project is an environmental history of empires, in this case, of German Southwest Africa (1884-1915). I contend that taking environmental factors into account further complicates existing understandings of German colonial fantasies. Germany dreamed of a model colony, envisioned as a profitable agricultural settler society. Realities on the ground, however, threatened such visions of empire, and repeatedly hindered German efforts in the region. The most important challenges were tied to issues of land accessibility and water scarcity. Massive investments into harbor structures, irrigation, and other imperial infrastructures soon shaped broader policies, especially following the 1904 Herero and Nama Uprising. Unintended consequences and overall failures, combined with the employment of everyday violence of the colonial state to achieve its fantasies, eventually transformed nature and people but also shaped the imperial imaginations of German colonialists. [Edited by staff]

Associated Products

The dowsing debate: Water, science and colonialism in German Southwest Africa (Article)
Title: The dowsing debate: Water, science and colonialism in German Southwest Africa
Author: Martin Kalb
Abstract: The dowsing debate in Imperial Germany and its role in the solution to the ‘water question’ in German Southwest Africa is a window on the three principal themes of this article: environmental challenges, imperial fantasies and the fluidity of epistemologies. First, the water question, as contemporaries termed it, was a significant concern in German Southwest Africa, and discussions of divination illustrate its centrality in the development of Germany’s first and only settler colony. Secondly, the main protagonist, district administrator and dowser Rafael Perfecto von Uslar, and his role in the search for water sources in German Southwest Africa capture the limits of German colonial control. Von Uslar stepped into a vacuum created by German ethnocentrism and its dismissive colonial gaze. Finally, the resurgence of divination, a folk tradition many believed existed only outside the sciences, blurred the line between objective scientific knowledge and superstition within the German Empire—all the while silencing local African expertise.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://academic.oup.com/gh/article-abstract/38/4/568/6065946?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Primary URL Description: Website of the journal 'German History' and specifics about my article (including the abstract, publication volume, and such);
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: German History
Publisher: German History (journal), via Oxford University Press

Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure, and the Making of German Southwest Africa (Book)
Title: Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure, and the Making of German Southwest Africa
Author: Martin Kalb
Abstract: Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile for most. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort of turning outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In his innovative environmental history, Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaisereich’s everyday violence. [from website linked below]
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KalbEnvironing
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781800732902

---