Racial Capitalism and the Imperial Germany’s African Schutzgebiete

Racial Capitalism — a social theory first proposed by Cedric Robinson in his 1984 treatise Black Marxism, but now experiencing a rhetorical resurgence — has already served as a useful frame of historical analysis, mostly applied to the cases of the United States and Great Britain; as of yet it has not been applied to Germany. This paper uses the theoretical framework of racial capitalism to clarify how the German Empire integrated the African Schutzgebiete into capitalist society by imposing a racial-social-hierarchy. Through imperial socio-economic engineering, native Africans were relegated to positions as propertyless, menial labourers. Furthermore, the boundaries between Weiß and Schwarz — Europäern and Eingeborene — in the Schutzgebiete were constantly in flux to accommodate continued labour needs. Racial (re)categorisation in the Kaiserreich reveals that socio-economic status was fundamental to determining race, and emphasises the necessity of including socio-economic status in any historical discussion of the race within the Schutzgebiete. The analysis offered here-in borrows from traditional historical materialism, from Robinson, and from contemporary critics and advocates of historical Marxism in order to broaden racial capitalism’s utility as a theoretical framework for socio-economic historical analysis of capitalist societies globally.