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Racialized and gendered beauty standards operated as a form of everyday colonialism and violence in the global German Empire. Through routine practices of grooming, dress, hygiene, and aesthetic judgment, white German women actively produced and normalized shifting racial hierarchies in both daily life and print culture. These intimate, feminized practices functioned as mechanisms of classification and exclusion, extending imperial power beyond formal institutions. By centering embodied habits often dismissed as trivial, Kate McGregor demonstrates that empire was not only governed through law and force but lived and reproduced in everyday life, positioning white women as active agents in the making of colonial rule.
a fresh consideration of German colonial race policy and violence through the lens of contemporary European beauty standards and heteronormative ideas of attractiveness.
— Dr. Adam A. Blackler, University of Wyoming
Kate McGregor is a historian of modern Germany and European imperialism, specializing in gender, race, and colonialism. She completed her PhD at the University of New Brunswick, where her research examined racialized beauty norms in the global German Empire. Her work has appeared in edited volumes on gender and German colonialism, and she has presented internationally on topics including race, aesthetics, and colonial power. McGregor’s research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She currently teaches courses on European history and gender at Mount Allison University.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Global German Empire: Expansion and Occupation in Africa, the South Seas, and the Kiautschou Bay Leasehold
Chapter 2. The Preservation of Whiteness: Settler Beauty Norms in the Metropole and the Colonial Sphere
Chapter 3. Ugly or Civilized? Race and Aesthetics in the African Colonies
Chapter 4. Pretty but Inferior? Hierarchies of Appearance in the South Seas and China
Chapter 5. Beauty and Belonging: Agency and Self-Expression in Colonized Communities
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index