This excellent work examines in rich detail the practice of policing and the reach of the colonial state in German Southwest Africa. Jakob Zollmann argues persuasively that the colonial state in Southwest Africa was relatively weak, demonstrating that the writ of colonial authority extended only so far. The police in the colony numbered at most around 500, which were far too few to exercise effective rule over the large expanse of territory that had a poor transportation and communications network. Certain regions, notably the far north of the colony, lay beyond the ability of the comparatively weak colonial apparatus to influence effectively, let alone control. Zollmann accordingly rejects the idea that the weak colonial state in Southwest Africa served meaningfully as a precursor to the Third Reich. No direct road ran “from Windhoek ‘to Auschwitz’” (p. 351).

The book is organized into three parts. Part one provides an institutional history of the colonial police. In the colony's early days, police duties rested in the hands of a Schutztruppe, a small body that served as a military and rudimentary police force. Not until 1905 did the government move to establish in the colony an independent police force, the Landespolizei, a civil force under the authority of the governor, but organized along military lines. Many of its members had served in the Schutztruppe, and the police and the military shared overlapping responsibilities, which meant that the ties between the two always remained important. Indispensible African auxiliaries, known as Polizeidiener, complemented the small number of members of the Landespolizei, often carrying out essential police functions.

The second part of the book examines the practice of penal justice in the colony as police officials sought to preserve law and order. Zollmann shows that when push came to shove, the police valued order more than strict adherence to the rule of law. The book details how colonial police continually acted in extralegal ways, including subjecting Africans to beatings in cases where the law did not provide for such punishment. Police officials habitually pushed to loosen legal restrictions on their use of force and justified deviations from the letter of the law by insisting that the rigorous adherence to the law expected within the metropole was impractical in Southwest Africa, where a siege mentality prevailed among officials. Zollmann offers a compelling account of a deeply insecure colonial state beset by fear that the tenuous colonial order would slip from its grasp. Although colonial police accordingly prized the maintenance of order most highly, they could not wholly ignore pressures to adhere to the law, especially since colonial officials and left-wing members of the Reichstag in Germany continually criticized lapses. Zollmann describes the competing pressures on the colonial state in Southwest Africa that produced a more complex state of affairs than has often been recognized.

The book's final section provides fascinating and finely grained analyses of three spaces in Southwest Africa: the capital Windhoek, rural areas inhabited by German settlers, and the far north of the colony beyond the “police zone.” Even in the colonial capital where police officers were comparatively numerous, they faced real limits to their capacity to control the Africans living in the large settlements where the colonial state worked to concentrate them. In the countryside, German settlers presented the most important check on the authority of the colonial police, who often bemoaned their inability to prevent settlers from abusing their African laborers. German farmers jealously guarded their authority to act as “little kings” (p. 18) in their own fiefdoms with a minimum of interference from colonial administrators. The competing claims to authority produced generally poor relations between the colonial police and settlers in the countryside. The most glaring evidence of the colonial police's weakness, though, comes from the colony's northern periphery, where the police were notable for their absence. In each of these three spaces, Zollmann thus illustrates the limits of the colonial state's power. Although the study focuses on the activities of the police in these three zones, the book affords insights into a far wider range of subjects than a narrow conception of policing might suggest or to which this short review can do justice.

Zollmann aims to illuminate the workings of the state in the colony, a goal that differs from much recent scholarship on imperialism that has sought to show the influence of empire on the metropole. Zollmann necessarily considers developments in the metropole that shaped and reflected events in Southwest Africa, but he centers his analysis on the colonial environment. The work does not analyze the causes or course of the wars against the Herero and the Nama, which have stood at the heart of most recent work on German Southwest Africa. Focusing on an understudied question with direct relevance for what has become one of the more hotly debated questions in the historiography of Germany's overseas empire, Zollmann offers a thorough and convincing account.

Zollmann, who has an eye for detail, theoretical dexterity, and the ability to illuminate larger questions, has thoroughly mined the archives in Germany and Namibia to provide a rich description of policing by the colonial state in German Southwest Africa. His book is essential reading for scholars of German imperialism.