Die (Un-)Erwünschten : Rassismus, Arbeit und koloniale Ordnung an der Küste Tansanias, 1885-1914

Abstract

The central question posed in this project is: In what way did the colonial labor regime in German East Africa correspond with the formation of a global color line and the growing debates over the relationship between race and labor at the end of the nineteenth century? The division between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ subalterns made by colonial rulers is the topic around which this project is structured. By examining three case studies, this project highlights the emergence of a colonial labor order in early colonial Tanzania. In doing so, it shows the discursive entanglements that bound local processes to global, transregional, inter-imperial, and metropolitan phenomena. The first chapter focuses on the recruitment and employment of Asian indentured laborers on plantations owned by the German-­East African Plantation Company, and so raises questions regarding global migration as well as free and unfree labor during High Imperialism. The second chapter contextualizes the “education of the Negro to work” as a result of a transatlantic knowledge exchange and ties this process to the question of school policy in colonial Tanzania. The chapter then goes on to analyze the recruitment policy of state-run schools in which Muslims, first and foremost, were to be trained as subaltern civil servants. The third chapter in turn focuses on unwanted subalterns and contextualizes the deportation of poor whites who were seen as a danger to both the colonial (labor) regime, as well as to the “white prestige” of colonial rulers. The project will demonstrate that this was a broader problem and that the legislative solution ultimately reached in German East Africa has to be analyzed within the context of imperial border regimes.