/
Introduction
Doorsteps in ParadiseWith its roughly 250 square kilometers of fertile grass, and an amazing

abundance of wildlife within its forested walls, the caldera of Ngorongoro
counts among Tanzania’s world-renowned wilderness areas. Like the adjacent Serengeti National Park or the Selous Game Reserve, Ngorongoro features on UNESCO’s World Heritage list. Hundreds of thousands of tourists
annually visit the crater for the promise of a spectacular game drive in aunique geological environment. So did I, one sunny morning in November 2004. My game drive was, however, also a journey into Ngorongoro’s
German history.
By midday, Joseph, my guide and driver, had taken me to the gate of
the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). From there, the route follows
a carefully orchestrated conservationist script. After forty-five minutes ofascent along a dusty and winding track road, the visitor is finally released
into the openness of the rim. Here, at Heroes Point, visitors are provided
with a commanding view over the silent vastness of the crater. Tiny dots
of wildlife are scattered over the verdant grassland some 600 meters below.
A monument at Heroes Point, unveiled in 1981, commemorates scientists,game wardens, and rangers who lost their lives in the conservation of Tanzania’s wildlife treasure. A little further along the crater rim, the motorized
traveler encounters the next memorial to conservation’s heroes and thefirst reminder of German entanglement with the fate of Ngorongoro. An
epitaph indicates the site of the graves of Bernhard and Michael Grzimek,
the Frankfurt Zoo Director and his son. Their films and publications
catapulted Serengeti and Ngorongoro into the limelight of international
conservation in the late 1950s. The memorial reminds visitors that Michael
Grzimek “gave all he possessed for the wild animals of Africa, including his
life.” Aged only 24, he died in a plane crash near Ngorongoro in January
1959 while conducting an aerial survey of wildlife numbers and migration
patterns. His father, Bernhard Grzimek, is usually credited for coining
the epithet of Ngorongoro as a “wonder of the world,” a standard accolade reciprocated in many East Africa travel guides.1 More importantly,

2 The Nature of German Imperialism

Grzimek’s book and Oscar-winning documentary film Serengeti Shall Not
Die (1959) made him an international conservationist celebrity with enormous influence on Tanzanian wildlife politics after independence. He did
not only mastermind many of the decisions taken in the management of
the Serengeti National Park and the NCA since the early 1960s, but also
promoted the nexus between mass wildlife tourism, development, andconservation in national parks.2 The revenue garnered from the films andconservationist campaigns in West Germany’s mass media enabled his
Frankfurt Zoological Society to develop into “the single most importantfunding body”3 of conservation in the Serengeti and a key stakeholder inprotected area management in Tanzania.4
Being thus reminded to whom visitors owed the opportunity to experience wildlife in Northwestern Tanzania, Joseph and I descended into thecrater to watch wildlife. However, our first encounter on the crater floor waswith a Maasai herder and his cattle. Upon my inquiry about the Maasai’spresence and rights in the crater, Joseph told me about the multiple landuse philosophy behind the NCA. The Maasai, I learned, “are part of theecosystem.” Occasional conflicts between the requirements of cattle andwildlife notwithstanding, Joseph emphasized the benefits the Maasai had
derived from tourism and the management principles of the NCA since
its inception in 1959. Talking about the crater’s fauna was an altogether
easier task. Having trained at the renowned Mweka College of African
Wildlife Management before he entered the business of wildlife tourism
as a tour guide, Joseph knew everything about the species’ different usesof the available forage and how food plants contributed to the functioningof the savanna ecosystem. After I had gazed in amazement at a cheetah
prowling in front of a dozen safari cars and got tired of the ubiquitouswildebeest, I asked Joseph to take me to the remnants of the German Farmin Ngorongoro. His surprise at my request confirmed anthropologist NoelSalazar’s observation that driver-guides usually skip this bit of the crater inorder not to spoil tourist imaginaries of pristine nature.5 Usually, visitors
are spared the reminder of what was a most contested place in colonial
debates about wildlife conservation prior to World War I.
The ruins hardly constitute a visual highlight. All that is left is some
rubble of the foundation walls and the still recognizable doorsteps of the
farmhouse. Yet, insignificant as these stones may seem, they are vestigesof the largely forgotten German colonial empire in Eastern Africa, a stumbling block of human history in “Africa’s Garden Eden.” The doorsteps ofthe past in the wildlife paradise of the present remind everyone that, had
the German colonial government had its way back in 1914, the history of
Ngorongoro might have taken an entirely different course.

Introduction 3

Illustration 0.1. Remnants of the Siedentopf farm in Ngorongoro.
Picture taken by B Gissibl (2004).

The Forgotten Past of Ngorongoro
Just over a century ago, the ruins near Munge Stream in the northwestof the crater belonged to what was an impressive farm by contemporary
colonial standards. It consisted of a stone-built farmhouse, shed, and stable,
and was owned by a certain Adolf Siedentopf, a German from the Prussian Province of Hannover. In April 1913, Siedentopf employed four whites,
fifty-eight Maasai, and several dozen Iraqw to tend to a stock of around
1,000 cattle, 2,500 sheep, 40 donkeys, and 12 horses.6 He shared the craterwith abundant wildlife—contemporary estimates reckoned as much as
20,000 wildebeest, 1,500 zebras, several thousand of Kongonis and othersmaller antelopes, plus the occasional rhinoceros7—and, until 1907, withseveral hundred Maasai pastoralists.
Before coming to Ngorongoro, Siedentopf had experimented with cotton
cultivation and the breeding of livestock, donkeys, and ostriches in Sukuma
near Lake Victoria. He probably discovered Ngorongoro while conducting
trade in livestock and elephant tusks with Maasai intermedi­aries. In late1904, Siedentopf approached the colonial government in Dar es Salaam to
grant him pastureland in the crater for grand-scale cattle ranching. Thanks

4 The Nature of German Imperialism

to its altitude, Ngorongoro featured a mild climate, was free from tsetse,
and remote enough from the next governmental outpost to provide leeway
for an enterprising settler. A number of Afrikaner families who had comefrom South Africa after the Anglo-Boer War also vied for agricultural landin the crater, but German district officials preferred to support a fellow
national. Under the assumption that Siedentopf was backed by substantial
capital from Germany, the government condoned his mercurial characterand his notorious defiance of authority. In December 1904, he was allotted
6,000 hectares of pasture in Ngorongoro with the obligation to stock theland with 2,000 heads of cattle. Depending on the development of his enterprise, Siedentopf was promised a further 3,000 hectares for every 1,000
heads of cattle, up to a total of 30,000 hectares. 8 In early 1906, Adolf wasjoined by his brother Friedrich Wilhelm who established a separate farmat the southeastern end of the crater near Lerai Forest.
The Siedentopfs were expected to afforest parts of the crater floor,
improve its pasture, and convert sizeable chunks of it into arable land.9
Within a few years, Adolf erected a stone farmhouse, which he baptized“Soltau,” after the small town in the Lüneburg Heath north of Hannover.
The brothers introduced Australian eucalyptus and alfalfa, dug irrigation canals, created tracks for ox wagons, erected kraals for livestock, andimported breeding cattle from Kenya and South Africa. But their enterprise would never have prospered without hunting. Abundant elephants
and wildebeest enabled them to enter into a flourishing regional trade inivory and wildebeest tails, the latter being a cherished exchange commodity in Sukuma where they were used as bracelets, anklets, ornaments, andfly whisks for rainmakers and prophets. Ngorongoro’s wealth of wildlife
helped subsidize their fledgling farms, as a considerable part of the settlers’
livestock was acquired in exchange for the products of their hunting.10
With the next German administrative post six days away, the Siedentopf
brothers occupied a lone European outpost in the heart of Maasailand. The
seminomadic, pastoralist Maasai were not the only ethnic group living in
the highlands and drylands comprising the Great Rift Valley in the west,
most of southern Kenya and today’s Maasai steppe in central and eastern Tanzania. Nor were they the ones with the most ancient claims to it.
Arriving at some point in the 1700s, they displaced other pastoralists from
Ngorongoro and established a regional hegemony based upon transhumant
pastoralism, specialized exchange economies, and the ruthless claim to all
cattle. Ngorongoro developed into a site of particular cultural and spiritualsignificance for the Maasai. The Lerai forest on the crater floor, for example,
was not only used for rainmaking and fertility ceremonies, but also held
as a sacred grove, containing the graves of a number of important andestimated Maasai elders.11

