The Color Line and the National Line in the Aftermath of Genocide: Property and Citizenship Rights in Southwest Africa and Republican Turkey

The color line and the national line constitute two essential features of the modern era. W. E. B. DuBois coined the first term, or at least gave it greater valence, in his famous sentence in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” The “national line” has no such illustrious progenitor as DuBois. But it, too, signifies the delineation of discrete population groups, each supposedly pure in form. Both terms signify a hierarchical order in which the racial or national elite exercise rights, while those defined as minorities or subject races languish as a “problem” or “question.”

As DuBois well understood, systems of rights, rather than establishing one single, universal standard, are generally hierarchical in nature. They function according to definitions of national, racial, and gender difference. Sometimes rights regimes are the creation of great democratic movements, but they can also be the outcome of the most brutal and repressive policies exercised by color and national-line states, including the most extreme case of genocide.

Genocides, then, are acts of political and economic creation. In their aftermath, elites typically create new forms of color or national-line states and societies. This presentation uses two very distinct cases, the annihilation of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa and of the Armenians and Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire, to shift the sightline away from the genocidal event to genocide’s political and economic effects. Both genocides entailed a huge transfer of wealth and a new system of rights that enabled the development of a white settler class in Southwest Africa and a Muslim bourgeoisie in Turkey, both of which exercised rights over property and citizenship.