Review of International Studies (2024), 50: 1, 146–170
doi:10.1017/S0260210523000050
R E S E A R C H A RTICLE
Creating colonisable land: Cartography, ‘blank spaces’,
and imaginaries of empire in nineteenth-century
Germany
Zeynep Gülşah Çapan
1
and Filipe dos Reis
2
*
1
Chair Group of International Relations, University of Erfurt, Germany and
2
Department of International Relations and
International Organization at the University of Groningen, Netherlands
(Received 24 February 2022; revised 27 January 2023; accepted 31 January 2023)
Abstract
e social sciences and humanities in general and International Relations (IR) specically are organised
around what has been called ‘analytic bifurcation’. Analytic bifurcations articially structure and divide
analytic spaces into, for example, Europe/non-Europe, inside/outside, state/empire, and metropole/colony.
Recently, these bifurcations have been problematised within IR and adjacent elds. Our article contributes
to and extends these discussions by foregrounding two interrelated aspects that have not received su-
cient attention: rst, connections between colonies rather than between metropole and colony and, second,
the construction and reproduction of the bifurcation of Europe/non-Europe. We explore how technologies
of power, in our case mapping and the use of ‘blank spaces’, were used to create imaginaries of colonisable
land. To do so, we trace two episodes from nineteenth-century German colonial discourse. e rst episode
analyses imaginaries of exploration in the Humboldtian tradition and how these imaginaries depict spaces
outside of Europe, namely in Africa, as blank spaces. e second episode reconstructs the cartographic
work of Paul Langhans, who focused on mapping ‘Germandom’ (Deutschtum) in Central and Eastern
Europe. Juxtaposing these two episodes shows the interconnectedness between these spaces (Africa and
the European East) and how techniques such as blank spaces were applied to create colonisable land.
Keywords: Analytic Bifurcation; German Colonialism; Historical International Relations; Maps and Mapping
Introduction
e mid-1880s witnessed two signicant shis in the policies of the German Empire (Deutsches
Kaiserreich). First, it acquired in less than a year, from 24 April 1884 to 27 February 1885,
Protectorates (Schutzgebiete) over Southwest Africa, Cameroon, Togo, and German East Africa.
1
Other colonies in Asia and the Pacic would follow in the second part of the 1890s, transforming
Germany into one of the largest colonial empires of the time. Second, the Royal Prussian Settlement
Commission (K ̈oniglich Preußische Ansiedlungskommission) was created in 1886 to purchase large
Polish estates and sell them in smaller plots to German-speaking settlers in the eastern provinces of
the German Empire and thereby spur the ‘Germanisation’ of territories with large Polish-speaking
communities. ese events are commonly framed, in the social sciences and beyond, as belonging
1
e ocial term ‘protectorates’ (Schutzgebiete) for colonies does not, as it suggests and supposes, protect the colonised but
the colonisers themselves by justifying and stabilising colonial rule.
© e Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association. is is an Open
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecom-
mons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no
alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. e written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior
to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 147
to dierent analytical spaces, namely, on the one hand, the expansion of the German colonial
empire and, on the other, policies of internal nation building within the Kaiserreich. Literature on
connections and entanglements has focused on how to overcome these ‘analytic bifurcation[s]’ for
some time.
2
Our article contributes to and further develops this debate by making visible intercon-
nections between colonial spaces (colony/colony) and by unpacking the notion of ‘Europe’ itself.
ese interconnections, which have so far been underexamined, are investigated through the cir-
culation of technologies of power, in our case mapping and the use of blank spaces on maps, across
dierent colonial spaces.
According to Julian Go, ‘analytic bifurcation’ occurs due to the ‘tendency to conceptually slice
or divide relations into categorical essences that are not in fact essences’.
3
For Go, analytic bifurca-
tions are articial and intertwined with issues of state-centrism, methodological nationalism, and
Eurocentrism in historical sociology. State-centric thinking refers to the assumption that ‘social
relations are contained by stated boundaries; and the related myth inherited from Westphalia that
the world consists essentially of sovereign states.’
