This book sets out to examine the internal workings of a colonial settler society drawing on
aspects of post-colonial theory and whiteness studies. It focuses on the construction of a
hierarchical social order in German Southwest Africa in the period 1884-1914. In doing so it
explores the historical creation of categories of race and the construction of a concept of
whiteness within white settler society in Germany's foremost settler colony. In the colonial
environment the presence of some settlers was deemed to be more desirable than others. As a
consequence policies of exclusion and racial rhetoric were employed to exclude undesirable
settlers from white society. What emerged was a pioneer society in which undesirable settlers
were socially politically and economically excluded whilst desirable settlers sought to forge
a racially and culturally exclusive utopia. Based on extensive archival material from the
Bundesarchiv in Berlin as well as a wide range of printed sources the book presents an insight
into strategies of social control power the establishment of social privilege and
constructions of whiteness in a settler society.
