Germany’s colonial past is again at the center of public debate. This book offers a focused contribution: a study of how the German administration in Samoa (1900–1914) used family law as a tool of colonial governance. Examining marriage, divorce, citizenship, legitimacy, and maintenance, Julia Hütten shows how rules on the most intimate matters became instruments of colonial power and a mirror for ideas of ‘Germanness’.
Interethnic families were already part of Samoan society when the imperial flag was raised in Apia in 1900. The new government tried to sort residents into two personal jurisdictions, ‘foreigner’ and ‘native’, yet people of mixed descent rarely fit neatly into either. The German Civil Code (BGB), which had only recently been enacted, granted citizenship to foreign wives of German husbands, but many long-standing unions in Samoa had never been registered as civil marriages. Officials responded by planning to prohibit future interethnic marriages and by compiling a register of so-called ‘half-castes’ born to unregistered unions, thereby expanding the reach of foreign jurisdiction. The formal ban on mixed marriages arrived in 1912, tightening these boundaries still further.
Fault-based divorce procedures, unfamiliar in Samoan practice, also unsettled households by compelling spouses to assign blame and expose private life to official judgment. These interventions did not simply transplant metropolitan law; they interacted with Samoan custom, missionary influence, and local knowledge, producing outcomes negotiated by officials, petitioners, and communities.
By tracing cases and policies across these 14 years, the book illuminates how colonial law marked racial boundaries, structured belonging, and reordered daily life in Samoan-German households. It also opens a window onto the German Empire itself: its anxieties about race and respectability, its administrative improvisation at the edge of empire, and the contested meanings of citizenship within a plural legal order.
On the author:
Julia Hütten is a legal historian whose research traces family law and identity in the German colonial Pacific. She holds a doctorate in law, having academic backgrounds in anthropology and information science. She held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.
Table of contents:
Foreword
List of Charts, Tables and Images
Introduction
Chapter 1: Samoa, Pearl of the South Sea
1.1 Morality and the Samoan climate
1.2 European contact and the matai political system
Chapter 2: German Identity and Colonialism
2.1 Samoan courtship ans marriage
2.2 Taupou, abstinence, and women’s sexuality
2.3 Marriage of Samoans in the Western manner
2.4 Marriage under German law
2.5 Marriages between Samoans and Chinese
Chapter 3: Breaking Up Families: The Ban on Interethnic Marriage
3.1 Changing views on race and ethnicity
3.2 Citizenship law and Deutschtum
3.3 The example set by German Southwest Africa
3.4 Defining the legal classification »native« in the German colonies
3.5 The Mischehenverbot in Samoa
3.6 Planning the Mischehenverbot
Chapter 4: Divorce and Matters of Family Law in the German Courts of Samoa
4.1 New policies in the regulation of divorce in the German empire
4.2 Application of family law from the BGB in Samoa
4.3 Grounds for divorce under the BGB
4.4 Divorces among the faʻa papālagi
4.5 Divorces among Samoans in the German courts
4.6 Women’s testimony in divorce
4.7 A change of stance of Governor Solf in 1907?
4.8 Maintenance
4.9 Maintenance of illegitimate children
4.10 Maintenance after the 1912 Mischehenverbot
4.11 Samoan divorce cases (a selection)
4.12 The case of Blanche Reid and the "Lifestyle Test"
4.13 Why the "Lifestyle Test ?"
4.14 The German interracial marriage debate (Mischehendebatte) in May 1912
Conclusion
Appendix I: Samoan terms
Appendix II: Translation of Dr. Wilhelm Solf’s opening statement to the German parliament (May 2, 1912)
Bibliography
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