“De-particularizing” a Bourgeois Ethos in the German Empire: A Postcolonial Complement to Bourdieu’s Theory of State-Making

Articulating Postcolonialism and Bourdieu’s Theory of the State

The postcolonial literature is replete with vivid accounts of how race, class, gender, and national identities have been analogized in discourses that straddled the divide between metropole and colony (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Hall 1992; McClintock 1995; Stoler 1995). In elucidating the co-constitutive genealogy of such identities, contributions in this vein continue to alert us to the critical role of Europe’s colonial entanglements in the emergence of Western “modernity” in both its material and symbolic dimensions.

However, as Magubane (2004) makes apparent, a particular theoretical lens can add further nuance and complexity to such findings. Magubane articulates postcolonialism with a critical Marxist perspective to highlight how racial analogies and constructions of gender served particular ideological ends in class struggles in nineteenth-century Britain and South Africa. On the one hand, these analogies naturalized a political economy with its ostensible separation of the “political” and the “economic” and obscured the violence of supplanting a subsistence economy with capitalist relations of production. On the other hand, workers and dominated fractions within the middle class deployed various racial analogies in an effort to enhance their relative position in society. In interrogating the matter from a particular theoretical angle, Magubane not only identifies a more clear-cut ideological function of analogizing race, class, and gender but also shows how a repertoire of racial analogies was often differentially refracted by the field of class antagonisms, depending on the position of those doing the analogizing.

I see similar analytic purchase in bringing Bourdieusian perspectives on state-making to bear on colonial analogies of race and class. The Bourdieusian framework offers an angle from which to employ the postcolonial lens in an original way, lending contour to a central dynamic that remains diffuse in extant work. In the case of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, this framework can help us discover not only that specific ideas of class and citizenship were forged in a colonial context and imbued with racial meaning but also, more specifically, how the superimposition and conflation of race and class obfuscated the bourgeois origins of a certain view of the good life as it came to be endorsed by the interventionist policies of the emerging German welfare state. At the same time, this approach advances Bourdieu’s own theory of state-making by identifying a concrete historical mechanism through which the class-cultural standpoint of civil servants in social space is de-particularized.

Significantly, Bourdieu’s edifice itself assigns a central role to analogies, rendering an articulation with postcolonial perspectives especially promising and even urgent. For Bourdieu, “structural homologies” between the relations of dominant and dominated within different fields are prone to overdetermine one another, with every move in one field resonating with and having implications for antagonisms in other fields.

Bourdieu’s (1984:475) concept of the habitus provides the conceptual underpinnings of such resonances: The socialized body works as “an analogical operator establishing all sorts of practical equivalences between the different divisions of the social world.” This is driven by the ambiguous quality and polysemous logic of the binary categories that organize such divisions: oppositions such as high versus low, spiritual versus material, unique versus common, brilliant versus dull, and so on (Bourdieu 1984:467–70; indeed, postcolonialism and Bourdieu also converge in their focus on such asymmetrical binaries). These binaries easily allow for, even render inevitable, transferences and resonances among the struggles in different fields. Bourdieu’s studies on Heidegger, masculine domination, the categories of academic evaluation, the religious field, and several others all show how mental categories acquired in one field are carried over and applied to antagonisms in others—albeit in a “euphemized” form. In that sense, every field can be said to be a transfiguration of the broader class conflict within the field of power and the field of social classes (see Bourdieu 1995:215–23).

Bringing together Bourdieusian theory and postcolonial insights, I propose that analogies between metropolitan and colonial social divisions operate as a pivotal mechanism of de-particularization in the context of German state-making. This mechanism explains how a bourgeois cultural orthodoxy, with a readily apparent standpoint and origin in a particular section of the social space, is transmuted into a “doxa,” a viewpoint that can “make believe that it is not itself a viewpoint” (Bourdieu 2014:28).

The de-particularizing effect lies in both anchoring and nesting the social divisions of the metropole in homologous colonial divisions of colonizer versus colonized, German/European versus native, white versus nonwhite. To put it more concretely, to the extent that heterodox positions in the metropole were tacitly conflated with colonial subjects, as both were viewed through the same bourgeois categories of perception, the other side of both distinctions became implicitly conflated as well, and orthodox positions increasingly came to stand for Germandom as such. The crucial effect is tied to polysemy: Through such analogizing maneuvers, the oppositions of the metropole acquire a “semantic density and suggestive power [which] derive from the fact that they bear all the isomorphic meanings they receive in all the different universes [italics added]” (Bourdieu 1996:271).

As the distinctions from both contexts are superimposed, the effect that de-particularizes a metropolitan orthodoxy occurs precisely because the colonial chord is inevitably struck whenever homologous oppositions operate. Once the divisions cohere, “you can only pass . . . to a discourse on a particular point . . . if you pass through the mediation and the logic of the whole system” (Bourdieu 2022:243). The coherence brings in the meaning associated with colonial divisions at the same time as it obscures the arbitrary nature of making that connection: The congruence itself has a naturalizing effect. Thus, the bourgeois signifier “naturally” resonates with Germandom, Europeanness, or even whiteness as such. To the extent that such resonances are effectuated by symbolic productions sponsored and endorsed by the state, an “official” view of what it means to be German is thus de-particularized.

