Environing Empire

Environing Empire PDF Author: Martin Kalb
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800734573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
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.

Environing Empire

Environing Empire PDF Author: Martin Kalb
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800734573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
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.

Planting Seeds of Knowledge

Planting Seeds of Knowledge PDF Author: Heinrich Hartmann
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805390112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, agricultural practices and rural livelihoods were challenged by changes such as commercialization, intensified global trade, and rapid urbanization. Planting Seeds of Knowledge studies the relationship between these agricultural changes and knowledge-making through a transnational lens. Spanning exchanges between different parts of Europe, North and South America, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, the wide-reaching contributions to this volume reform current historiography to show how local experiences redefined global practice.

An Imperial Homeland

An Imperial Homeland PDF Author: Adam A. Blackler
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271093811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into “exotic domains” where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world beyond Europe as a part of their daily lives. An Imperial Homeland reorients our understanding of the relationship between imperial Germany and its empire in Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). Colonialism had an especially significant effect on shared interpretations of the Heimat (home/homeland) ideal, a historically elusive perception that conveyed among Germans a sense of place through national peculiarities and local landmarks. Focusing on colonial encounters that took place between 1842 and 1915, Adam A. Blackler reveals how Africans confronted foreign rule and altered German national identity. As Blackler shows, once the façade of imperial fantasy gave way to colonial reality, German metropolitans and white settlers increasingly sought to fortify their presence in Africa using juridical and physical acts of violence, culminating in the first genocide of the twentieth century. Grounded in extensive archival research, An Imperial Homeland enriches our understanding of German identity, allowing us to see how a distant colony with diverse ecologies, peoples, and social dynamics grew into an extension of German memory and tradition. It will be of interest to German Studies scholars, particularly those interested in colonial Africa.

Forged in Genocide

Forged in Genocide PDF Author: William Blakemore Lyon
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111374912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Forged in Genocide traces the early history of colonial capitalism in Namibia with a central focus on migrants who came to be key to the economy during and as a result of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904-1908). It posits that Namibia, far from being a colonial backwater of the early 20th century, became highly integrated into the labor flows and economies of West and Southern Africa, and even for a time was one of the most sought-after regions for African migrants because of relatively high wages and numerous opportunities resulting from the war’s demographic devastation paired with an economic frenzy following the discovery of diamonds. In highlighting the life stories of migrants in Namibia from regions as diverse as the Kru coast of Liberia, the Eastern Cape of South Africa, and the Ovambo polities of Northern Namibia, this work integrates micro-history into larger African continental trends. Building off of written sources from migrants themselves and utilising the Namibian Worker Database constructed for this project, this book explores the lives of workers in early colonial Namibia in a way that has hereto not been attempted.

Green Lands for White Men

Green Lands for White Men PDF Author: Meredith McKittrick
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226834689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state. In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority. Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite. A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.

The Universal Anthology

The Universal Anthology PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anthologies
Languages : en
Pages : 720

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Book Description


The Long Shadow of German Colonialism

The Long Shadow of German Colonialism PDF Author: Henning Melber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197797490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
From 1884 to 1914, the world's fourth-largest overseas colonial empire was that of the German Kaiserreich. Yet this fact is little known in Germany and the subject remains virtually absent from most school textbooks. While debates are now common in France and Britain over the impact of empire on former colonies and colonizing societies, German imperialism has only more recently become a topic of wider public interest. In 2015, the German government belatedly and half-heartedly conceded that the extermination policies carried out over 1904-8 in the settler colony of German South West Africa (now Namibia) qualify as genocide. But the recent invigoration of debate on Germany's colonial past has been hindered by continued amnesia, denialism and a populist right endorsing colonial revisionism. A recent campaign against postcolonial studies sought to denounce and ostracize any serious engagement with the crimes of the imperial age. Henning Melber presents an overview of German colonial rule and analyses how its legacy has affected and been debated in German society, politics and the media. He also discusses the quotidian experiences of Afro-Germans, the restitution of colonial loot, and how the history of colonialism affects important institutions such as the Humboldt Forum.

Thinking Russia's History Environmentally

Thinking Russia's History Environmentally PDF Author: Catherine Evtuhov
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805390287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Historians of Russia were relative latecomers to the field of environmental history. Yet, in the past decade, the exploration of Russian environmental history has burgeoned. Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally showcases collaboration amongst an international set of scholars who focus on the contribution that the study of Russian environments makes to the global environmental field. Through discerning analysis of natural resources, the environment as a factor in historical processes such as industrialization, and more recent human-animal interactions, this volume challenges stereotypes of Russian history and in so doing, highlights the unexpected importance of Russian environments across a time frame well beyond the ecological catastrophes of the Soviet period.

The War and Religious Ideals

The War and Religious Ideals PDF Author: Cyprian Leycester Drawbridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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The Book of Literature

The Book of Literature PDF Author: Richard Garnett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 718

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Book Description