Introduction 5

Many scholars have presumed that German conquest combined withemutai, had “removed the Masai and their cattle from the crater in the
1890s.”12 Emutai is the Maasai term for the “complete destruction” thatstruck the pastoralist communities of the crater highlands during thisdecade, 13 denoting the virtual annihilation of the economic basis of
Maasai pastoralism through the combined onslaught of a panzootic of
the previously unknown rinderpest, bovine pleuropneumonia, smallpox,
and the warfare of colonial conquest. Famine followed, and contemporary estimates reckoned the death toll at about 90 percent of cattle andtwo thirds of the Maasai population.14 However, various reports by district commissioners and Schutztruppe15 officials attest not only to theircontinuing presence in Ngorongoro but reveal that the crater functioned
as an important basis for the recovery and reorganization of the various
Maasai sections during the 1890s and the early 1900s. It was the adventof the Siedentopfs that triggered their expulsion and expropriation fromwhat they claimed as ancestral land in the crater. Siedentopf himself had
represented Ngorongoro as “uninhabited” in order to make authorities
regard the land as ownerless. Initially, no colonial official bothered toverify this claim. When Johannes Abel, the responsible district officerof Moshi, came to Ngorongoro in early 1905 to actually see and chart
the land granted to Siedentopf a few months earlier, he found the crater
inhabited by roughly 800 Maasai with approximately 500 cattle and 3,000
heads of small stock.16 But this made no difference. “Nomads as they are,”he argued, “the Maasai would never be granted land as property by any
official land commission.” Although colonial officials acknowledged that
Ngorongoro had been “a preferred pastureland of the Maasai since time
immemorial,” the Ngorongoro Maasai were forcibly removed to the newly
established Maasai reserve south of Kilimanjaro.17 A land commission set
up in April 1907 confirmed Siedentopf’s leasehold, declared the crater ascrown land, and provided an ex-post legal cover for the established factof displacement, decreeing that “the Maasai had no more title to the landsince they have been banned from Ngorongoro following their robberies
and thefts.”18 By the end of 1907, only a handful of Maasai families wereallowed to remain in the crater to work as herders and stable hands on
Siedentopf’s fledgling farm.19
Around 1907, the future of Ngorongoro appeared to lie in its wholesale transformation into an agriculturally productive landscape. However,Siedentopf’s livestock economy neither met governmental expectations nor
his own initial promise. Accusations of violence, maltreatment of workers
and unpaid wages, unfulfilled leasehold obligations, wildlife damage, cattle
import, and guns in the hands of African farmworkers all contributed toincreasing malevolence between Siedentopf and the government. When it6 The Nature of German Imperialism

emerged that the presence of thousands of wildebeest constituted a constant threat of transmitting diseases to domesticated animals, colonial
authorities began to consider options beyond livestock-based agriculture
in Ngorongoro. A small yet vociferous wildlife conservation lobby in Germany called for the establishment of a permanent Naturschutzpark—the
German term for a protected area inspired by the U.S. precedent of Yellowstone—in the colony. From about 1911 onward, colonial officials seriously
considered preservation an attractive alternative use of the crater. “Shall
this unique stock of game be exterminated just to make room for 3 or 4
farms with a few thousand cattle?”, the responsible subdistrict commissioner asked the government in Dar es Salaam in April 1912. “There areplenty of areas suitable for animal husbandry, but in the whole of Africa,
there will be no other patch in which so much game is concentrated on solittle space.”20
Encouraged by similar requests from the colonial office in Berlin, thegovernment probed options to turn the caldera into a Naturschutzpark.
However, this would have meant to remove a settler with a leasehold
contract that was irredeemable by the government until 1932. Authorities were reluctant to exert too much pressure, for the Siedentopfs wereconnected to influential prosettlement circles in Berlin. Any policy thatsmacked of handicapping Germany’s industrious frontiersmen for the sakeof wildebeest ran the risk of public scandalization. Siedentopf rejected any
compensation with farmland outside Ngorongoro, and the East African
government declared itself unable to procure an estimated sum of up to200,000 marks to buy Siedentopf out of his contract. So did the colonial
office in Berlin. Also, the German Colonial Society (DKG), the country’s
foremost organization to support colonialism overseas, and the Verein
Naturschutzpark, a preservationist organization founded in 1909 to promote the establishment of large protected areas, declined to spend considerable funds for what they regarded as, after all, only a piece of “steppe
country” far away in Africa.21
Because the Naturschutzpark appeared impossible to realize, governor
Heinrich Schnee announced to open the crater to private enterprise andagricultural development again. In early 1914, applicants for farmland werequeuing. A safari business opened by Friedrich Wilhelm Siedentopf had
already started to attract the first globetrotting German hunters to thecrater, and by summer 1914, the distribution of farmland had proceeded
apace. The final decision about the future utilization of the crater was still
pending, but had it not been for the outbreak of World War I, Ngorongoro
would have been completely divided up into agricultural estates. The war
halted the sale of land, and the advance of British troops in early 1916
finally forced the brothers to leave the crater.

Introduction 7

Germany and the Roots of Tanzania’s Environmental
Conservation Complex
My personal safari into the conservation history of Ngorongoro shows that
there is often little “natural” about places that the hegemonic representations of wildlife tourism and conservation management entrench as timeless nature and primordial wilderness. Tourist imaginaries of the present
usually elide the complex human history of iconic natural landscapes. The
rubble of the German farm in Ngorongoro also reminds everyone thattoday’s natural zoo was perceived completely different by Europeans a century ago. Until late in the first decade of the twentieth century, Europeans
saw and described Ngorongoro predominantly in terms of its potential
for agricultural development. It was a paradise of the farmer, while theimagery and rhetoric of a wildlife paradise only rose to prominence after
the removal of the Maasai.22
Above all, the traces left by Siedentopf first, and the Grzimeks later,
testify to the deep connections that existed between German society andthe nature and wildlife of Ngorongoro over the twentieth century. Likethe extensive sisal plantations at the bottom of the Pare Mountains, theremnant doorsteps in the wildlife paradise of Ngorongoro are a visible
and lasting mark that German colonial rule has left on Tanzania’s environment. Indeed, the ruins of Ngorongoro are a very fitting reminder, forthey are easily overlooked, just as the significance of the German colonial
period in the history of wildlife conservation in East Africa has so far been
overlooked. But it was in the years of German colonial rule between 1885
and World War I that the legal pretext for the exclusion and alienationof the Maasai from vast tracts of their homelands was invented. Today’s
conflicts surrounding conservation and land use in the area started withthe colonial denial of entitlements and the removal of the Maasai in 1907.
Scribbled English notes on the respective files in the national archives of
Dar es Salaam reveal that subsequent British authorities were aware of
their content and consulted them in later quarrels over human and animal
rights in Ngorongoro and Serengeti. Ngorongoro may have been poised
to be developed rather than preserved in 1914, but the debates surrounding the establishment of a Naturschutzpark reflect the broader conflicts
over hunting, access to wildlife, and land use that became a characteristicfeature of colonial politics after the turn of the century. At times, thesewere so fierce that contemporaries employed the dramatic catchphrase of“colony or zoological garden” to capture the possible future developmentsof German East Africa.
The case of Ngorongoro shows that “modern” conservationist concerns
as well as outside interventions on behalf of the preservation of African8 The Nature of German Imperialism

wildlife predate the British period. It also illustrates how much animals
mattered to the course and development of colonial Tanzania. The three
decades of German colonial rule in Tanzania witnessed the formation ofa regime of wildlife conservation that emerged from the precolonial andcolonial politics of hunting in East Africa. This was a conflict-ridden and by
no means straightforward process. Yet, by the end of the German colonial
period, wildlife, or at least game,23 was routinely framed as an evolutionary
heritage that was acknowledged, although not yet systematically used asa source of tourist revenue. Unlike in continental Europe, the establishment of a conservationist mode of appropriating the wildlife’s value led to aregard for nature and large animals as natural capital.24 Wild animals were
not removed as an obstacle, but came to be acknowledged as the basis ofan East African way into modernity that accommodated rather than exterminated wildlife.25 The origins of Tanzania’s “environmental-conservation
complex,”26 that conglomerate of a protected area estate, wildlife as a sourceof revenue, and transcontinental governance, date back to the years ofGerman rule, when wildlife conservation emerged as part of the competingand often contradictory agendas of the colonial state. While Ngorongoro
did not yet count among them, the British inherited fifteen game reserves
and a structure of codified game laws when they took over Tanganyika asa mandated territory from the League of Nations after World War I. The
East African Campaign may have been an ecologically devastating rupture,but it did not affect the legal substance and the exclusionary pattern ofconservation policies as continued after 1918.

Historiographical Contexts and Analytical Perspectives
Colonial conservation and wildlife policies are such well-establishedthemes in the environmental history of Africa and the British Empire that
William Beinart, one of the foremost champions of the field, has urged
scholars to move beyond the colonial paradigm a few years ago.27 However, scholars of East Africa yet need to acknowledge the depth of German
involvement in its wildlife history. The existing literature on Tanzania,
most of it of Anglo-American provenance, has largely marginalized theGerman colonial period. Conservation policies before World War I, if registered at all, are seldom dedicated more than a few pages.28 In Germany,
the towering icon of celebrity conservationist Bernhard Grzimek and his
mediatized moral campaigns since the 1950s have long handicapped rather
than encouraged a deeper engagement with the fact that the country had
been involved in East African wildlife conservation half a century earlier.29
In the collective memory of German society, it is usually Grzimek who isIntroduction 9

