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Capturing the history of thousands of German women recruited to colonize Southwest Africa between the 1890s and 1940s, The Servants of Empire engages a radical nationalist history of German efforts to prevent interracial unions and establish permanent white settlement. As colonists, sponsored women often supported or even helped perpetrate extreme patterns of racist violence and vigilantism in Namibia, which linked them inextricably to marked atrocities such as the Herero and Nama Genocides. Navigating the intersections of German attitudes toward race, class, ethnicity, gender, and nation, this revealing study traces the German settler community’s gossip and rumors to uncover how the many poor white female settlers in Southwest Africa disrupted bourgeois race and gender relations and contributed to the trenchant sexual and racial violence in the territory.
“The author’s efforts to theorize gossip and rumors, while covering a time frame beyond 1915, should make this volume of interest to experts in German colonial and women’s history…Recommended.” • Choice
“O’Donnell’s thoroughly researched book offers a wealth of insights into the unstable, gendered, classed, and racialized dynamics governing settler society in German Southwest Africa. With welcome attention to paranoia and panic, gossip and rumour, The Servants of Empire reveals institutionalized regimes of violence and coercion aimed at Africans and intrusive regimes of internal boundary-drawing focused on the vulnerability of white German women’s bodies.” • Jeff Bowersox, University College London
K. Molly O’Donnell is Professor of History and Director of Humanities honors at William Paterson University of New Jersey. She is the chief editor of The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (2005) with Renate Bridenthal and Nancy Reagin.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Map of Southwest Africa
Part I: The Origins and Biopolitics of German Women’s Settlement
Chapter 1. “Colonial Fanaticism”
Chapter 2. “The Defilement of our Daughters”
Chapter 3. “The Race War”
Part II: Colonial Gossip, Moral Panics and Racial Conflict
Chapter 4. “The Malice of Native Women”
Chapter 5. “A Moral Danger for the Children of White Mothers”
Chapter 6. “African Stories”
Part III: German Women’s Colonialism after the Loss of the German Colonies
Chapter 7. German Colonial Women in the First World War
Chapter 8. Weimar Women’s Colonial Activism
Chapter 9. German Women and the Nazi Colonial Movement
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index