In many ways, the nesting of metropolitan oppositions within a broader colonial difference also carves out a newly inclusive position for the metropolitan subaltern classes. It tacitly invites the latter to partake in a common cultural identity constructed against a colonial foil, but on the bourgeoisie’s class-cultural terms. As bourgeois positions recede and fold into, as much as constitute, an imagined community of the “national” in de-particularizing comparisons with natives, the culturally dominated are incentivized to endorse precisely those cultural arbitraries that a bourgeois discourse offers as the most salient contrasts between Germans and the colonial other.

Fleshing out such a mechanism of de-particularization offers concrete directions for empirical research. First, the “work” of de-particularization mentioned by Bourdieu in this case comes more clearly into view as the symbolic production of establishing and articulating a coherence between metropolitan and colonial distinctions. Researchers thus need to empirically explore and specify the objective conditions for the “mythopoeic act” (Bourdieu 1977:124) that does the symbolic labor of blending the organizing distinctions of both contexts. This entails identifying “bridge actors” who are not only actively involved in both metropolitan and colonial contexts but who also have a professional mandate to produce and elaborate an official view of the world.

Second, the concept of de-particularization provides a specific focus in examining analogies that became operative in the symbolic productions of such bridge actors. Scholars often concentrate on how colonial metaphors played into the “othering,” even racializing, of metropolitan subalterns through potent imagery likening slums to jungles and paupers to savages (as in urban ethnographies by the likes of Henry Mayhew, William Booth, and Eugene Sue; see e.g., McClintock 1995). The concept of de-particularization, in contrast, redirects our view to colonial analogies that primarily transfigured the meanings of the dominant position (in both the colonial and metropolitan contexts).

Such heuristic considerations set our sights on the case of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (hereafter, the Verein). As I show in the subsequent section, the Verein, with leading social scientists and senior state officials dominating its membership, was a powerful player in the public interpretation of reality, providing widely regarded diagnoses of public problems and policy advice. In many ways, “seeing like a state” in Imperial Germany meant seeing through the eyes of the Verein: Its surveys, treatises, published proceedings, and associated journals rendered a comprehensive picture of the pressing issues of the nation in the making.

The Verein für Sozialpolitik and the State

After German unification in 1871 and the subsiding of the national question, public concern turned to an “inner” consolidation of the Empire in light of enduring and substantial divisions between the working and bourgeois classes. It is in this sense that Imperial Germany can be regarded as a “nationalizing state” (Brubaker 1996, 2011). This task was mainly taken up by national economists (Lindenlaub 1967:15), specifically by those subscribing to the historical school of economics (see Grimmer-Solem 2003). These scholars, who were dubbed “Kathedersozialisten” or “socialists of the chair” for their interventionist ideas, stood opposed to a Manchester-capitalist, laissez-faire brand of economics and advocated for social policy and social reform to level the stark differences between the swelling masses of laborers and the middle class. It was to that end that the Verein was founded in 1873.

The Verein stood in a line of bourgeois associations in Germany that had likewise been born out of concern with the social question, the specter of socialism, and the threat of social revolution. Like the Verein, many of these associations also pioneered social surveys as a tool of fact-finding and activism (see Oberschall 1965; Reulecke 1981). What set the Verein apart from its precursors, however, was the fact that it was dominated by scholars and administrative officials and thus squarely situated within the civil service (which, in Germany, made up much of the educated bourgeoisie and included university professors) rather than the propertied bourgeoisie (Grimmer-Solem 2003:68).

From the outset, the economist Gustav Schmoller was a towering figure in the Verein. He would take up the rein of chairman only in 1890 (until his death in 1917), but his influence in setting the Verein’s direction was considerable from the beginning. Despite the range of positions assembled in the Verein, it generally sailed the course of Schmoller’s conservatism, envisioning a decisive and comprehensive role of the state in bridging the rift between the classes (Lindenlaub 1967:153–96).

By all accounts, the Verein’s channels of influence were vast and its impact significant. For one, many high-ranking officials and notable municipal officers were active members of the Verein or former students of its leading figures (Lindenlaub 1967:7, 150).

Second, the Verein’s publications had a wide readership among state officials, and Schmoller’s Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft, explicitly intended for a wider audience, was arguably the most important social policy journal in the Empire (Grimmer-Solem 2003:82, 2019:23).

Third, the Verein’s leadership overlapped substantially with the boards of a host of other influential organizations that were pivotal in disseminating its reformist ideas and reached deep into the state. Among them was the Staatswissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, or State-Scientific Society, a Berlin discussion forum founded by Schmoller in 1883 with an eye to fostering exchange between leading academics and high-ranking officials (see Staatswissenschaftliche Gesellschaft 1983). The Gesellschaft für Soziale Reform, or Society for Social Reform, was another such organization, whose relationship with the Verein was conceived in terms of a division of labor: The Verein was to focus more on academic research relating to social policy, and the Society was to conduct the nitty-gritty lobbyism, not least via local chapters on the municipal level; rally like-minded reformers; and engage worker associations in the common pursuit of social policy enactment (Ratz 1980). The Society’s operations were flanked by an influential periodical, the Soziale Praxis (Social Praxis), which served as its de facto publication outlet. It was one of only a few publications closely read in state and municipal administrative offices and in newsrooms of both the bourgeois and social democratic press and even in union offices (Ratz 1980:25). Its editor-in-chief, Ernst Francke, was a board member of the Verein. The periodical was eventually headquartered in the Bureau für Sozialpolitik (Office for Social Policy), which served as a central social policy hub and “clearing house” (vom Bruch 1985:96) for the closely intertwined activities of the Verein, the Soziale Praxis, and the Gesellschaft für Soziale Reform. The Bureau too had strong ties to the government, which regularly turned to it for its social policy expertise.