credited to have raised people’s awareness to the endangered wildlife of theAfrican continent. However, Grzimek had a precursor more than fifty years
earlier, who anticipated most of his concerns, arguments, and methods:
Carl Georg Schillings, a hunter, wildlife photographer, and conservationist campaigner whose bestselling books and sold-out lantern-slide picture
shows of East Africa’s wildlife sensitized German audiences to the problemof wildlife destruction in the decade before the World War I. Retrieving
his largely forgotten story helps restore the long-term continuities as wellas the fundamental ambivalences and asymmetries inherent in Germany’s
cosmopolitan engagement in Africa’s conservation history.
This book explores the politics of conservation and wildlife regulation incolonial Tanzania under German rule. It situates the colonial exploitation,utilization, conservation, and regulation of game in the political ecologyof wildlife that evolved under the regime of the East African caravan tradeover the nineteenth century. It asks how wild animals and elephants inparticular have shaped the culture and geography of colonial rule, andhow conservation policies evolved in a stuttering and highly uneven quest
for a more sustainable utilization of the wildlife resource. The chaptersthat follow identify the years between 1885 and 1914 as a period of decisive transformation in the relationship between humans and wildlife.
They highlight the role of wildlife as a factor in the “contested interaction
between the environment, local initiative, and imperial drive”30 that produced “Tanzania” as a political unit. A centralizing state defined a public
interest in nondomesticated animals, wielded control over wildlife as aresource, and fundamentally altered the geographies of human interaction
with wild animals through the establishment of game reserves. The severe
restrictions placed upon the hunting rights of Africans transformed local
ecologies and decisively impeded rural communities’ capacities of environmental control. Colonial wildlife legislation established an ecoracist
regime whose asymmetries remained in place long after formal politicaldecolonization.
Yet, wildlife did not just play an important role in Tanzania’s state-building. It was also crucial for the country’s integration in transcontinental
and global connections. If the ivory trade has been a driver of East Africa’s
connectedness across continents before the onset of colonial rule, the conservation of its wildlife acquired a similar function since 1900. Preserving
elephants in particular became part of Europe’s civilizing mission. Conservation engendered, at times, close cooperation among empires and became
the concern of well-connected elite hunter-conservationists in Germany
and Britain. Their lobbying for stricter conservation policies initiated theoutside intervention on behalf of Tanzania’s wildlife that is such a marked
feature of the transcontinental architecture of wildlife conservation gov-

10 The Nature of German Imperialism

ernance in East Africa to this day.31 In German society, the numerous representations of the colonial encounter with Africa’s fauna in travelogues,
photography, museums, and colonial exhibitions fostered perceptions oftimeless originality that erased history and the human factor from theAfrican landscape.
The role that the hunting and conservation of elephants attained in
the context of colonialism in East Africa was unique in comparison withGermany’s other colonies. It was here that wildlife products and ivory inparticular had the greatest economic and political importance. The popularization of East Africa’s wildlife in text and photographs held a most
capti­vating sway on the German imperial imagination and had no parallel in any other of the German colonies. In hunting and conservation
related discourses, the Maasai Steppe and Kilimanjaro plains became landscapes of desire and localizations of a wildlife paradise that helped forge
the stereo­t ypical equation of Africa with the East African savanna and its
charis­matic animals. East Africa is therefore a fertile ground to show what
the imperial treatment of nature can disclose about the nature of imperialism. Focusing on one colony allows for an empirically grounded analysis of
how the appropriation of animals has shaped the unfolding and workingsof colonial rule down to the local level. While the results of this study suggest that German imperialism is more adequately understood as consistingof a variety of different colonialisms,32 this book stakes the broader claimthat elsewhere, too, nature was a crucial locus of power and not merely
a passive background for the human drama of colonialism. Ecology, thebodies and properties of animals, soil, natural resources, or forests, wereof similar significance in other contexts of German imperial expansion.33
Hence the title The Nature of German Imperialism.
By restoring the presence of animals in the colonial encounter between
colonizers and colonized, this study argues for a more comprehensive
understanding of empire and colonialism that includes their ecologicaldimensions and the multiple agencies of humans, animals, and plants.
Rather than a mere “relationship of domination between an indigenous …
majority and a minority of invaders,”34 colonialism must be understood asa political ecology constellation that essentially pertained to the land andits properties. It did not only affect flora and fauna but worked throughthem. Contemporaries were well aware of the grounded and ground-taking
character of the process they referred to as Kolonisation.35 The Germans
who conquered East Africa in the early 1890s tried to realize this claim to
the properties of the land and especially those animals regarded as game.
The appropriation of animals as well as their conservation was enmeshedin changing relationships of power, which this study engages by applying apolitical ecology framework. The transdisciplinary project of political ecol-

Introduction 11

ogy critically rejects unpolitical explanations of environmental change andcombines, in its classic definition by Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield,“the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy.”36 Political ecological analyses are sensitive to questions of environmental justiceand situate local resource conflicts, ecological change, and nature conservation measures in broader relations of economic, political, and epistemic
power. They draw awareness to the fact that concepts such as soil erosion,
deforestation, wilderness, biodiversity, “threatened,” or “pristine” nature
are no natural phenomena, but implicated in often asymmetrical relationsof power. Epistemologically, most political ecology studies subscribe to a
critical realism that rejects the absolutism of discourse and representation
and acknowledges the double character of nature as cultural construct andas physical materiality.37
In her fascinating study of early modern colonial expansion in New­England, Virginia DeJohn Anderson has argued that “leaving livestock outof the story of early American history is a little like staging Macbeth without
the scenes in which Banquo’s ghost appears. The ghost has no speaking role,
but it is nevertheless central to the plot.”38 The same could be said about therole of elephants or the tsetse-transmitting flies of the species glossinae in
East African history. The following chapters seek to release these species
from their confinement in apolitical natural histories and bring them backinto a world they shared with humans. Although inspired by the burgeoning field of human-animal studies,39 this study does not intend to provide ananimal history or reconstruct the past ecology or ethology of certain species.
Its prime interest lies with hunting and conservation as the predominant
and politically relevant forms of human interaction with them. Yet, restoring the presence of animals in the contact zones of European colonialism
is more than a reference to the latest academic fad.40 The following chaptersshow that animals and elephants in particular were instrumental in themaking of colonial rule in East Africa. Animal action and behavior influenced and determined what humans did (and vice versa). In that relational,
processual, and compounded sense, animals did have agency.41
Furthermore, this book engages several other bodies of scholarly literature. First, it contributes to the vibrant environmental historiographyof Tanzania. Thaddeus Sunseri in particular has advanced knowledge ofthe German period through his thorough analyses of the social conflicts
surrounding the introduction of European-style rational forestry and by
exposing the environmental dimensions of the Maji Maji War.42 This study
builds upon this work by analyzing the origins of statist wildlife conservation, the social conflicts that arose out of the colonial regulation of access togame, and the role elephants and ivory played in Maji Maji. By emphasizing
the degree to which the political cleavages and alliances created by hunt-

12 The Nature of German Imperialism

ing in the precolony were continued under colonial rule, the book refines
Sunseri’s argument about Maji Maji. Moreover, it contributes to the longstanding controversy in Tanzanian environmental history surrounding thestability and environmental control of precolonial societies, respectively,
the devastating impact and ecological destabilization wrought by colonial
rule. Interpretations of a “Merry Africa” of stable communities living inharmony with nature have been contrasted by analyses that stress precolonial primitivity and poverty.43 However, as N Thomas Håkansson hasargued, both interpretations underestimate outside forces and the transformative capacities of the ever-expanding caravan trade from the middleof the nineteenth century.44 By drawing attention to the social and political
implications of elephant hunting and its enormous ramifications for the
making of colonial rule, this study emphasizes the mobilizing characterof the caravan trade, the dynamics of precolonial human-animal relationships, as well as important continuities between precolony and the German
takeover.
Second, by analyzing the environment as a “locus of power,”45 The
Nature of German Imperialism seeks to restore an environmental dimension to the historiography of German colonialism. While there exists a burgeoning literature on the environmental history particularly of the British
Empire,46 the boom of German colonial studies over the last two decades
has spawned comparatively little interest in the ecological entanglements
between metropole and colonies.47 The emphasis on entangled histories
and the plea to analyze colony and metropole “in a single analytical field,”respectively within a global framework, have been extremely stimulatingfor German colonial studies in general.48 However, the reception of postcolonial methodology in German colonial studies has also been marked
by a tendency to privilege discourses, fantasies, and the repercussionsof the colonial encounter in the imperial “metropole” over what actually
happened in the colonies.49 In a more recent turn, the adoption of a “postcolonial perspective” on German expansionism has resulted in a wave ofstudies interested in continuities, parallels, and connections between colonial rule overseas and continental imperial expansion in Eastern Europe.50
Whereas the claims about connections, impacts, and reverse flows havespawned productive controversies, for example, over military violence andgenocide, the depth and character of entanglements between colony andmetropole require critical qualification by thorough empirical analyses offurther fields of imperial engagement. This study contributes to this literature by providing an empirically grounded analysis of the transcontinental
flow of ideas and concepts in the making of colonial wildlife policies in East
Africa. It is attentive to the concrete directions of these transfers and its
agents. While retaining its focus on a formal protectorate as the foremostIntroduction 13

space in which German imperialism took place, it extends the analyticalfield of colony and metropole by situating these exchanges in a transcolonial, respectively transimperial setting. German policies in Africa wereheavily influenced by concepts, models, and practices in other imperial settings, like the North American West or the British territories in Southernand Eastern Africa.51 Finally, by analyzing the international repercussionsof African wildlife conservation and by restoring the colonial dimensionsof the early German Naturschutz movement, this book highlights thetransnational dimensions of the fledgling German preservationism thathas so far received but scant attention in German environmental historiography.52 The encounter with Africa’s charismatic megafauna was a sourceof German conservationist sensibilities in its own right.53 Integrating thecolonial experience into the history of the “new” German conservationism
evolving in the last third of the nineteenth century highlights the often
overlooked role of hunting as a source, as well as of hunters as advocatesand promoters of conservationist sensibilities. Although their ideas aboutwild animals were by no means uncontested, hunters were a controversial
part rather than opponents of the fledgling and amorphous German movement for nature protection around 1900.
Analyzing the politics of wildlife in East Africa between colony andmetropole requires sensitivity to the spatial levels of the colonial, the trans­
imperial, respectively international, and the “metropolitan” on which thesepolitics unfolded and reverberated. Of course, this distinction is first andforemost analytical. The interactions, frictions, and connections between
these spaces are manifold and hard to disentangle. Fear of extinction “onthe spot,” for example, evoked transimperial and international cooperationthat impacted back upon wildlife policies in East Africa. While the interaction between these three levels is woven into the narrative that traces theunfolding of East African wildlife politics in Parts I and II of this book, thelast three chapters take these spatial levels as their specific analytical starting points. Thereby, they highlight the thorough and more than ephemeral
impact of German colonial policies in the field of wildlife and the evolving
structural dependency of East African wildlife policies on the internationaland metropolitan spheres. They also draw attention to what was transferred and what was lost in translation. The development of a cosmopolitan
concern in Germany with wildlife conservation far away in Africa cameat the price of a narrowing of vision and a stereotypical simplification ofsocial, political, and ecological complexity that characterizes environmental communication and perception across continents to this day.
With a view to the colony as a space of wildlife, this study is interested
in the political, social, ecological, and economic conflicts caused by theestablishment of colonial control over East Africa’s wildlife. In his analysis

