Hermann J. Hiery - Böcker

The German Colonial Experience provides readers with an understanding of how the Germans gained, explored, pacified, ruled, and exploited their colonies prior to their loss in World War I. Knoll and Hiery show how Africans, Chinese, and Pacific Islanders reacted to German rule, how the Germans ran the daily affairs of government, their vision for the colonized peoples, and how the colonizers and the colonized perceived one another. In other words, how did German colonial rule actually work? This book intensely scrutinizes colonial documents, most of them in German script, from archives not only in Germany, but also from places such as Australia, New Guinea, and Samoa. Many of these documents have never previously been published, even in the original German.

British and German ambitions have clashed in the Pacific at many times in the last two centuries. This is a study of those episodes, and their effects on the European powers and the Pacific Islanders involved. It throws light on the activities of missionaries in Micronesia, head-hunters in New Guinea, Law-makers in Tonga and the influence of the British and Germans in the region.The book considers: European perceptions of Pacific islanders and vice versa; the ecological effect of European intervention, both on the environment and its inhabitants; the efforts to impose a European rule of law in the South Pacific; and the area of sexuality as a specific form of Pacific-European interaction where cultural differences between European and traditional behaviour was at its most marked.