Externe Publikationen

Global development and colonial power: German development policy at home and abroad (book review)

Haug, Sebastian
Externe Publikationen (2018)

in: Journal of Development Studies 55 (2) 328-329

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2018.1523121
Information

For most of the last 100 years Germany’s colonial past seemed to have all but disappeared from public consciousness. Although during its most expansionist phase the German colonial empire had been the world’s fourth-largest, including territories in Africa, East Asia, and the Pacific, Germany’s colonial legacy never played a major role in post-colonial public debates. The general interpretation of German colonial endeavours was that they came late and were largely unsuccessful, and thus formed a rather negligible part of German history (Conrad, 2012). This ‘colonial amnesia’ (Habermalz, 2018) has increasingly been called out by scholars and activists. Daniel Bendix’s book furthers this by highlighting colonial continuities in the development cooperation sphere.