Seeing like a Racial State: The Colonial and Racial Capitalist Roots of German Citizenship

How do states determine who should be a member of their citizenry, and what logics drive these decisions? In the German context, this question has predominantly been answered through an emphasis on state formation. Through a historical case study of Germany's 1913 citizenship act, this article brings a different set of drivers into view. It situates the making of the 1913 act within German overseas colonialism, the territorial expansion to the European east, German mass emigration to the settler-colonies of the Americas, shifting labor and employment relations, and the increase of foreign workers in the German metropole. Mobilizing the postcolonial migration scholarship and theories of racial capitalism, the article thus reveals how citizenship laws emerged as one of the tools of state power to balance the demands of racial and colonial capitalism for land, labor, and resources with the desire to “secure” the white German polity from the racial other in Europe and the colonies. It further demonstrates how racial capitalist and colonial processes of othering demarcate the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately, this shows that the making of the German citizenry is as much a story of racial and colonial capitalism as it is a story of state building.