This book sets out to examine the internal workings of a colonial settler society drawing on aspects of post-colonial theory and whiteness studies. It focuses on the construction of a hierarchical social order in German Southwest Africa in the period 1884-1914. In doing so it explores the historical creation of categories of race and the construction of a concept of whiteness within white settler society in Germany¿s foremost settler colony. In the colonial environment the presence of some settlers was deemed to be more desirable than others. As a consequence policies of exclusion and racial rhetoric were employed to exclude undesirable settlers from white society. What emerged was a pioneer society in which undesirable settlers were socially, politically and economically excluded whilst desirable settlers sought to forge a racially and culturally exclusive utopia. Based on extensive archival material from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin as well as a wide range of printed sources, the book presents an insight into strategies of social control, power, the establishment of social privilege and constructions of whiteness in a settler society.

The Author: Robbie Aitken graduated from the University of St Andrews, Scotland before gaining a doctorate in German Studies from the University of Liverpool in 2002. He is currently a Research Fellow in the German Department at the University of Liverpool.

Contents: Germans in Africa (Namibia) ¿ German colonialism ¿ Development of a settler society ¿ Undesirable, marginal white settlers ¿ Constructions of race and the categorisation of people, constructions and articulations of whiteness ¿ Inter-ethnic relations and colonial law ¿ Hans Grimm, colonial literature and the notion of degeneration (Verkafferung) ¿ Foreign immigration and the normalisation (blackening/whitening) of Afrikaner immigrants.