14 The Nature of German Imperialismof the establishment of German rule in East Africa, Michael Pesek has
drawn attention to the multiple local roots of colonial rule, showing how
the political and moral economies of East African caravan travel wereincorporated and gradually abandoned by the traveling economy of colonial conquest.54 His observations must be extended to the elephant huntingthat supplied the ivory trade, as both the control over ivory and elephants
decisively shaped the structure and the practices of colonial state-building.
Therefore, it is indispensable to rehearse the importance of hunting in theprecolonial ecologies of settlement and trade in order to understand thedegree to which colonial rule was both a continuation and rupture of local
cultures of hunting and authority.55 In their dependence on local intermediaries and their networks, the impersonations of the colonial state at thelowest administrative level strikingly resembled the African and Swahili
big men and entrepreneurs who had used hunting and ivory to accumulate
wealth in people.56 The colonial state of the 1890s continued essentiallyprecolonial patterns of authority and used hunting less as an assertion ofimperial power than as a means of establishing a working relationship withcooperating chiefs or aspirants to power. The integration of animals into
the workings of colonial rule thus serves to abandon easy categorizationsof collaboration versus resistance or colonizer versus colonized for more
complex interrelationships in the colonial contact zones.57
By tracing the protracted, contested, and haphazard assertion of state
control over wildlife, this study exposes both the strength and the weaknessof the colonial state. With no premeditated pattern and an institutional
structure that rendered every change of governor “a change of the system,”58
the colonial administration staggered toward sustainability by exclusion.
In the process, multiple lines of conflict became visible, several of themundermining the boundaries of “race”. Therefore, the question of who wasentitled to hunt which animals, by what means, and at what cost, is particularly well suited to reveal the inner workings and fissures of colonial society.
Nevertheless, access to wildlife in 1914 was fundamentally different from
1885. From a resource exploited for their economic value as ivory, elephants
had developed into an exclusive resource preserved for a handful of whitehunters for the conspicuous performance of their wealth, class, race, andmasculinity. The local politics of wildlife in the colony had become part ofimperial and international structures of environmental governance, andthe change in the economics of the hunt was mirrored by a change in ethics.
The “trust in nature” that had governed hunting in the precolony had been
replaced by a centralized state that held “nature in trust.”
The second level on which the colonial politics of wildlife will be analyzed in this study comprises all the processes, links, and networks thattranscended the boundaries of the colony and forged trans- and interna-

Introduction 15

tional, transcolonial, or transimperial connections.59 The neighborhood of
empires in Africa turned European imperialism into a culture of prestige
and exposure as well as into a structure that prompted exchange and transfer. Imperialism generated its own forms of internationalism. Nature conservation came to constitute “one of the key realms of … trans-imperial andinternational coordination,”60 and colonial conservation was an important“triangulation point” for cultural transfers and contacts between Britain
and Germany.61 Highlighting the principled mutuality of these exchanges
may serve as a way to deflate assumptions about British exceptionalism andput the British Empire in perspective and proportion. Rather than taking
its leading role for granted, an analysis of the transimperial character of
East African wildlife politics helps to analyze, in Antoinette Burton’s words,“to write the British Empire into world history … in terms of its role in the
co-production of imperial globality rather than its originary character.”62
This said, there is no denying that perceptions and exchanges between
Britain and Germany in East Africa were conjunctural, asymmetrical, andoften one-sided. Russell Berman has even argued that German colonial discourse was essentially derivative, as it constantly engaged with the example
set by the British.63 The prominence of Britain as rival, model, and above
all, repository of imperial practices and knowledge will be approachedon several levels.64 In relative independence of the ebbs and flows of theAnglo-German antagonism in Europe, Germany’s self-perception as alatecomer in colonial matters resulted in a structural propensity to learn
and adopt. The political geography resulting from the scramble for Africa
had a direct impact upon the phenomena under discussion in this study.
Sharing borders was a structural feature of Anglo-German imperialism.
German East Africa in particular bordered on British territories with similar wildlife ecologies. Consequently, the regulation of trade in animals’
body parts, wildlife conservation, and its advocacy by elitist lobby groups,
but especially veterinary science and the ecology of wildlife diseases, allinvited exchange and cooperation across borders as much as they fannedcompetition. At times, they constituted “common projects” of the imperial powers, 65 at times, they merely ran parallel. Given the small circle ofimperial decision-makers and the equally limited set of actors involved inveterinary science, hunting, and wildlife conservation, an actor-oriented
approach is best suited to identify why some concerns transcended therealm of colony and empire and others did not. It was a result of strategic framing that the first and foremost Anglo-German concern over the
depleted game stocks of East Africa lifted Africa’s wildlife into the international arena and resulted in two international conferences on wildlife
conservation in Africa before World War I. This study analyzes the actors
and motivations behind these transimperial exchanges and connections

16 The Nature of German Imperialism

and identifies European imperialism as an important driving force of environmental internationalism around 1900. Taking the colonies as a vantage
point for transfers and exchange across several continents also draws attention to connections bypassing the metropole. While the structures of imperial governance necessitated that most colonial issues were handed back to
the imperial metropole to be internationalized, the metropole was not the
only reference point for the transcontinental connections forged by thepolitics of wildlife. Robert Koch, for example, developed his knowledge intropical medicine in British India and Southern Africa. German veterinaryscientists trained at Onderstepoort laboratory in South Africa.66 The colonial game reserves were inspired by both the aristocratic European hunting estate and by specific, contextualized understandings of U.S. nationalparks. By highlighting such transcontinental exchanges, webs of meanings,
globalized worldviews, and transfers between and beyond metropole andcolony, this book also confronts the environmental history of hunting andconservation in East Africa with the sensibilities of multisited transnational and global histories.67 Thereby, it adds to the recent revisionism of
simple diffusionist and exceptionalist understandings of U.S. national park
history.68
A third analytical perspective is developed upon the representations andreverberations of the colonial encounter with Africa’s wildlife in Germany.
The travelogues, articles, and photographs that transmitted the colonizers’
experience to audiences in imperial Germany were replete with ecstatic
descriptions of a radically different, “exotic,” and “primeval” nature. An
overwhelmed officer of the colonial military wrote his parents that the“childhood images of paradise which I keep in my head and in which thousands of animals promenade around Adam and Eve under tall trees arenothing compared to the reality I encounter here every single day.” Hanns
Braun, a trained historian and journalist relished in the “excitement andmystery of traveling through a continent that has not yet been shaped byman, but still remains stamped by the animal. It was a dream-like journey back to the dawn of creation.”69 Such seemingly natural renderings ofAfrican landscapes as primeval, timeless, and empty but for animals were
wedded to the mental operation that characterized Europeans’ orderingof the world under the impact of nineteenth-century evolutionism: thereading of geographical difference across space as historical and temporal
difference over time. This process has been described as “denial of coevalness” or the “invention of anachronistic space.”70 One of the key strategies
to render this assumption plausible was to “naturalize” it.
This study asks how the envisioning of African space as wilderness
peopled by animals rather than humans prepared and accompanied theintervention of colonial authorities into physical environments. Often,

Introduction 17

they reified this mental separation of humans and animals on the ground.
The direct colonial encounter with wildlife in the late nineteenth century
also politicized and essentialized earlier discourses of evolutionism, paleontology, and zoogeography to give rise to an epistemic configurationthat conflated space and species, habitat, and time in a political geography of the characteristic animal.71 These ideologies were encapsulated in
the first photographic representations of Africa’s wildlife that appearedin Germany around 1900. They show that the new visuality of Germancolonialism in the “Magic Lantern Empire” was not only about “picturing
race” or “advertising Empire,”72 but also about the virtual authentificationof wilderness that motivated cosmopolitan conservationist concern andentrenched a long lasting European stereotype of African nature. The final
chapter explores the wider ramifications of this conflation of space andspecies for ideas about Africa, nature, Heimat, and the nation in Germany. It follows the textual and visual tracks left by Africa’s wildlife, therepresentations to which they gave rise and the practical consequences
these representations entailed—especially in Carl Georg Schillings’s bestselling hunting tales and picture shows, in the discourses of the movement
for nature conservation as well as in the German landscape. By tracing
the incorporation, domestication, and restoration of the wild by various
techniques of Western modernity, The Nature of Imperialism analyses thecoconstitution of social ideas of nature and wilderness between colony
and metropole “in a single analytic field.”73 Rather than a laboratory for
German conservationist thinking and practices, the colonies must be
understood as a source of environmental and preservationist sensibilities
in their own right.

