Through Sebastian Conrad’s continuities of rule, islands of power, the struggle for legitimacy, and the use of violence against colonized subjects, it can be understood how colonized subjects reacted to structures of German colonial society in positive, passive, and negative ways.
It appears that there was no set definition for what constituted both German nationalism and Germanness, and this is only made more apparent when analyzing how the loose definitions of both changed over time.
According to David Ciarlo, it was not simply “empire” that the Germans were obsessed with, but the “display of empire in grand, well-crafted, artful stagings.” Like exhibitions in Britain and France, Germany’s 1890s exhibitions portrayed Germany as being a colony-holding world power.