Finally, as social policy on the municipal level increasingly evolved into scientific social work and professional civil servants and experts began to displace local notables from the propertied bourgeoisie in the municipal offices in the 1890s, “[s]ome of the ideas the new officials brought to bear on social reform came from national economics and the proto-sociology of groups like the Verein für Sozialpolitik” (Steinmetz 1993:193). Indeed, between 1890 and 1918, it was predominantly on the municipal level where the interventionist state took its progressive shape (Ritter 1998:53–67), and here the Verein often had “direct access to political power” (Steinmetz 1993:199).

Thus, the Verein could rely on a vast personal network and flow of information that extended deep into the bureaucracy on both the national, state, and municipal levels, a capillary system that innervated administrative structures throughout the Empire, even reaching worker associations on the other side of the class divide. As the premier advocate for a resolution of the worker question through social policy, the Verein’s specific interpretations of reality had an authoritative force in Germany and certainly among the civil servants who dominated the state. As vom Bruch (1980:65; see Lindenlaub 1967:149 for second half of quote) observes, it was not without merit when Schmoller wrote to his fellow member Lujo Brentano in 1912:

[The Verein’s publications are] filling the intellectual horizon of all influential state and municipal administrators, of most journalists and members of parliament. The Verein für Sozialpolitik is today dominating those who govern. . . . The decisive people in the Office of the Interior in the last ten years were Caspar and Wiedefeld; they stand entirely on our ground. And the secretaries Bülow, Posadowsky, Bethmann, Delbrück do as well; they only cannot admit to it as openly lest they upset the agrarians and feudals, the coal and iron barons.

Schmoller’s judgment speaks to the question to what extent the Verein’s views on a standard “German” life can be taken as congruous with the dominant views within the state apparatus. After all, Bourdieu (1994, 2014) theorized the state not as a monolithic entity but as a bureaucratic field that, while relatively autonomous, is a site of struggles that mirror class relations. In light of a still widespread perception of a stranglehold of the landed gentry, or “Junkers,” on the bureaucracy, this question warrants some attention.

Indeed, this view has come under robust attack, most notably and seminally by the intervention of Blackbourn and Eley (1984). For one, a very different picture regarding Junker dominance in the bureaucracy emerges when distinguishing between Imperial offices and Prussian offices. In 1895, only 12 of 86 higher civil servants working in Imperial offices (not counting the Foreign Office) were noble by birth (Blackbourn and Eley 1984:246). Second, studies on administrative decision-making show that a bureaucratic esprit de corps favoring “modernist” social and economic policies generally prevailed over Junker class interests regardless of civil servants’ social origins (Bonham 1991; Steinmetz 1993). In his survey of administrative stances on key economic issues directly affecting the landed aristocracy between 1889 and 1909, Bonham (1991: 362) finds that as many as 38 of the 42 higher officials from the Imperial administration in his sample consistently opposed the Junkers. Finally, a marked trend in the final 20 years of the German Empire further shifted political power away from the Prussian aristocracy (Nonn 2017:80–82). Under Bismarck, most legislation was drafted in the Prussian offices, but this generally became the prerogative of the Imperial administration in the post-Bismarck era. At the same time, the Bundesrat, or federal council, where Prussia was an eminent force, lost much of its initiative in governance and increasingly took a back seat to negotiations between the Imperial executive and Parliament.

This dominance of the type of civil servant associated with the Verein was also reflected in the highest offices of the Imperial administration. Imperial state secretaries were appointed by the Kaiser in consultation with the Chancellor, but most were seasoned civil servants who had worked their way up the administrative ladder (Lerman 2015:23). The office of the Chancellor exhibited a clear trend in this direction as well, from Bismarck, a staunch Junker, to Bülow, a diplomat trained by Verein member Adolf Wagner, and finally to Bethmann Hollweg and Michaelis, two career bureaucrats. The grip of the Verein on state officials grew even tighter after a Prussian law of 1906 made certified studies in economics and state sciences a requirement for entry into the civil service (Bonham 1991:346).

However, even if the Verein “dominated those that govern,” as Schmoller held, this still leaves open to what extent its state-sponsored definition of Germandom could effectively adjudicate nation-ization struggles (Gorski 2013) among opposing visions of the nation. Yet here, too, the field was dominated by civil servants and thus by a segment of the social space highly congruent with the Verein’s membership. The leadership tiers of key organizations invested in defining and promoting Germandom, such as the Colonial Society, the Navy League, and the Pan German League, were overwhelmingly on the public payroll, although the degree to which they hailed from top-level bureaucratic positions varied (Chickering 1984:115). The nobility, on the other hand, had little to offer in this regard. With an outlook far more provincial than that of the English aristocracy, they provided no comprehensive social model comparable to that of the English gentleman (Blackbourn and Eley 1984:231–34; see also Malinowski 2011:149).