Tracking Game in the Colonial Archive
Following the tracks of hunters and wild animals between East Africa andGermany necessitates the transcontinental mining for sources. The basisof this book are records, personal papers, and manuscripts from well overtwenty archives and libraries in Tanzania, Kenya, Germany, Great Britain,
Belgium, and the United States.
Reconstructing the colonial politics of wildlife is impossible without
resorting to material from the “colonial archive.” The most substantial partof the archival material comprises official correspondence of the German
imperial authorities in Berlin and in Dar es Salaam. The documents held
in Berlin reveal the view from the metropole, but they also include correspondence and reports from the colony that disclose the workings ofcolonial rule beyond the central administration in Dar es Salaam. Because

18 The Nature of German Imperialism

the voices from the colony that can be retrieved in Berlin are sporadic andhardly ever extend to the administrative levels below the central administration, it is imperative to complement the archive material of the colonial
department (colonial office from 1907 onward) in Berlin with the surviving source material of the “German Records” in Dar es Salaam. Unfortunately, the files of the German East African colonial administration, notto mention the various district stations and outposts, are extremely patchy,
because a large part of records was destroyed upon withdrawal from theadvancing British forces in World War I. Records that give insight into thehunting and wildlife politics at the level of district stations have survived
for the 1890s, whereas the majority of files for the years after 1900 are
lost. This loss can only partially be compensated by surviving administrative correspondence and annual reports of district offices or legal cases
dealing with breaches of the game regulations.74 Beyond the memory of“official colonialism,” the files contained in Germany’s ethnographic andnatural history museums provide another rich and hitherto hardly tappedsource of information on German colonialism. For example, correspondence between hunters and museum curators has survived in the Museumof Natural History in Berlin, which held an official mandate as clearing
house for all zoological material obtained on official expeditions between
1889 and 1911. Further archives have been consulted to assess the strategies of participants at the First International Conference on the Preservation of African wildlife in 1900. Given the colonial neighborhood in East
Africa, the joint Anglo-German preparation of the London Conference
and the overall model character of British colonial rule in terms of wildlife
policies, files have been reviewed in the Kenya National Archives as wellas in the Public Record Office in London to unravel processes of transfer,mutual borrowings, and observation. A final category of archival material consisted of personal papers and correspondence of leading colonial
decision makers and individual hunters. Though scattered and evidently
incomplete as far as the personal correspondence is concerned, the papersof Germany’s eminent big game hunter of the time, Carl Georg Schillings,
have allowed at least the partial reconstruction of his transnational reception as well as of his transnational conservationist contacts.
Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler has drawn attention to the role of thearchive as the “supreme technology” of late nineteenth-century imperial
governance.75 Archives, and the colonial archives in particular, are noneutral sites of knowledge retrieval but the sedimented memory of thecolonial state and thus a site where colonial knowledge was produced andthe taxonomies of rule forged. It is, therefore, indispensable to read these
documents as expressions of a colonial epistemology. However, althougharchives “see like a state,” the sources they contain are polyphonous, andIntroduction 19

it is the historian’s task to retrieve this polyphony by carefully contrasting“the file” with material of different provenance and other fields of knowledge. All too often, the very archive reveals the failure of imperialist aspirations. Reports and correspondence can be subjected to subversive reading“against the grain” to restore hidden meanings and the multiple agencies of“colonizers,” “colonized,” and also of the animals that crowded the contact
zones of colonial rule.
This approach has obvious limits in the assessment of the agency of Africans whose actions are largely represented through the distortions of thecolonial archive or the views of the hunter. Still, files do contain occasional
reports by local African or Swahili intermediaries, and Africans also got avoice in the rare instances of bearing witness in court cases dealing withbreaches of the game laws. But the extremely patchy nature of the source
material disallows an observation of the localizations of hunting policies
and indigenous reactions for any single area over a longer timescale. While
those district officials and missionary ethnographers who produced thesources remained place-bound, hunters, together with porters, counted
among the most mobile social groups in East Africa, which accounts fortheir overall elusive presence in the records.
The records lifted from the imperial archives are contrasted and supplemented with a variety of published material, all fraught with their own
problems as historical sources. A multiplicity of travelogues, anthropological and geographical descriptions and ethnographies compiled by
missionaries, colonial administrators, and early anthropologists, hasbeen consulted to uncover the significance of hunting in the lives of African societies prior to and under colonial rule. Much of the same caution
applies to these sources: travelogues based sweeping assertions upon fleeting observations, and enormous differences exist in the trustworthinessof individual observers. Hunting tales are a genre underlying their own
plots of dramatization culminating in the final kill, whereas ethnographies
produced by colonial officials or missionaries were implicated in the colonial project and often covered the awkward and complex negotiations withdichotomic essentializations of the colonial situation in which they were
produced.76 Still, differentiations are in place also here: there were authoritarian ethnographers who claimed to know, whereas others revealed theirinformants and the basis upon which they drew their conclusions. Likewise,
there were hunting tales presenting an eternal contest between man andthe brute, and those that proceed as detailed and localizable as a diary.
Apart from the various colonial periodicals published in Germany,
the most important being the Kolonialzeitung and the Kolonialblatt, theDeutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung as the main organ of the white community and the Usambara-Post as the settlers’ mouthpiece in the colony have

20 The Nature of German Imperialism

been consulted as sources for the significance of hunting in colonial culture
as well as for critical perspectives on official wildlife policies. Additionally, this study has for the first time made extensive use of the contemporary German hunting press, such as the periodicals Wild und Hundor the Deutsche Jägerzeitung. As staple reading for the considerable community of hunters and game lovers, these periodicals are a most rewarding source for tracking those hunters who, for various reasons, did not
publish their stories in book-length volumes. Discussions in the huntingpress also reveal the disputed character of big game hunting at the fringesof European expansion. Moreover, the hunting press generally discloses
the degree to which a social group usually associated with provincialism
actually participated in the global appropriation of the wild. Its value asa source for a social history of hunting is, however, diminished insofar as
the social background of contributors is often hard to assess, especiallywhen authors used pseudonyms or only gave their initials. Then, contemporary British and German publications on veterinary medicine have been
consulted to reconstruct transimperial debates on wildlife diseases andto partially compensate for a dearth of files on the local level in Dar es
Salaam. Finally, hunting and the global loss of the large mammalian fauna
were topics reverberating frequently in the flurry of journals in the fieldof popular science, but also in the publications of the fledgling movement
for nature conservation. They allow for a cautious assessment of the social
reach of conservationist concern about the colonies in German society.
The book is organized into three parts. The first part consists of two
chapters that analyze the political ecology of wildlife in the transition
from precolony to colonial rule. They stress the continuity of a hunter
principle of authority that emerged under the ivory trade and marked
the years of colonial conquest. Part II charts the making of Tanzania’s
wildlife conservation regime in three chronologically successive chapters (3 to 5). Starting from Maji Maji as the violent end of hunting as a
middle ground for political alliances, the conflicting politics of wildlife
are analyzed under the conditions of an unfolding settler society and theincreasing impact of hunter-conservationist networks in Germany. The
first two parts together develop a narrative of how colonial wildlife regulation in Tanzania evolved from exploitation toward conservation in ahaphazard manner of constant trial and error. Therefore, a synopsis of themost important game ordinances has been compiled in the appendix toprovide additional orientation and helpful reference. The third part abandons the chronological organization of the previous chapters. Here, systematic perspectives on the wider ramifications of conservation between
metropole and colony prevail. Drawing upon the evidence assembled in
the first two parts, chapters 6 to 8 systematically entrench aspects that

Introduction 21

have received only short shrift in the chronological chapters. Chapter 6
explores the politics of reserves and protected area governance between
local and global historical perspectives. The following chapter charts thetransimperial and international mechanics and entanglements of wildlife conservation and reflects upon the relationship between Britain andGermany as empires among empires, both from East African and metropolitan perspectives. The final chapter, 8, focusses on the reverberations ofEast African wildlife conservation in Germany. By putting these themes
into broader analytical contexts, the third part, together with the epilogue,highlights the lasting and broader significance of the nature of German
imperialism in East Africa.
Chapter 1 sets out with the ecology of wildlife in the Tanganyikan precolony and distinguishes settlement and trade as the main regimes thatgoverned hunting as a highly differentiated and dynamic form of African
societies’ interaction with nature. The incorporation of ever more societies
in Tanganyika into the networks of the long-distance caravan trade towardZanzibar brought about decisive transformations in the political, social,
and moral ecology of hunting, which came to be the main economic activity by which East Africans partook in the worldwide web of trade in thenineteenth century. The rising value of wildlife commodities, especially ofivory prompted the emergence of specialized elephant hunters. The controlof elephants and ivory became an important mechanism for the accumulation of wealth and authority, enabling self-made political entrepreneurs
to establish themselves as big men and attract a following. When theGermans took control of East Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth
century, they found a political economy benefiting a “hunter principle” ofpolitical authority as well as a marked commercialization of elephant hunting and the gradual erosion of the political, social, and cultural buffers that
had served to prevent the overexploitation of elephant herds.
Chapter 2 corrects the erroneous assumption that the Tanganyikan
elephant population was already too depleted to assign ivory an importantrole for the German colonizers. It shows how hunting and the acquisitionof ivory were instrumental in the establishment of German colonial rule:ivory served as the main subsidy and currency of conquest. Until around
1900, German wildlife policies in East Africa were governed by the political ecology of the ivory trade. Chapter 3 links the themes of parts I and
II by charting the transition of hunting policies from trade toward conservation. Linking the elephants of the Mahenge district in the southernhighlands with the various levels of imperial governance over wildlife, thechapter interprets the Maji Maji rising in 1905 as an environmental conflictover the access to elephants and wildlife resources. The war effectively put
an end to the colonial “big man” policies of hunting and ivory that had

