Environing Empire

Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were largely futile. For years colonists fought ocean waters and desert landscapes in their struggle to turn outwardly barren landscapes into a profitable settler colony, a project that had failed long before its invasion by British and South African forces in World War I. As Martin Kalb demonstrates in this innovative environmental history, understanding the material "realities on the ground" reveals not only the folly of this particular colonial endeavor, but of the fantasies that drove the imperial vision of the Kaiserreich.