Unsurprisingly, then, the culturally dominant had a prerogative in defining German culture, and this prerogative held fast even with the relative devaluation of Bildung in an industrializing society, as even Ringer (1969:139) concedes. Nationalist advocacy groups espoused different ideas of the national interest that often clashed with the government (Eley 1980), but they would have been unlikely to object to the Verein’s essentially bourgeois rendition of Germandom.

The Verein was thus in a propitious position to impose a universal definition of a standard German life as the focal point of the emerging interventionist state. Yet as I will show, the Verein’s construction of the worker question still exhibited a blatant and outspoken particularism. The de-particularization of the Verein’s own standpoint, and thus of the class ethos of civil servants as a universal (rather than a particular) reference point, as a national standard above and outside social space, was yet to be effectuated.

Bourgeois Orthodoxy and the Worker Question

In his 1872 inaugural address at the Eisenach conference, which would lead to the founding of the Verein, Schmoller invoked the history of the Greek and Roman Empires as chilling examples of advanced cultures that found their ultimate demise in an inability to reconcile the antagonism between the upper and lower classes. For Schmoller (1873:4), however, proper redress did not lie in a materialist leveling of class differences. As Schmoller made clear, the “chasm in ethos, education, views, and ideals” was far more deleterious than property relations. At stake in bringing the worker into the fold of the “organism of society and the state” (Schmoller 1873:5), then, was an assimilation to a bourgeois ethos.

In Schmoller’s treatise “The Worker Question,” which he would later consider the Verein’s political manifesto (Grimmer-Solem 2003:138), this bourgeois cultural standpoint of his (and by extension the Verein’s) social reformism is made even more explicit. Here, the deviant life of the worker is openly measured against the yardstick of bourgeois class-culture. As Schmoller (1864:525) writes,

What generally hinders the elevation of the standard [of life] are the ethical conditions of the workers. Prone to despair over any future, the worker lives only for the moment, hour by hour; he doesn’t save, enters recklessly into marriage before knowing his future secured, may even hope for an improvement of his condition in letting his wife and children work with him by which he often intellectually and physically poisons them, he has no sense for the higher and ethically ennobling pleasures of a comfortable abode, of a personally owned hearth and home, of a greater cleanliness, of adequate reading, he may even rely on a misguided poverty tax that robs him completely of any desire to work and suffocates the very last seed of honor and sense of responsibility in him.

Here, we see a candid juxtaposition of a bourgeois cultural orthodoxy to the heterodox lives of workers. This perspective exhibits the typical value orientations of the German educated bourgeoisie: the valorization of a methodical pursuit of life, long-term planning, and thrift; a concern for self-edification and the education of one’s children; a division of labor among the sexes; an ethical notion of work; a valorization of personal independence and responsibility; and norms of sedentariness and domesticity (see Kocka 1993).

Such openly ethical standards also informed the Verein’s social surveys on the worker question, most prominently the survey on the Condition of the Rural Laborers (Verein für Sozialpolitik 1892). Deteriorating economic relations in rural Germany provided the context for this investigation (Mommsen and Aldenhoff 1993). The liberation of the serfs had led to an increasing proletarianization of rural laborers, which, in turn, precipitated their mass emigration to the cities or overseas. Freed from patriarchical responsibilities, landowners increasingly resorted to Polish seasonal workers, which further drove down wages in the rural labor market. As elsewhere, such developments gave rise to a general concern that the increasingly desolate circumstances of rural laborers would provide a fertile ground for the spread of socialism.

The Verein’s survey sought to acquire a detailed picture of the situation in the German countryside (Riesebrodt 1984). The proposal for the investigation was submitted by Max Sering during a board meeting on September 26, 1890. Sering was a professor of agricultural economics in Berlin and three years earlier had published a major study on agricultural competition and homesteading in North America (Grimmer-Solem 2019; Nelson 2024; Zimmerman 2010). With these credentials, Sering would become Germany’s foremost expert on internal colonization, a state policy of breaking up large estates in the German East and allotting small plots of land to smallhold farmers as a means of strengthening the middle rungs of rural society.

The board decided to put Sering; Hugo Thiel, a senior official in the Prussian Office for Agriculture; and Johannes Conrad, a professor of state sciences in Halle, in charge of the investigation. Sering designed the questionnaire for the survey (see the editorial comments in Verein für Sozialpolitik 1892), which consisted of two parts, one more detailed and “specific,” the other more concise and “general.” Both were sent out to landowners (not workers), with 2,277 and 291 questionnaires, respectively, completed and returned.

