In 1987, Paul Carter published a study of the exploration and colonial settlement of Australia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries titled The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History. A literary critic by training, Carter drew on a range of primary sources for his study, including explorers’ journals, travel accounts, memoirs, letters, poems, maps, and photographs. The Road to Botany Bay explored spaces and places in the making, with a focus on the attitudes, desires, and beliefs of those involved in this process. Carter's book introduced the concept of “spatial history,” which has since been embraced by other scholars with increasing frequency, including in the field of African history. In his 1992 book Colonial Space, literary scholar John Noyes reflected on “spatiality in the discourse of German South West Africa, 1884–1915,” and, more recently, several volumes from across African studies have foregrounded “space” and “spatiality”: for example, Allen M. Howard and Richard M. Shain's The Spatial Factor in African History (2005), Ulf Engel and Paul Nugent's Respacing Africa (2010), and Ulf Engel, Marc Boeckler, and Detlev Müller-Mahn's Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa (2018).

Matthew Unangst's book Colonial Geography is pitched as a “spatial history” as well, and it has a lot to offer. Based, like Carter's study, on travelogues, correspondence, and maps, plus a few poems and photographs, alongside a range of journals, school textbooks, and official documents, it traces the shifting conceptions of space and approaches to colonial rule that characterized German East Africa (Ostafrika) from its foundation in 1884 to the Maji-Maji War in 1905–07. This is largely a story of failure. A recurring theme in the book is the glaring inadequacy of German colonial thinking, which often bumped up against the social realities on the ground. German colonialists first adopted the most basic form of territorialization, assuming that the mere act of stipulating German control of the land, not least through a series of treaties, would set the colony on a path of economic development for the benefit of the colonizer. As German territorial control was repeatedly challenged—the so-called Abushiri Uprising of 1888–89 being only one example—alternative approaches to rule soon developed, which Unangst calls “cultural geographic.” These approaches focused on both “land and people” (Land und Leute) and were geared toward managing and refashioning the colonial population through cultural diffusion and the use of migrants from South and East Asia as well as South Africa. After all, in contrast to other colonies such as German South West Africa, Ostafrika lacked a sizable European settler community. Unangst identifies the early 1890s as a turning point for colonial policies, which became increasingly informed by German ideas of culture (Kultur), cultivation, and settled agriculture.

In addition to its overarching argument, and in part related to it, Unangst's book makes several observations. Two of them should be highlighted here. First, German colonizers deployed various strategies of sense-making and ideological legitimation, most importantly the temporalization of space and the pursuit of a civilizing mission. These strategies placed Ostafrika on a par with medieval Europe as far as its “stage of development” was concerned—conspicuously recalling the trope that beyond Europe was before Europe. Equally, Germans claimed to be fighting for both European Christianity against Oriental Islam and the cause of humanity against the Arab slave trade, especially in the context of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1887–89 and the Abushiri Uprising. The anti-Arab agitation was later contrasted with a more complimentary stance toward Arab coastal elites as potential aids in the endeavor to cultivate Land und Leute in Ostafrika's interior. Second, and linked to this last point, German conceptions of East African space were partly indebted to precolonial geographies, both real and imagined. Not only did previously established itineraries and caravan trade routes shape German explorers’ travel accounts, but also the Swahili distinction between a culturally advanced coast that was part of the Indian Ocean World and a “savage,” “barbarian” interior of perilous wilderness entered the colonial frameworks of Kultur and Hinterland.

Unangst's book is meticulously researched and taps a wide and varied collection of primary sources. It also illuminates many other facets not covered in this review, such as popular representations of German East Africa in local history (Heimatkunde) publications, which fed into colonial imaginaries at home. It may, moreover, be fruitfully read alongside the thematically cognate and spatially attuned study by Andreas Greiner, Human Porterage and Colonial State Formation in German East Africa, 1880s–1914, published in the same year as Unangst's book. Still, I have a few quibbles.

First, while the theme of failure is the book's basso continuo, readers search in vain for more detailed information on how and why exactly the outlined approaches to colonial rule proved so inadequate. Although trade and economic development are prominent themes in the book, it offers few details on aspects such as yields and profits. I also wonder, given the importance of territoriality to the book, why no use was made of some of the major studies on the subject, from Robert Sack (Human Territoriality [1986]) to Charles Maier (Once within Borders [2016]).

Second, despite the centrality of “cultural geography” in Unangst's analysis, the author leaves its nineteenth-century contours rather vague as an emerging field of research, an academic subdiscipline, and a popularized way of thinking about Land und Leute. A few proponents are briefly mentioned, including Heinrich Barth and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. The book's main reference point in this regard, however, is Friedrich Ratzel, the founder of human geography (Anthropogeographie) and political geography (Politische Geographie). Although the term Kulturgeographie was not unknown to Ratzel, it is perhaps no surprise that “cultural geography” does not figure at all in a recent major biography of him (Ian Klinke, Life, Earth, Colony [2023]). While both “cultural geography” and Friedrich Ratzel have a place in Unangst's story, I wonder whether the disciplinary specificities of each of them are too easily collapsed here.

Finally, the overarching conceptual framework, centered on the concepts of “representational space,” “representations of space,” and “spatial practice,” is marred by misunderstandings. The terminology is borrowed from Henri Lefebvre's dialectical triad. Following the 1991 publication of an English translation of The Production of Space (French 1974), Lefebvre has become something of a patron saint of the broad church of spatial scholars. He has also been the subject of much elaborate reflection, as can be gleaned, for instance, from the work of Stuart Elden (Understanding Henri Lefebvre [2004]), Christian Schmid (Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space [2005/22]), and Łukasz Stanek (Henri Lefebvre on Space [2011]). In Unangst's rendering, “representational space” simply means “ideas of space” or “spatial imaginary” (9–10), while the term “representations of space” is taken to refer to material artifacts such as maps or travelogues. This misguided adoption of Lefebvre's dialectical triad would not have been a major issue had these terms not been used quite so frequently throughout the text, often twice per page. Instead of enhancing the analysis, they diminish readability. This problem is less apparent in the later chapters than in the earlier ones, which would have benefited more generally from further copy-editing. This is a shame, as much can be learned from a close reading of this ambitious and insightful study.