Servants of Empire

K. Molly O’Donnell is Professor of History and Director of Humanities honors at William Paterson University of New Jersey. She is the chief editor of The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (2005) with Renate Bridenthal and Nancy Reagin.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsMap of Southwest AfricaIntroductionPart I: The Origins and Biopolitics of German Women’s SettlementChapter 1. “Colonial Fanaticism”Chapter 2. “The Defilement of our Daughters”Chapter 3. “The Race War”Part II: Colonial Gossip, Moral Panics and Racial ConflictChapter 4. “The Malice of Native Women”Chapter 5. “A Moral Danger for the Children of White Mothers”Chapter 6. “African Stories”Part III: German Women’s Colonialism after the Loss of the German ColoniesChapter 7. German Colonial Women in the First World WarChapter 8. Weimar Women’s Colonial ActivismChapter 9. German Women and the Nazi Colonial MovementConclusionAppendixBibliographyIndex

“The author’s efforts to theorize gossip and rumors, while covering a time frame beyond 1915, should make this volume of interest to experts in German colonial and women’s history…Recommended.” • Choice“O’Donnell’s thoroughly researched book offers a wealth of insights into the unstable, gendered, classed, and racialized dynamics governing settler society in German Southwest Africa. With welcome attention to paranoia and panic, gossip and rumour, The Servants of Empire reveals institutionalized regimes of violence and coercion aimed at Africans and intrusive regimes of internal boundary-drawing focused on the vulnerability of white German women’s bodies.” • Jeff Bowersox, University College London