The Carceral Landscapes of the German Imperial Settler State

Seeking to identify the corrective aesthetics of what legal historians have referred to as the doctrine of ‘protective supervision,’ this paper explores the architectures and rescaled landscapes of a constellation of transregional resettlement programs that took shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century in imperial Germany. At this time, rural and pastoral territories, both internal and overseas, were reimagined as part of a legal order that aggregated recombinant forms of expulsion, appropriation, discipline, and supervision, formations that were allied in their shared focus on the redemption of ‘wasted’ land and ‘idle’ bodies. These concerns crystalized in legal debates in the 1890s regarding the merits of the forced migration of recidivist prisoners, the unhoused, and the itinerant poor to rural regions at the imperial edge—Germany’s inland annexed eastern frontier and what emerged as its ‘model’ overseas colony, German South-West Africa.

These debates took as an anchor point the recent appearance in Germany, beginning in 1882, of a system of Arbeiter-Kolonien, domestic labor colonies that were resonant with a broader movement that pursued agrarian colonization as a putatively rehabilitative policy. Several years later, in 1886, a government-sponsored program of mass resettlement took shape through policies of internal colonization, organized around the transplantation of working-class German families to the annexed eastern borderlands of Prussia and the forced population transfer of the region’s Slavic population. While some work has been done exploring the relation between the resettlement programs pursued in German South-West Africa and in the eastern Prussian borderlands, little account has been given to the carceral structures that underpin what Hanneke Stuit calls the ‘pastoral entrapment’ of such agrarian colonization efforts. This paper speculates on the role these experimental spatial practices played, as disciplined sites of ‘productive’ virtue, in the settler towns and carceral landscapes of German occupied South-West Africa.