22 The Nature of German Imperialism

marked the years of conquest. Chapters 4 and 5 unfold the whole panorama of conflicts over the regulation of hunting after Maji Maji, when agrowing number of white settlers in the colony and an emerging lobby ofhunter conservationists in Germany appeared as new stakeholders on thescene. Scientific studies proved that game hosted trypanosomes that caused
human and animal sleeping sickness. The controversial debate about the
future of wildlife in the colony exposed the cleavages of colonial society
and turned into Germany’s biggest environmental scandal of the Kaiserreich when governor von Rechenberg attempted the creation of a cordon
sanitaire devoid of game to prevent the spread of rinderpest in 1910. Moraloutrage, a well-connected wildlife lobby, and the interference of German
Emperor Wilhelm II resulted in a revision of the game laws largely in tune
with the ideals of the conservationists. By 1912, the expropriation of Africans from the control over their wildlife was virtually complete.
Chapters 6 to 8 abandon the chronology of wildlife politics to rehearse
systematically the different spatialities of the colonial encounter with thewild. Chapter 6 conceptualizes late nineteenth-century imperialism as adriving force for the globalization of environmental responsibility. It situates the establishment of game reserves in East Africa between wildlife
degradation, governmental land politics, heterotopian ideals of wilderness, and the transimperial exchange of concepts that connected reserves
along the Rufiji with Yellowstone in North America, the Southern Game
Reserve in Kenya, and the Schorfheide outside Berlin. The introductionof game reserves entailed a shift of environmental decision-making awayfrom the respective locality, subjecting the politics of place in East Africa tothe structures and actors of imperial environmental governance. Chapter
7 explores the politics of wildlife in colony and metropole in their transimperial and international as well as in their governmental and social
dimensions. It provides a synopsis of the entwined coevolution of wildlife
policies in German and British East Africa and traces various forms oftransimperial cooperation in wildlife-related fields. The chapter systematically assesses the conditions and factors underlying exchange and cooperation across empires and determines the relationship between imperialism
and internationalism in the field of colonial conservation. Chapter 8 isconcerned with the textual, visual, and conceptual reverberations and representations of the colonial encounter with the African fauna in Germany.
It traces the cultural messages and environmental sensibilities conveyed
through the nascent wildlife photography, and it examines how the debates
about wildlife conservation in the German colonies and the global vanishing of the giant fauna nourished conservationists’ anxieties about theloss of rootedness in an era of rapid industrialization and social change.
The perceived originality of African nature exposed an emotional blank inIntroduction 23

German environmental identity that motivated attempts at restoring thewild to the German landscape.
Finally, a word on words. In order to enhance legibility, I have translated
all quotations from the original German into English. However, there area few terms where the utilization of English equivalents would contort theoriginal meaning, as in the case of Weidgerechtigkeit, the word German
hunters used to denote the ethics and attitudes of hunting they deemed tobe peculiarly German. Its closest English equivalent would be “sportsmanship.” However, this term and the understanding of hunting as a “sport” ingeneral were hotly contested by those parts of the German hunting fraternity who rejected this association with competition and records, often
in nationalistic terms. Weidgerechtigkeit and sportsmanship constituted
rivalling and ideologically charged concepts in contemporary colonial
debates over wildlife regulation, and any translation would risk blurring
this incommensurability. “Conservation” and “preservation” are usedaccording to their established understanding in international environmental history, that is, with conservation denoting measures of nature protection that allowed for management and sustainable utilization to ensure
the continued use of animals through humans, as opposed to preservation
as noninterventionist forms of protection predicated upon assumptionsof ecological integrity and natural balance.77 However, contemporaryconservationist debates were characterized by a mixture of motivations
and concepts that scrambled this distinction as much as the terminology
employed in German conservationist discourse: The terms Jagdschutz andWildschutz referred to the protection of legitimate hunting and game andthus count among measures of conservation through utilization. The terms
Naturschutz (nature protection) and the rarely deployed Tierschutz (animal
protection) framed Africa’s wildlife within the newly emerging concern
over the preservation of the remnants of pristine nature in the late nineteenth century.
Writing about colonialism inevitably entails dealing with a formation of epistemic power whose language and terminology was geared togovern and render legible. Colonial rule invented and employed a systemof homogenizing, derogatory, and straightforwardly racist categories withlittle correspondence to the self-identification of the people thus described.
However, as “technical terms” of colonial rule, this terminology is often
indispensable. Colonial rule and the game legislation it prompted was
predicated upon a distinction between Eingeborene (natives) and NichtEingeborene (nonnatives), the former including not only Africans but also
Arabs, Zanzibaris, and Indians, the latter denoting any white person originating in a country counted among the “civilized” nations. Where the useof such terminology cannot be avoided, it will be placed in quotation marks.

24 The Nature of German Imperialism

Similarly fraught with problems are the denomination of African ethnicities. Africanist scholarship has exposed the “time-defying and historydenying” logic behind a category such as “tribe,”78 which fails to capturecomplex social structures and arrested social mobility and fluid identities
in archaic immobility. These ethnic referents are used nonetheless, but they
are to be understood as geographical and historical references to an area
and its people, not necessarily implying that they existed as a named andbounded political community during the nineteenth century. Reference tothe territory under study is equally problematic: “German East Africa” wasconstituted as a meaningful political unit only by the end of the nineteenth
century. Any application of German East Africa, Tanganyika, or Tanzania
to the social, political, and economic constellations of this area earlier than
the 1880s is to apply a conceptual framework that simply did not exist. As
a colonial invention, German East Africa made sense for Europeans, but
hardly for its inhabitants. Comprising also Rwanda and Burundi, it wasneither equivalent to the Tanganyika that came to replace it as denominator, nor to the Tanzania that was formed as a union of Tanganyika andZanzibar in 1964. Nonetheless, I use German East Africa, Tanganyika, orcolonial Tanzania interchangeably as a reference for the emerging centralized territorial state that came to be the dominant framework for East Africa’s politics of wildlife ever since the last decade of the nineteenth century.
The colonial spelling of place names has been adapted to current usage.
Notes
1. Bernhard and Michael Grzimek, Serengeti darf nicht sterben. 367000 Tiere suchen
einen Staat (Berlin, 1959), 306. For an early reference to Ngorongoro as a “reborn
world to be glanced at as a wonder” and a “unique natural zoological garden” see,for example, Hans Reck, Oldoway, die Schlucht des Urmenschen. Die Entdeckung
des altsteinzeitlichen Menschen in Deutsch—Ostafrika (Leipzig, 1933), 31–32.
2. Peter J Rogers, “History and Governance in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area,
Tanzania, 1959–1966,” Global Environment 4 (2009): 80, 91–92; Thomas Lekan,“Serengeti Shall Not Die: Bernhard Grzimek, Wildlife Film, and the Making of a
Tourist Landscape in East Africa,” German History 29 (2011): 224–64.
3. Anthony RE Sinclair, The Serengeti Story. Life and Science in the World’s Greatest
Wildlife Region (Oxford, 2012), xiv.
4. Katherine Scholfield and Dan Brockington, “Non-Governmental Organisations and African Wildlife Conservation. A Preliminary Analysis” (Brooks World
Poverty Institute Working Paper no. 80, Manchester, 2009), 20.
5. Noel Salazar, Envisioning Eden. Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and beyond(New York, 2011), 87.
6. Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam (TNA) G 8/144, fol. 208–10: Bezirks­
nebenstelle (subdistrict office; BNS) Arusha to Government (Gov) Deutsch-­Introduction 25

