‘Punitive’ Expeditions in German Colonial Contexts in Africa

Abstract

The debate on the restitution of African cultural heritage has brought greater attention to the history of colonial violence, especially to the dispatch of so-called ‘punitive’ expeditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Expanding knowledge on the genealogy of this particularly brutal form of military campaign, this article explores the historical semantics of the German term ‘Strafexpedition’ and its contextual use in the organ of militarist colonial propaganda at the time in Imperial Germany, the Deutsches Kolonialblatt. Through a content analysis of the occurrence of the term and its correlate, this study aims to bridge the fields of semantics and colonial historiography and lays the groundwork for a macro-history of events of spoliation and plunder in German colonial contexts.