Slaps in the face, kicks, beatings, painful cuffing, shoving, and other forms of everyday violence were customary aspects of life in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). In crisp prose and through stirring anecdotes, Marie Muschalek's book reveals how police violence evolved into an essential instrument of German supremacy between 1908 and 1915. Although the Herero-Nama genocide is the most well-known act of German aggression in the colony, Muschalek maintains that routine violence, dissimilar to Lothar von Trotha's campaign of eliminatory warfare, lent meaning and purpose to rank and file members of the Landespolizei (imperial police) (2). She identifies policemen as semi-independent agents who regularly assaulted, confronted, and whipped Africans for their own personal and shared purposes, a practice that over time normalized the “proper treatment of natives” in physically violent terms (8). Most effectively, Muschalek's concentration on localized, “bureaucratically correct” violence reveals that the Landespolizei did not serve exclusively as an apparatus of the imperial government. Much to the contrary, policemen enjoyed considerable autonomy both in the colony's towns and the rural savannahs and used their authority to fashion an imperial state in their own callous image (44).

Violence as Usual fruitfully contributes to an already rich field of social history in Germany's former overseas territories. Isabel Hull, Jakob Zollman, and Michelle Moyd, among others, have all demonstrated the importance of local actors on the political evolution of the German colonial project in Africa before, during, and after World War I. The book follows in the methodological footsteps of these historians, examining how factors such as honor and masculinity, bureaucratic responsibility, weaponry, and regulatory agency influenced the conduct and identity of imperial policemen. In what she characterizes as “a new conceptualization of the colonial state,” Muschalek centers her analysis on “unspectacular” and “messy” police violence in order to expose it as a “fundamental and inherent part of the colonial state's power” (9–10). As local arbiters of control, the Landespolizei relied on the presence of armed men and segregatory laws to secure Germany's foothold in southern Africa. In doing so, policemen willingly exercised their ability to shape their surroundings as pivotal actors in activities of colonialism. Everyday violence, in other words, was the point and not the exception.

Muschalek organizes her study into five thematic chapters. Chapter 1 examines the backgrounds of male recruits and their rationales for joining the Landespolizei. It asserts that a man's pursuit of honor, which she identifies as a “social phenomenon … [that] people establish, maintain, and defend … via the judgement of others,” gradually determined how policemen cultivated their identities as both colonial officers and members of a hierarchical racial and social order (15). Whether African or German, men in the Landespolizei understood that achieving a certain level of civil and economic flexibility also meant that they could expand their authority over members in their own communities. Access to weapons and military training, together with an inalienable right to exert power over what Muschalek calls “the policed population,” eventually encouraged policemen to forge a hyper-masculine identity that promoted “honorable violence” over “effeminate weakness” (42).

Chapter 2 builds on this argument with a detailed examination of policemen's training, civil responsibilities, working conditions, and group dynamics. Perhaps most important, Muschalek establishes that Landespolizei regarded themselves first and foremost as members of a military organization. The “primacy of military values,” therefore, framed their group composition and external face, a condition that looked to violence as a necessary element of their daily patrols, interrogations, and interactions with farmers and African workers (63).

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 shift away from policemen's institutional backgrounds to specific practices and technologies of brutality. From shackles, guns, and fists to regulatory decrees, ordinances, and segregatory edicts, imperial Landespolizei shaped the contours of the colonial state through what they regarded as standard police work. Muschalek analyzes these measures as part of a hybrid matrix so as to demonstrate how ideology, bureaucracy, and daily conventions fostered “an effective regime of police violence” in German Southwest Africa (75). The most vital purpose of standardized cruelty was that it enabled imperial policemen to define the proper ways to inflict violence, as well as who was qualified to carry out a sentence. As “guardians of ‘civilizing’ violence,” the Landespolizei possessed a monopoly over every aspect of juridical conduct in the colony (137). This broad authority enabled policemen to harass, kidnap, and physically assault African workers with impunity, so long as their “policing work” followed the appropriate codes and standards of each respective colonial district (Bezirk).

Muschalek utilizes an extensive array of police reports in archives to underscore this argument. Her assessment of these collections reveals that policemen did not try to hide their violent conduct, but rather went to considerable lengths to justify their actions as “proper,” “limited,” and “educational.” As qualified practitioners of discipline, imperial policemen believed that their most important contribution to the state was to ensure the existence of an active workforce. They alone, in other words, had the ability and skill to administer punishments so “that workers did not die” (132). In this way, the Landespolizei played a pivotal role in the expansion of German Southwest Africa's repressive economy. Their control of violence did not check or limit its application, but rather rendered daily acts of brutality an essential factor in Germany's economic and imperial exploitation of African bodies, cultures, and territories (156).

Violence as Usual offers an important contribution to the role of localized violence and the evolution of the colonial state in German Southwest Africa. Although the book's emphasis yields many new insights on the social delineations of the colony, it could have demarcated the implication of everyday violence between 1908 and 1915 even more forcefully with a general overview of police behavior in the formative imperial era. Given that German imperial authority was weak and, at times, nonexistent before 1900, one wonders if members of the Landespolizei looked upon this history as further justification to normalize violence in their districts. This possibility might also explain why the colonial administration was so willing to let policemen define their own measures of bureaucratic and legal conduct throughout the colony. The potential challenge to institutional hierarchy aside, colonial officials perhaps felt that order and stability were worth the price. These minor criticisms, however, do not take away from the book's central and innovative thesis. Marie Muschalek provides a compelling narrative that will hopefully inspire more scholarship on local actors and their role in Germany's global empire.