4
Methodological nationalism adds to this that
national (or, in our case: regional) histories are treated as isolated from one another, whereby
‘knowledge of the world [is] discursively and institutionally prestructured in such a way as to
obscure the role of exchange relationships.’
5
Eurocentrism, in turn, points to spatio-temporal hier-
archies that separate ‘Europe’ from other spaces and situate it as being temporally ahead.
6
Taking all
of this together, a narrative is created where European states become the ‘natural’ form of political
organisation and are conceptualised as distinct and isolated from the rest of the world. Moreover,
this has led to the tendency that other entities, such as metropole and colony, but also East and West,
domestic and foreign, state and empire, or inside and outside, have become (articially) separated
as well.
e historical turn in International Relations (IR) and the global turn in History have addressed
the problematique of analytic bifurcation by introducing connections and entanglements in the
making of the international, which had been unexplored before.
7
Various authors and approaches
underlined that developments, events, and issues, which were traditionally analysed as having
solely happened in ‘Europe’, did not occur in isolation but rather through interactions with
‘non-Europe’.
8
is article contributes to the broader discussions on how to overcome analytic
2
Julian Go, ‘Occluding the global: Analytic bifurcation, causal scientism, and alternatives in historical sociology’, Journal of
Globalization Studies, 5:1 (2014), pp. 122–36. Dynamics of connections and entanglements have been addressed in dierent
literatures. See, for example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected histories: Notes towards a reconguration of early modern
Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31:3 (1997), pp. 735–62; Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the
Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire,
and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Lisa Lowe, e Intimacies of Four
Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). e following section discusses some of these contributions in more
detail.
3
Go, ‘Occluding’, p. 125.
4
Ibid., p. 124; Daniel Chernilo, ‘e critique of methodological nationalism: eory and history’, esis Eleven, 106:1
(2011), pp. 98–117; Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Sciences: e Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (2
nd
edn,
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001).
5
Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 3.
6
Pinar Bilgin, ‘How to remedy Eurocentrism in IR? A complement and a challenge for e Global Transformation’,
International eory, 8:3 (2016), pp. 492–501; Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the
Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
7
Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected histories’. For IR, see Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, ‘Beyond visible entanglements: Connected histo-
ries of the international’, International Studies Review, 22:2 (2020), pp. 289–306; Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Historical sociology,
International Relations and connected histories’, Cambridge Review of International Aairs, 23:1 (2010), pp. 127–43.
8
Alexander D. Barder, Empire Within: International Hierarchy and Its Imperial Laboratories of Governance (Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, 2015); C. A. Bayly, e Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden,
UK: Blackwell, 2004); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and
Europe, 1650–1900 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman, International Order in
Diversity: War, Trade and Rule in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
148 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
bifurcations as it highlights dyanmics of interconnectedness across colonial spaces and the
Europe/non-Europe divide by exploring episodes of German colonial imaginaries and policies
throughout the nineteenth century. For this purpose, we focus on mapping practices and how maps
created imaginaries of imperial and colonial spaces and hence ‘colonisable land’ in both Africa and
the European East. We build here on insights from the critical study of maps and mapping tech-
niques and take maps not as perfect mirrors of a world out there.
9
Colonial spaces are not simply
‘found’. Oen, maps rather create imaginaries of future political projects, by, for example, creating
spaces as colonisable and hence conquerable. Our article traces how the cartographic ‘technicality’
of ‘blank spaces’ has been used in the German colonial discourse to create imaginaries of territories,
which are colonisable for Germans, both in Africa and the European East.