Crucially, both questionnaires mixed inquiries into workers’ objective and material conditions with inquiries of a more ethical kind that exhibited the typical ethos of the educated bourgeoisie. To name only the most blatant items in this regard, part C of the specific questionnaire asked whether workers were maintaining savings accounts, to what extent workers were sending their children to prekindergarten and secondary schooling, whether public libraries were nearby and whether workers made use of them, and whether newspapers circulated among workers. The more general questionnaire featured several items inquiring whether and how workers’ situation had changed within the past 10 to 20 years with regard to their (a) material subsistence (quality of housing, quality of clothing, type of nutrition [more meat]), (b) frugality, (c) capacity for performance and actual performance, (d) intellectual edification, and (e) morals, specifically out-of-wedlock childbirths, petty theft, and intemperance.

These items closely mirror the bourgeois ideal of the good life espoused by Schmoller in his ornate depiction of everything the worker was lacking. They are no less concerned with a provident consideration of the future and sense of responsibility (savings accounts, out-of-wedlock childbirths), the “ennobling pleasures of a comfortable abode” (quality of housing), investment in the education of the next generation (schooling), and an “adequate reading” (libraries, newspapers). Indeed, the item on the circulation of newspapers might well have been intended to assess the degree of socialist agitation (which was also ascertained by a separate item), but the results make clear that most of those surveyed understood it unequivocally as inquiring into the bourgeois practice of subscribing to a newspaper and staying abreast of current events.

These publications document a bourgeois orthodoxy articulating itself against the heterodoxy of workers’ lives. This constitutive othering of the worker, however, sat awkwardly with the Verein’s core mission of incorporating the worker into the nation’s fold. How, then, did this obvious tension subside? How did this openly bourgeois perspective on heterodox lives in Germany entertained by the Verein transform into a “doxic” notion of the good life, with the class-cultural particularism rendered invisible (Bourdieu 2014:174)?

I argue that the superimposition of two discourses—the worker question in the metropole with its focus on proletarianization and the question of acclimatization of whites in tropical climates with its focus on racial degeneration—had a de-particularizing effect. This superimposition occurred in a remarkable study, “The Settlement of Europeans in the Tropics” (Verein für Sozialpolitik 1912–1915), in which the central comparisons shifted from bourgeois versus workers to Germans/whites versus natives even as the tertia comparationes were still derived from bourgeois class-cultural particularisms. As a result, the particularity of this standpoint was obscured, and bourgeois notions of the good life were tacitly universalized to include Germans or even the white race as a whole.

Bridging Metropolitan and Colonial Questions

To examine this mechanism of de-particularization, we must investigate how the Verein came to operate as a bridge actor between metropole and colony, transposing principles of vision and division of the worker question onto the acclimatization question. Why did the Verein conduct a colonial survey in the first place? As Grimmer-Solem (2007) has shown, members of the Verein were attuned to colonial affairs and, like the educated bourgeoisie more generally, highly supportive of it. Their enthusiasm reached a new height around 1907. Two particularly brutal conflicts with the indigenous population in German East Africa and German Southwest Africa had led to a budgetary crisis and new national elections. At this critical juncture, where parliamentary opposition threatened Germany’s colonial engagement as such, leading members of the Verein, among them Schmoller, Sering, and Karl Rathgen, formed the backbone of a newly constituted colonial-political action committee (Kolonialpolitisches Aktionskommitee).

This committee strengthened the Verein’s ties with the Colonial Office, where state secretary Bernhard Dernburg, subscribing to a new course of colonial reform, was himself courting the social and natural sciences in an effort to put the colonial endeavor on a more rational footing (Grimmer-Solem 2007). In line with his endorsement of scientific colonialism, Dernburg also turned to the scientific examination of the question of acclimatization. At stake in this rather convoluted debate was whether Europeans could constitutionally adjust to the climate in the tropical colonies. ² There had been previous studies in 1886 and 1888 by the German Colonial Association (which merged with the Society for German Colonization in 1887 to form the German Colonial Society), but by 1908, the topic had acquired a new urgency, after biological conceptions of race had become increasingly fixed and stricter policies of racial segregation emerged in the colonies (Grosse 2000:57–58, 75–77).

For Dernburg, the question of tropical settlement fell into two parts, one regarding the “capacity for acclimatization of the white race as such” and the other “the material advancement of European settlers.” ³ In 1908, Dernburg referred the first question to the Imperial Health Office, which dealt with it from a purely medical and biological angle. The second question was put to various German governors and consuls in tropical colonies, most of whom, however, delivered mere superficial impressions. ⁴ In addition, the former governor of German Southwest Africa and current undersecretary to Dernburg in the Colonial Office, Friedrich von Lindequist, embarked on a fact-finding mission to British and German East Africa (and Mozambique) between September 1908 and May 1909 to ascertain the potential for white settlement. ⁵ (The results of this expedition were later published as part of the Verein’s investigation on European settlement in the tropics.) This new relevance ascribed to the topic by the Colonial Office could not have escaped members of the Verein given its heightened colonial enthusiasm and connections to Dernburg during this period.

Yet the more significant impulse that led the Verein to consider a study of its own came from the Institut Colonial International (hereafter, ICI) in Belgium. Established in 1893, the ICI was a nongovernmental organization dedicated to colonial policy research (see Wagner 2022). In 1909, it listed over 50 active members and over 70 associated members from Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, mostly academics, government officials, and administrators, as well as high-ranking members of national colonial associations (ICI 1909). During the annual meeting of that year, acclimatization was once again on the agenda, after it had been last discussed at the meetings of 1894 and 1895 (ICI 1909:138).