Ostafrika (DOA), 11 March 1913; TNA G 8/144, fol. 214: BNS Arusha to Gov
DOA, 23 April 1913.
7. TNA G 8/144, fol. 178–79, Report by Lieutenant Theodor Tafel on land affairs in
Ngorongoro, 4 March 1912.
8. TNA G 8/144, fol. 19: Gov DOA to Siedentopf, 7 December 1904.
9. TNA G 8/144, fol. 92, Methner to Friedrich Wilhelm Siedentopf, 6 December 1907.
10. TNA G 8/144, fol. 160–61: Moshi to Gov DOA, 13 July 1911; TNA G 31/1,
unfol.: Adolf Siedentopf to Gov DOA, 22 August 1913; TNA G 31/170, unfol.:
Veterinarian Braunert to Gov DOA, 23 August 1913; Reck, Oldoway, die Schlucht
des Urmenschen, 34.
11. Oxford, Bodleian Library (OBL) Mss Afr s 1237a: H St J Grant: Masai History and Mode of Life. A Summary Prepared for the Committee of Enquiry into
the Serengeti National Park (1957), 1–2; OBL Mss Afr s 1237b, Oltimbau ole
Masiaya on behalf of the Masai of the Serengeti National Park, Memorandumon the Serengeti National Park, 1957; Katherine Homewood, Patti Kristjanson,
and Pippa Chenevix Trench, “Changing Land Use, Livelihoods and Wildlife
Conservation in Maasailand,” in Staying Maasai? Livelihoods, Conservation andDevelopment in East African Rangelands, ed. K Homewood, P Kristjanson, and
P Chenevix Trench (New York, 2009), 5; cf. John G Galaty, “Maasai Expansion
and the New East African Pastoralism,” in Being Maasai. Ethnicity and Identity
in East Africa, ed. Thomas Spear and Richard Waller (London, 1993), 74.
12. See, for example, Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History. The Case of Tanganyika 1850–1950 (London, 1977),
74; Deutsches Kolonialblatt 12, no. 24 (1901): 902–6.
13. Richard Waller, “Emutai: Crisis and Response in Maasailand 1883–1902,” in
The Ecology of Survival. Case Studies from Northeast African History, ed. Douglas
H Johnson and David M Anderson (London, 1988), 73–112.
14. Oscar Baumann, Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle. Reisen und Forschungender Massai-Expedition des Deutschen Antisklaverei-Komite in den Jahren 1891–
1893 (Berlin, 1894), 30–32; Moritz Merker, Die Masai. Ethnographische Mono­graphie eines ostafrikanischen Semitenvolkes (Berlin, 1904), 336.
15. Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika was the official denominationof the military force established to conquer and secure the East African colony.
It was formed in 1891 from the mercenary army that had conquered large partsof the territory under Hermann von Wissmann since 1889. Its bulk was madeup from African soldiers, the so-called Askari. See Tanja Bührer, Die Kaiserliche
Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika. Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung 1885 bis 1918 (Munich, 2011).
16. TNA G 8/143, fol. 26: Abel to Gov DOA, 13 February 1905; cf. DeutschOstafrikanische Zeitung 8, no. 38 (1906).
17. TNA G 8/143, fol. 26: Abel to Gov DOA, 13 February 1905; TNA G 8/143, fol.
46: Gov DOA to Moshi, undated concept; TNA G 8/143, fol. 73: Moshi to Gov DOA,
31 October 1905; TNA G 8/143, fol. 74: Gov DOA to Siedentopf, 8 February 1906.
18. TNA G 8/144, fol. 69: Protocol of the Land Commission, no. 47, Ngorongoro,
26 April 1907.
19. TNA G 8/144, fol. 198–205: Adolf Siedentopf to Gov DOA, 3 January 1912;
Wilhelm Methner, Unter drei Gouverneuren. 16 Jahre Dienst in deutschen Tropen(Breslau, 1938), 155.

26 The Nature of German Imperialism
20. TNA G 8/144, fol. 178–79: Report by Lieutenant Theodor Tafel on land affairsin Ngorongoro, 4 March 1912.
21. Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (BAB) R 1001/6229-1, fol. 75–76: Reichskolonialamt (RKA) to Erwin Bubeck, Verein Naturschutzpark, 14 April 1914; BAB
R 1001/6229-1, fol. 95: Bubeck to RKA, 26 May 1914; BAB R 1001/6229-1, fol. 98:
RKA to Bubeck (draft), 29 June 1914.
22. Ironically, it was Siedentopf and one of his farm assistants who discovered,just after the Maasai had been expelled, that the history of human-wildlife
co­existence in the crater had a deeper history still. While seeking stones for theirfarm buildings, they unearthed Neolithic burial mounds that helped trigger
palaeoanthropological interest in the crater highlands. The discovery of evenolder hominid fossils in nearby Oldupai Gorge earned the Serengeti-Ngorongoro
landscape the further epithet of a “cradle of humankind” since the 1930s, see
Reck, Oldoway, die Schlucht des Urmenschen, 154–60; Virginia Morell, Ancestral
Passions. The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings (NewYork, 1995), chapter 3.
23. Despite manifest differences between “game” and “wildlife,” with the former
denoting first and foremost those species suited for hunting, I use both terms
interchangeably, for in the German language no such distinction existed, and contemporaries used the term Wild also to refer to nondomesticated animals beyond
game. After 1900, the term Tierschutz (animal conservation) was employed occasionally to denote that Wildschutz (game conservation) was informed by the newsensibilities of early twentieth-century nature preservationism.
24. On conservation as a form of capitalist production see Elizabeth Garland,“The Elephant in the Room. Confronting the Colonial Character of Wildlife Conservation in Africa,” African Studies Review 51 (2008): 51–74.
25. Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt, ed, African Modernities. Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Portsmouth, NH, 2002).
26. Dan Brockington, “The Politics and Ethnography of Environmentalisms in
Tanzania,” African Affairs 105 (2006): 102.
27. William Beinart, “Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: African History and Environmental History in Large-Scale Perspective,” in The Environment and WorldHistory, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz (Berkeley, CA, 2009),
211–28.
28. See, for example, Dan Brockington, Hassan Sachedina, and Katherine
Scholfield, “Preserving the New Tanzania: Conservation and Land Use Change,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 41, no. 3 (2008): 557–79; John
M MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature. Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988); Roderick P Neumann, Imposing Wilderness. Struggles
over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley, CA, 1998); Thomas P
Ofcansky, Paradise Lost. A History of Game Preservation in East Africa (Morgantown, 2002), 47–63; Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation. The Preservation of
the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania (Oxford, 2002); David Anderson and Richard Grove, eds, Conservation in Africa. People, Policies and Practice (Cambridge,1987).
29. Bernhard Gissibl and Johannes Paulmann, “Serengeti darf nicht sterben,”in Kein Platz an der Sonne. Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte, ed.
Jürgen Zimmerer (Frankfurt, 2013), 96–108.

Introduction 27

30. Gregory Maddox, “Networks and Frontiers in Colonial Tanzania,” Environmental History 3 (1998): 437.
31. See Carl Death, “Environmental Mainstreaming and Post-Sovereign Governance in Tanzania,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7, no. 1 (2013): 1–20.
32. See George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting. Precoloniality and theGerman Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007),
1–3, 19–27; Trutz von Trotha, “Was war Kolonialismus? Einige zusammen­
fassende Befunde zur Soziologie und Geschichte des Kolonialismus und derKolonialherrschaft,” Saeculum 55 (2004): 53–55.
33. On Namibia, see Ute Dieckmann, Hai//om in the Etosha Region. A Historyof Colonial Settlement, Ethnicity and Nature Conservation (Basel, 2007); Manfred O Hinz, “‘Waidgerechtigkeit’ versus afrikanische Tradition. Deutsches Jagdrecht in Namibia?,’ in Kolonialisierung des Rechts. Zur kolonialen Rechts- und
Verwaltungsordnung, ed. Rüdiger Voigt and Peter Sack (Baden-Baden, 2001),
336–48; Bernhard Gissibl, “Paradiesvögel: Kolonialer Naturschutz und die
Mode der deutschen Frau am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Ritual-Macht-Natur.
Europäisch-ozeanische Beziehungswelten in der Neuzeit, ed. Johannes Paulmann,
Daniel Leese, and Philippa Söldenwagner (Bremen, 2005), 131–54.
34. Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism. A Theoretical Overview (Princeton, NJ,
2005), 16–17.
35. See, for example, Bernhard Dernburg, Zielpunkte des deutschen Kolonial­
wesens. Zwei Vorträge (Berlin, 1907), 5.
36. Piers M Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society(London, 1987), 17.
37. Paul Robbins, Political Ecology. A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA, 2004);
Roderick P Neumann, Making Political Ecology (London, 2005).
38. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire. How Domestic Animals
Transformed Early America (Oxford, 2004), 3.
39. See Brett L Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Andrew Isenberg (Oxford, 2014), 52–75;
Bernhard Gissibl, “Das kolonisierte Tier. Zur Ökologie der Kontaktzonen desdeutschen Kolonialismus,” Werkstatt Geschichte 56 (2010): 7–28; and Gesine
Krüger, “Das koloniale Tier. Natur—Kultur—Geschichte,” in Wo ist Kultur? Perspektiven der Kulturanalyse, ed. Thomas Forrer and Angelika Linke (Zürich, 2014),
73–94.
40. The term contact zone denotes the “space of colonial encounters” and intersecting trajectories, defined by the interaction of individuals previously separated
by geography, history, and culture, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel
Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), 6–7.
41. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, “Animal Spaces, Beastly Places. An Introduction,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places. New Geographies of Human-Animal
Relations, ed. C Philo and C Wilbert (London, 2000), 1–35.
42. See Thaddeus Sunseri, Wielding the Ax. State Forestry and Social Conf lictin Tanzania, 1820–2000 (Athens, 2009), 50–74; Thaddeus Sunseri, “Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa,
1874–1915,” Environmental History 8 (2003): 430–51; Thaddeus Sunseri, “Famineand Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Maji-Maji War in
Uzaramo,” Journal of African History 38 (1997): 235–59; Thaddeus Sunseri, “The

