Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa

Abstract

Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile for most. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort of turning outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In his innovative environmental history, Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaisereich’s everyday violence.

Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology

“…Those are not, importantly, processes devoid of politics and hierarchies. As Kalb (2022) shows in the context of colonial German Southwest Africa, 'environing offers the analytical space to incorporate technological, human, and animal engineering while acknowledging messy hierarchies' (p. 3). These, significantly, index both the success and the failure of infrastructure, as Kalb notices: 'The exploitation of contract, migrant, and forced labor to build and maintain such structures was essential, and Germans employed discriminatory policies, everyday colonial violence, and genocide to use African bodies meant to compensate for the failures of existing structures' (p. 3).…”