There were crucial connections between the Verein and the ICI. Gustav Anton, professor at Jena, and Karl Rathgen, professor at the Hamburg Colonial Institute, were members prior to 1909, and both were present at that year’s meeting in June (ICI 1909). Moritz Julius Bonn, professor in Munich, became a member shortly afterward and attended the ICI’s annual meeting in 1911 (ICI 1911). This intermeshing between the ICI and the Verein attests to the latter’s pivotal role as a bridge actor between metropolitan and colonial arenas, and the Verein’s study on the settlement of Europeans in the tropics germinated precisely in this overlap.

The discussion in 1909 focused primarily on physiological aspects of acclimatization, specifically on cellular damage caused by sun exposure, its effect on the central nervous system and fertility, and the role of skin pigmentation (ICI 1909:138–54). Rathgen, however, a board member of the Verein, reminded the audience that acclimatization was not merely a matter of biological reproduction: It was also necessary to address the “economic and social effects” of tropical settlement, specifically as they relate to the “moral and intellectual qualities” and “economic efficiency” of the settler population (ICI 1909:180–81). Rathgen joined a subcommittee that was to prepare a survey and report on the matter for the next general meeting in 1911, but his socioeconomic perspectives failed to exert a significant influence. Tellingly, Rathgen did not sign the final report that was presented to the ICI’s members, justifying his decision by saying he was “an economist” who “had no authority in biological matters” (ICI 1911:122).

Not coincidentally, it was in the interim of these two ICI meetings that the Verein decided to launch its own investigation of the matter. At the Verein’s board meeting in May 1910, Moritz Julius Bonn introduced an extensive exposé for an “enquiry into the possibilities for European expansion in colonies—especially African and Oceanic colonies—with a viable native population.” ⁶ Bonn’s proposal made explicit what prompted and motivated this research endeavor. Bonn conceded that the ICI would seem the more adequate venue for such an undertaking: “Yet the fashion—practical and theoretical—in which the Institute conducts such colonial investigations . . . not always guarantees its evaluation from a perspective of scientific economic and social policy.” ⁷

At the previous year’s meeting of the Verein, economist Paul Arndt had proposed a similar study on “the social question in the colonies” (Boese 1939:137). ⁸ A letter from Bonn to the general secretary suggests Schmoller encouraged Bonn to take up Arndt’s proposal. ⁹ Schmoller was aware of the proceedings at the ICI, as Rathgen kept him informed. ¹⁰ Bonn would have been the logical choice for such an undertaking given that at the time, he had established himself as an expert on colonial affairs, not least with a widely regarded article series “On the State of Southwest Africa” in the Frankfurter Zeitung and on “Questions of Settlement and Native Policy” in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik.

The board meeting in May 1910, at which Bonn’s proposal was hotly debated, proved formative for the direction of the survey. ¹¹ Georg Friedrich Knapp, a founding member of the Verein, advised they stick with “domestic issues.” In a direct reply to Knapp, Sering not only championed Bonn’s proposal but essentially made it his own by reading into it the sociopolitical interests that had preoccupied him for so long. He proposed to rephrase the investigation’s topic as “The Agricultural System of the Tropical Colonies since the Abolition of Slavery.” At its core, this was the question of the Survey on the Condition of Rural Laborers transposed to a colonial context. In that investigation, labor relations after the abolition of serfdom, with its subsequent problems of proletarianization and a polarization of capital and labor, were analogously at stake. The implicit superimposition of both research endeavors was thus already very much apparent in the working title suggested by Sering. In his own remarks at the meeting, Max Weber himself added to such a parallelization in offering one of his distinct class-related concepts for relabeling Bonn’s proposal: “The life-chances of Europeans.”

Rathgen seconded Sering’s position in noting that a treatment of these problems was not to be expected from other agencies. He mentioned he had “made an attempt to promote socio-political aspects at the Institut [Colonial International], but, unfortunately, in vain.” Rathgen welcomed the “focus” provided by Sering and suggested Sering lead the subcommittee, which would ultimately consist of Sering, Bonn, Rathgen, and other economists with colonial expertise, but also Gottfried Zoepfl, an adjunct professor of Staatswissenschaften and permanent aide in the Colonial Office.

In the subcommittee meetings, Sering continued to make his imprint on the investigation he had come to lead. During the discussions, he repeatedly suggested to focus the question of tropical settlement on whites in plantations and attendant labor relations as well as on smallholdings of whites and of “coloreds.” Sering pursued this focus in his revision of Bonn’s first draft of the questionnaire, which had given more weight to the economic standing of natives.

The first block of questionnaire items dealt with the distribution of estates and explicitly inquired into the existence of a homestead act that facilitated the acquisition of land for white settlers. The second block zeroed in on labor relations in large, middle, and smallholding farms, distinguishing among “colored” and white farmers, and asking whether smallholdings were on the rise since the abolition of slavery. The remaining three blocks, much shorter in length, asked about the position of whites and “coloreds” in trade and industry, the state of health of the white population, and the settlers’ own views regarding the prospects of settlement and reproduction.