28 The Nature of German Imperialism
War of the Hunters: Maji Maji and the Decline of the Ivory Trade,” in Maji Maji.
Lifting the Fog of War, ed. James Giblin and Jamie Monson (Leiden, 2010), 117–48;
see further Christopher A Conte, Highland Sanctuary. Environmental History in
Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains (Athens, 2004).
43. See James Giblin and Gregory Maddox, “Introduction: Custodians of theLand. Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania,” in Custodians of theLand. Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania, ed. Gregory Maddox, James
Giblin, and Isaria N Kimambo (London, 1996), 1–14; Achim von Oppen, “Matuta.
Landkonflikte, Ökologie und Entwicklung in der Geschichte Tanzanias,” in Tanzania. Koloniale Vergangenheit und neuer Aufbruch, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden
and Achim von Oppen (Münster, 1996), 47–84; Juhani Koponen, People and Production in Late Precolonial Tanzania. History and Structures (Helsinki, 1988);
Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History;
John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979); James L Giblin,
The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania, 1840–1940 (Philadelphia, 1992).
44. N Thomas Håkansson, “The Human Ecology of World Systems in East
Africa: The Impact of the Ivory Trade,” Human Ecology 32 (2004): 561–91; N
Thomas Håkansson, Mats Widgren, and Lowe Börjeson, “Introduction: Historical and Regional Perspectives on Landscape Transformations in Northeastern
Tanzania, 1850–2000,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 41, no.
3 (2008): 369–82.
45. Jane Carruthers, “Africa: Histories, Ecologies and Societies,” Environmentand History 10 (2004): 382.
46. See William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford,2007); and James Beattie, “Recent Themes in the Environmental History of the
British Empire,” History Compass 10, no. 2 (2012): 129–39.
47. Exceptions are Philipp N Lehmann, “Between Waterberg and Sandveld: An
Environmental Perspective on the German-Herero War of 1904,” German History 32, no. 4 (2014): 533–58; Daniel Rouven Steinbach, “Carved out of Nature:
Identity and Environment in German Colonial Africa,” in Cultivating the Colonies. Colonial States and Their Environmental Legacies, ed. Christina Folke Ax,
Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund (Athens, 2011), 47–77;
Ulrike Kirchberger, “Wie entsteht eine imperiale Infrastruktur? Zum Aufbau
der Naturschutzbürokratie in Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Historische Zeitschrift 291(2010): 41–69; H Jürgen Wächter, Naturschutz in den deutschen Kolonien in Afrika,
1884–1918 (Münster, 2008); Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten. Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne, 2003), 138–62; Nigel Rothfels, Savages
and Beasts. The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, MD, 2002). A rare regional
study of the environmental agency of missions in German Tanzania is provided
by Robert B Munson, The Nature of Christianity in Northern Tanzania. Environmental and Social Change, 1890–1916 (Lanham, MD, 2013).
48. See German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley
(Durham, 2014); Birthe Kundrus, “Von der Peripherie ins Zentrum. Zur Bedeutung des Kolonialismus für das Deutsche Kaiserreich,” in Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in der Kontroverse, ed. Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (Göttingen,2009), 359–73; Dirk van Laak, “Kolonien als ‘Laboratorien der Moderne?,’” in
Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914, ed. SebastianIntroduction 29

Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (Göttingen, 2004), 257–79; cf. Sebastian Conrad,
Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2010), chapter
2; Sebastian Conrad, “Globalization Effects: Mobility and Nation in Imperial
Germany, 1880–1914,” Journal of Global History 3 (2008): 43–66.
49. For surveys of the field see Sebastian Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41(2013):
543–66; Maiken Umbach, “Forum: The German Colonial Imagination,” German
History 26 (2008): 251–71.
50. See for a survey Winson Chu, Jesse Kauffman, and Michael Meng, “A Sonderweg through Eastern Europe? The Varieties of German Rule in Poland during theTwo World Wars,” German History 31, no. 3 (2013): 318–44.
51. Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age”; Andrew Zimmerman, “Africa in Imperial and Transnational History: Multi-Sited Historiography and the Necessity of Theory,” Journal of African History 54 (2013): 331–40;
John M. MacKenzie, “European Imperialism: A Zone of Co-operation Rather
than Competition?”, in Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870-1930. Empires
and Encounters, ed. Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (London, 2015): 35–53.
52. See, however, William H Rollins, “Imperial Shades of Green: Conservationand Environmental Chauvinism in the German Colonial Project,” German Studies Review 22 (1999): 187–213; Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “Naturschutz global—
oder: Hilfe von außen. Internationale Beziehungen des amtlichen Naturschutzes
im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Natur und Staat. Staatlicher Naturschutz in Deutschland
1906–2006, ed. Hans-Werner Frohn and Friedemann Schmoll (Bonn, 2006),
625–727.
53. The classic argument about the overseas colonies as the origin of European
environmental sensibilities is unfolded in Richard H Grove, Green Imperialism.
Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism,
1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995). The relative insignificance of the global South forGerman environmentalism has recently been emphasized by Frank Uekötter, The
Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism (London 2014),
13–14.
54. Michael Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika. Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt, 2005); Marcia Wright, “Local Roots of
Policy in German East Africa,” Journal of African History 9 (1968): 621–30.
55. The frictions between the bureaucratic state of the European tradition, intermediary and despotic forms of power, and African ideas of authority have been
one of the core issues in the historical and political science study of the African
state, see Andreas Eckert, Herrschen und Verwalten. Afrikanische Bürokraten,
staatliche Ordnung und Politik in Tanzania, 1920–1970 (Munich, 2007), 10–22,
31–38; Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika; Jeffrey Herbst, States
and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton,
NJ, 2000).
56. Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riots. Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH, 1994), 187–96.
57. Frederick Cooper, “Conf lict and Connection. Rethinking Colonial African
History,” American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1527–28.
58. Speech of Bernhard Dernburg in the Reichstag on 18 February 1908, see
Deutsches Kolonialblatt 19 (1908): 229.

30 The Nature of German Imperialism
59. This study uses “transcolonial” to refer to links across borders that took place
or were relevant first and foremost in the colonies; “transnational” designates
relations across national borders in Europe; “transimperial” denotes interactions
between the imperial powers, which oscillated between metropole and colony.
60. Corey Ross, “Tropical Nature as Global Patrimoine. Imperialism and International Nature Protection in the Early Twentieth Century,” Past & Present Supplement 10 (2015): 214–39, 215.
61. David Blackbourn, “‘As Dependent on Each Other as Man and Wife’: Cultural Contacts and Transfers,” in Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain.
Essays on Cultural Affinity, ed. Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth (Oxford,2008), 27; John M MacKenzie, “‘Mutual Goodwill and Admiration’ or ‘Jealous
Ill-Will’? Empire and Popular Culture,” in Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian
Britain. Essays on Cultural Affinity, ed. Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth(Oxford, 2008), 91–113.
62. Antoinette Burton, “Getting Outside the Global: Re-Positioning British
Imperialism in World History,” in Race, Nation and Empire. Making Histories,
1750 to the Present, ed. Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (Manchester, 2010),
213.
63. Russell A Berman, “Der ewige Zweite. Deutschlands Sekundärkolonialismus,” in Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, ed.
Birthe Kundrus (Frankfurt, 2003), 23.
64. For the broad canvas of transimperial entanglements between Germany and
Britain, see Ulrike Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen. Deutschland und Großbritannien als Imperialmächte in Afrika 1880–1914 (Frankfurt, 2011).
65. Ibid., 8.
66. See, for example, Karen Brown, “Tropical Medicine and Animal Diseases:
Onderstepoort and the Development of Veterinary Science in South Africa 1908–
1950,” Journal of Southern African Studies 31 (2005): 513–29.
67. Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age”; Zimmerman,“Africa in Imperial and Transnational History.”
68. James Morton Turner, “Rethinking American Exceptionalism. Toward a
Transnational History of National Parks, Wilderness, and Protected Areas,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Andrew Isenberg (Oxford,2014), 282–308; Ian Tyrrell, “America’s National Parks: The Transnational Creation of National Space in the Progressive Era,” Journal of American Studies 46,
no. 1 (2012): 1–21.
69. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich (BayHStA) IV, Hirsch Papers 10 35:
Letter to his parents, Iraku, 3 July 1907; Hanns Braun, Die Reise nach Ostafrika(Berlin, 1939), 225.
70. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object(New York, 2002), 31; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender andSexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995), 40.
71. The term characteristic animal had been coined by Alfred Russel Wallace,
The Geographical Distribution of Animals. With a Study of the Relations of Living
and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth’s Surface, 2 vols.
(London, 1876); cf. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Oxford, 1996), chapters
11 and 12; Susanne Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen. Das Naturkundemuseum
des deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871–1914 (Cologne, 2003), 97–100.

Introduction 31

72. Volker Langbehn, “Introduction. Picturing Race: Visuality and German
Colonialism,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed.
Volker Langbehn (New York, 2010), 1–33; David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire. Raceand Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2011); John Philip
Short, Magic Lantern Empire. Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca, NY,2012).
73. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony:
Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 4.
74. Eckhart G Franz and Peter Geissler, Das Deutsch-Ostafrika-Archiv. Inventar
der Abteilung “German Records” im Nationalarchiv der Vereinigten Republik
Tansania, Dar-es-Salaam, 2 vols. (Marburg, 1973), 48–57.
75. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial
Common Sense (Princeton, NJ, 2009).
76. Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism. Culture, History, and theEmergence of Western Governmentality,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 26(1997): 165.
77. Libby Robin, “Conservation and Preservation,” in The Palgrave Dictionaryof Transnational History, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (Basingstoke,2009), 191–94.
78. Joseph C Miller, “History and Africa/Africa and History,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1–32, 16.