In conquering Egypt, the Roman Empire secured direct access to the centuries-old Indian Ocean trade network that in Roman times brought together China, India, Southeast Asia, Parthia, Arabia, and Africa as well as the Roman Mediterranean. Far from being a product of Schumpeterian objectless expansion, Rome's conquest of Egypt fit into a broader strategic logic that sought to extend Roman control over eastern entrepôts. Despite its centrality to the Mediterranean wing of the world economy and its ability to extract surplus from its own provinces, the hub of this global economy remained India, whose linchpin emporia were able to extract surplus from the Roman Empire.
The German colonial world was marked by an ostensibly self-evident boundary between the white ruler and the black ruled that situated Europeans and indigenous peoples as diametrically opposed and socially discrete. This situation, however, was problematised by the gendered and sexualised interactions between European and indigenous society. The result was often a slippage between the administrative attempts to create recognisably 'German' families (perceived in racial terms), and the antinomian realities of human relationships that transgressed racial lines. This in turn gave rise to reproductive anxieties in the face of a new liminal population of 'half-castes' (Mischlinge) that refused the white-black, master-slave dialectic of the colonial ideal. Many historians have recently attempted to link the troubled history of race relations in German Southwest Africa to the later history of Nazi anti-Semitism and genocide, by focusing on the apparent continuities between the Holocaust and the Herero-Nama wars. However, an alternative genealogy for the Holocaust that refutes this genocidal continuity thesis is possible through an investigation of the origins and contents of the debates about the nature of the German colonial family and its relationship to German citizenship between 1904 and 1914.
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