Sering’s edit aligned the survey’s thrust much closer with the investigation on the condition of rural workers from two decades before. In so doing, it refocused the main problematic of the investigation on the proletarianization of the white laborer—the question at the center of the earlier study. Indeed, Sering explicitly criticized Bonn’s design for paying too much attention to natives rather than treating them just as a context variable for the analysis of the economic and social situation of the white population. ¹² Through Sering’s revision, the relationship between whites and natives could be more straightforwardly analogized with the competition of Germans and Poles in East Elbia. (In fact, Rathgen [1910:1443] made that analogy explicit in a lecture at the Hamburg Colonial Institute in 1910, the same year the study was launched.) Here, too, an implicit association of Polonization and proletarianization had already gone a long way in de-particularizing a bourgeois standard of living. ¹³

Embedding the investigation in the broader problematic of acclimatization imbued the issue of proletarianization with surplus meanings of race in an even more pronounced fashion. The acclimatization debate was closely tied to a discourse on racial degeneration. A common trope held that the physical environment of the tropics, as well as miscegenation, could lead to an assimilation to the native in physical and intellectual terms, conceived as a deterioration of the qualities of the white race. The colloquial term for this imagined process was “verkaffern,” a racial slur for “going native” (literally: “going Kaffir”).

In superimposing the issue of proletarianization onto the question of acclimatization, the Verein’s survey intimately entangled and confounded questions of race and class. The superimposition is already evident in the fact that the subcommittee explicitly limited its research interest to tropical colonies; this position was reiterated in the very first subcommittee meeting in July 1910. ¹⁴ After all, from the perspective of social policy, there is no reason why the issue of socioeconomic relations in “mixed colonies” would not be relevant in nontropical colonies as well.

The questionnaire, with its various inquiries into the economic background of whites and natives, makes this subtle confluence of race and class readily apparent. One item is particularly revealing in this regard. The third question in the first block asks whether there is “a capital-less white population dependent on wage labor” and whether “this population has immigrated or been born in this country.” Read through the prism of the acclimatization debate, birth in this country would strongly suggest a process of degeneration, or “Verkafferung,” which here is tacitly equated with proletarianization.

To be sure, the proletariat had previously featured as the central locus of racial degeneration in domestic eugenicist debates. From that vantage point, the subordinated position of proletarians was thought a result of their inferior genetic fitness, which put them at a disadvantage in the economic struggle for existence. Or, proletarian mores such as prostitution and alcoholism were seen as a cause of genetic deterioration (Weingart, Kroll, and Bayertz 1988:114–25). However, this was still one step removed from defining heterodox proletarian mores themselves as a symptom of racial degeneration. Yet this is precisely what the design of the Verein’s study, with its dual interests in acclimatization and proletarianization, gestures toward. In subtly associating the proletarian lifestyle with the native racial “other,” its particular opposite, the bourgeois orthopraxy and life standard that underwrote the survey on rural labor in the 1890s, becomes de-particularized as biologically “white” and universally European. This can be gleaned directly from the investigation’s published results, to which I now turn.

From Orthodoxy to Doxa: De-particularizing a Bourgeois Class Culture

As per usual, the members of the subcommittee for the investigation on tropical settlement were to recruit further expert collaborators. The regions initially selected for examination included the Dutch Indies; South Africa, Southwest Africa, and North Africa; Uganda and Northeast Africa; the west coast of tropical Africa (excluding the German colonies), the West Indies, and Central America; the German colonies in tropical Africa, the U.S.-American South, and Mexico; North Australia, Queensland, New Zealand, and the South Seas; the American Colonies in the Pacific including New Guinea; and South America. ¹⁵ Crucially, the choice of colony hinged on whether it allowed for analogies with German colonies. ¹⁶

The investigation was generously subsidized by the Colonial Office, which immediately professed a profound interest in it and effectively shouldered half the expenses. ¹⁷ Furthermore, Friedrich von Lindequist, the former governor of German Southwest Africa who had taken over the Colonial Office after Dernburg’s resignation in 1910, made available the report of his journey through British and German East Africa. At one point, the subcommittee had recruited over 20 collaborators who promised to deliver a manuscript ¹⁸ ; overall, they expected to produce a nine-volume series. ¹⁹ However, the overwhelming costs of a parallel survey on the pricing of agricultural products along with the collapse of some communication lines due to the war led to the decision to end the series with Wagemann’s survey of Espirito Santo in Brazil. ²⁰

In the end, 10 surveys were published in five parts as volume 147 in the Verein’s monograph series, covering British and German East Africa (Dr. von Lindequist) in part one; Central America and the Lesser Antilles (Dr. Karl Sapper, professor of geography at the University of Strasbourg), the Dutch West Indies (Dr. Durk van Blom, professor of political economy at the Technical University of Delft), and the Dutch East Indies (Dr. Izak Alexander Nederburgh, a Dutch former undersecretary) in part two; Natal (Maurice S. Evans, Member of Parliament in South Africa), Rhodesia (Dr. H. Hardy, state council and permanent aide to the Colonial Office), and British East Africa and Uganda (Dr. Oskar Karstedt, colonial officer in German East Africa) in part three; British Kaffraria and its German settlements (Johannes Spanuth, Lutheran pastor) in part four; and the German colonists in the Brazilian state Espirito Santo (Dr. Ernst Wagemann, an economist in Berlin) in part five.