We develop our argument in four sections. e rst section outlines how approaches with
a focus on connections and entanglements have been employed within IR so far. While these
approaches have predominantly focused on metropole-colony connections, they have not (yet)
suciently explored connections between colonial spaces. e purpose of this article is thus to
extend previous scholarship by drawing attention to interconnections between colonial spaces. is
helps us, in addition, to problematise the construction of the space of ‘Europe’ itself. Whereas it is
common to take Europe as a unied whole – and thereby construct and reproduce the Europe/non-
Europe bifurcation –, we break ‘Europe’ down and point to hierarchies – and the construction of
colonial imaginaries – within Europe itself. To show the added value of these analytic redescrip-
tions, we explore how technologies of power, in our case mapping and the use of ‘blank spaces’ on
maps, were applied within the German colonial discourse to ‘colonial spaces’ outside of ‘Europe’, in
particular Africa, and in the project of the ‘colonies of the East’, of which the Prussian Settlement
Commission was part of. e second section, therefore, advances to study mapping as a specic
technology of power in the imagination and creation of imperial and colonial spaces. Here we
reconstruct how mapping and empire intersect and introduce the cartographic technique of des-
ignating ‘unknown’ areas as ‘blank spaces’. Yet, as we show, blank spaces do not only demarcate
‘unknown’ territories as they also create an imaginary of free and empty, colonisable land. e arti-
cle focuses in the third and fourth section on two episodes of the use of blank spaces on maps
in the context of the German colonial discourse. For this, we turn to cartographic products of
the Justus Perthes publishing house in Gotha, the leading German-language publisher on cartog-
raphy and mapping during the second half of the nineteenth and the rst part of the twentieth
centuries. e rst episode encompasses imaginaries of exploration in the Humboldtian tradition
and how these imaginaries depict areas outside of Europe, particularly in Africa, as blank spaces.
e second episode reconstructs the cartographic work of Paul Langhans, who focused on mapping
‘Germandom’ (Deutschtum) in Central and Eastern Europe. Juxtaposing these two episodes shows
the interconnectedness between these spaces (Africa and the European East) and how techniques
such as blank spaces were applied to create colonisable land. Yet, this reconstruction foregrounds
both similarities and dierences in the politics of using ‘blank spaces’.
Moving beyond analytic bifurcations? The study of connections, entanglements, and
the making of the international
e historical turn in IR has increasingly problematised narratives of the making of the inter-
national, which were primarily a consequence of analytic bifurcations, by invoking connections
and entanglements.
10
is section will, rstly, present an overview of how connections and entan-
glements have been introduced and discussed within historical IR and, secondly, draw attention
9
J. B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica, 26:2 (1989), pp. 1–20; Matthew H. Edney, Cartography: e Ideal
and Its History (Chicago, IL: e University of Chicago Press, 2019); Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins (eds),
Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic eory (London, UK: Routledge, 2009).
10
Barder, Empire Within; Martin J. Bayly, Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International Relations, and
the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808–1878 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Go, ‘Occluding’.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 149
to two interrelated aspects that have not received sucient attention: on the one hand, the
connections between colonies rather than between metropole and colony and, on the other, the
problematisation of the space of ‘Europe’.
One of the main impulses to study connections and entanglements comes from the approach
of ‘connected histories’. It was Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a historian specialising in the early modern
period, who developed the concept of ‘connected histories’ to problematise two aspects within the
historiography of that period: methodological nationalism, which takes the European nation-state
as a given and traces its emergence and history back in time, and the comparative method, which
compares this development within dierent regions by conceptualising its entities as closed con-
tainers.
11
Subrahmanyam argues, instead, that it is necessary to ‘delink the notion of “modernity”
from a particular European trajectory’ since there was a ‘more-or-less global shi, with many dier-
ent sources and roots, and – inevitably – many dierent forms and meanings depending on which
society we look at it from’.
12
According to him, the connected histories approach aims to ‘not only
compare from within our boxes, but spend some time and eort to transcend them, not by compar-
ison alone but by seeking out the at times fragile threads that connected the globe’.
13
Subrahmanyam
thereby underscores the need to think beyond the analytic categories and boxes that result in
methodological nationalism concealing connections. Whereas Subrahmanyam focuses on the early
modern period, Gurminder Bhambra has taken up the discussion on connected histories to study
modernity.
14
Bhambra argues that modernity was ‘formed in and through the colonial relationship’
and as such the ‘colonial question needs to be considered as integral to the development of the
nation-state not just outside Europe, but within Europe as well’.
15
A second approach that explores
the relevance of connections and entanglements to understand the making of the international
and that has gured prominently in IR is global history.
16
According to Sebastian Conrad, global
historical scholarship criticises tendencies of internalism and Eurocentrism in the social sciences
and humanities. It, instead, ‘takes the interconnected world as its point of departure, and the cir-
culation and exchange of things, people, ideas and institutions … among its key subjects’.
