Building the Colonial Border Imaginary: German Colonialism, Race, and Space in East Africa, 1884-1895

Abstract

The dissertation explores the intellectual history of the interconnection of European and African ideas about race and space in 19th-century European imperialism. I examine German colonial geographies of East Africa, meaning not only cartography, but the new discipline of human geography, which studies the relationship between people and their environment. Germans and East Africans together produced a hybrid geography that combined precolonial conceptions of race and space and race from both Europe and Africa, and race explicitly entered German governance for the first time. By analyzing changes in how both Germans and East Africans imagined geographical relationships, I argue, we can better understand the ways in which they developed new conceptions of themselves and the world at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The project traces the history of German racial thinking to a specific, earlier colonial context than other scholars have argued. It also brings a spatial dimension to studies of the colonial state in Africa in order to understand the ways in which spaces have become imbued with racial and ethnic meaning over the last century and a half.