The surveys differed in their organization of the material, but they all focused on the economic aspect of successful settlement in light of a presumed hazard of racial degeneration, thus taking up the central prompt from the questionnaire. This holds true even for von Lindequist’s report on British and German East Africa. Von Lindequist had completed his assessments prior to the Verein’s undertaking and likely did not substantially revise them before publication. Yet as we have seen, von Lindequist’s expedition was motivated by the same concern for the socioeconomic aspects of acclimatization and thus similarly prone to superimpose matters of race and class.

To highlight concrete evidence of de-particularization, I reorganized the material from the investigation according to four aspects central to the ethos of the educated bourgeoisie and explicitly referenced in Schmoller’s candid statement on the ethical underpinnings of the worker question. As we have seen, these class-cultural aspects were also of central concern to the Verein’s investigations on rural labor relations. These aspects are thrift and a methodical pursuit of life, a sense of responsibility and personal independence, cleanliness and proper living conditions, and self-edification through reading and use of libraries. Precisely these criteria were applied in the tropical survey to assess the degree to which white settlers were deviating from a racial norm. What is more, the questionnaire’s differentiation between “whites” and “coloreds” in its inquiries into general socioeconomic standing also elicited assessments of the native population with regard to these particular “virtues.” In this context, what was previously presented as a bourgeois orthodoxy and orthopraxy now becomes de-particularized as universally German, European, or even white, depending on the context. Generally, where German settler populations are surveyed, the bourgeois ethos is stylized as German; in surveys of other European settlements, the bourgeois ethos is transfigured as European, with both signifiers assuming the racial connotations of “whiteness.”

Conclusion

Bourdieu’s concept of de-particularization puts processes of symbolic violence and cultural monopolization in state-making into sharp relief. One particular standpoint, the standpoint of those who dominate the state, is made a national cultural standard. What was before only an orthodoxy, dominant perhaps but still contested, is thus turned into “doxa.”

However, Bourdieu did not flesh out any mechanism of how such de-particularization takes effect. I argue that it is precisely in this light that the activities of the Verein, spanning metropolitan and colonial contexts, need to be interpreted. The case of the Verein shows how the explicitly class-cultural principles of vision and division of the worker question are de-particularized as the same actors who were at the forefront of the worker question transpose such concerns to a colonial context. As issues of proletarianization are imbued with meanings of racial degeneration and vice versa, the Verein’s publications, cosponsored by the German state and coauthored by key officials like von Lindequist, wittingly or unwittingly came to officially endorse a bourgeois ethos as universally German or even white.

Such conflations also occurred in colonial debates elsewhere, but they acquired a particular significance in the case of the Verein due to its eminent position in the Empire. Although not an official entity of the state, it intermeshed with it closely. As the Verein made metropolitan and colonial registers cohere, the symbolic effects could ripple through its rhizomatic network that extended to all levels of state power.

First and foremost, there were the Verein’s board meetings at which the proceedings of this particular investigation were continually discussed. Aside from the usual roster of state and municipal officials, the minutes show that between 1910 and 1915, these meetings were attended by at least one of the three central figures of the Society for Social Reform: Berlepsch, Francke, or Zimmermann. Alfred Grotjahn, who spearheaded the hygienic movement that was becoming increasingly influential in municipal social work, participated in the 1911 meeting in his capacity as a board member. Details of the investigation were also made available to members through protocols of the subcommittee sessions led by Sering.

Second, Sering was a member of Schmoller’s State-Scientific Society in Berlin, where he rubbed shoulders with high-ranking officials at monthly meetings. In 1913, Sering gave a presentation on large and smallholding farms (Staatswissenschaftliche Gesellschaft 1983:140). By then, several of the investigation’s surveys had already been published, and more were yet to appear. Given that inquiries into large and smallholding farms made up almost half of the items in the questionnaire, it would have been odd if the Verein’s colonial investigation had not come up on that occasion (as a rule, the presentations’ and discussions’ contents were confidential).

Third, all 10 surveys of the investigation received an extensive review in the Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft, the most influential social policy journal of the German Empire (Ballod 1916). The influential periodical Soziale Praxis, the unofficial organ of the Society for Social Reform that circulated even among worker associations, also published a multipage lead article on “worker and settlement questions in the German protectorates,” authored by Else Lüders, in its May 29, 1913, issue. The article reviewed several recent contributions to the debate and amply discussed von Lindequist’s part of the Verein’s investigation.

Finally, the issue of colonial settlement was also debated in the Reichstag with explicit reference to the Verein’s survey, and excerpts from this debate were published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, which enjoyed a nationwide readership (see, e.g., the various issues of March 8, 1913).

Thus, the tacit conflation of German and bourgeois culture can be said to have “fill[ed] the intellectual horizon of all influential state and municipal administrators, of most journalists and members of parliament,” as Schmoller noted with regard to the Verein’s symbolic productions generally (cited in vom Bruch 1980:65). The “official” view of German society and German lives, entertained and broadcast by civil servants of the German state, is here de-particularized.