17
For
example, for the context of German colonialism, Andrew Zimmermann, in his book Alabama in
Africa, traces the entanglements between the American South, the German Empire and Togoland
through an account of the Tuskegee cotton expedition to Togo in 1901. He tells the story of not
only how the American South became a model for European colonial rule in Africa but also how
the expeditions, which were organised for the exchange of knowledge, also inuenced discussions
on agricultural labour within Germany. Zimmermann concludes that the ‘Tuskegee expedition to
Togo sits at the junction of three great transformations, linking the racial political economies of
the southern United States, eastern Germany, and colonial Africa’.
18
ereby, Alabama in Africa
11
Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected histories’; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Holding the world in balance: e connected histories of
the Iberian overseas empires, 1500–1640’, e American Historical Review, 112:5 (2007), pp. 1359–85.
12
Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected histories’, p. 737.
13
Ibid., pp. 761–2.
14
Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity; Bhambra, ‘Historical sociology’; Gurminder K. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies
(London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014).
15
Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity, p. 117. An early contribution from postcolonial studies to German historiography, as well
as the sociological theory of modernity, came from Shalini Randeria. Randeria developed the concept of geteilte Geschichte to
study ‘uneven histories of entangled modernities’. Geteilte Geschichte has in German the double meaning of history as being
‘shared’ and ‘divided’. It highlights connections and similarities but also disruptions and dierences. See Shalini Randeria,
‘Geteilte Geschichte und verworbene Moderne’, in J ̈orn Rüssen, Hanna Leitgeb, and Norbert Jegelka (eds), Zukunsentwürfe:
Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999), pp. 87–96.
16
For a discussion on dierent, sometimes competing, understandings of global history, see Conrad, What Is Global
History?. For an overview in the context of IR, see Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, Filipe dos Reis, and Maj Grasten, ‘Global histories:
Connections and circulations in historical International Relations’, in Benjamin de Carvalho, Julia Costa Lopez, and Halvard
Leira (eds), e Routledge Handbook in Historical International Relations (London, UK: Routledge, 2021), pp. 521–9.
17
Conrad, What Is Global History?, p. 5.
18
Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, p. 248.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
150 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
makes visible a variety of dierent entanglements, which became hidden if one traces events and
developments within bounded entities.
ese formulations have in common that they problematise the bifurcations of
metropole/colony and state/empire. is insight has also been addressed in IR, where sev-
eral recent contributions in the context of the historical turn have demonstrated how a series of
developments, which were previously studied in isolation within the designated space of Europe,
were in fact made possible through interactions with spaces outside of it. Some have shown how
the metropole/colony and nation-state/empire bifurcations silenced a series of connections.
19
Others, in turn, have underlined how the story of sovereignty, the meaning of Westphalia, and
the expansion of the international society cannot be attributed to Europe alone but need to be
considered as developments that happened in interaction with spaces outside of Europe.
20
One
of the main foci of the historical turn in IR has been to analyse connections, exchanges, and
dialogues, which had previously been made invisible by analytically separating state/empire and
metropole/colony. Despite their centrality, it is important to emphasise, however, that state/empire
and metropole/colony are not the only bifurcations at stake.
As Go points out, the ‘tendency to conceptually slice and divide relations into categorical
essences that are not in fact essences’ is not limited to the metropole/colony bifurcation but it is
also at stake in how ‘East’ from ‘West’, ‘Europe’ from the ‘Rest’, the ‘inside’ of nations from their
‘outside’, or ‘the domestic’ from the ‘foreign’ becomes divided.
21
e predominant focus on the
metropole/colony bifurcation can also work to make other hierarchies and dynamics invisible in
the narrative of the making of the international. is has been problematised by dierent schol-
ars. For example, George Steinmetz focuses on the colonial state as an analytical eld and thereby
makes visible the dierent models of governance implemented in German colonies. Drawing on
Bourdieusian eld analysis, Steinmetz argues that these dierent modes of governance were in
place as ‘the colonial state eld autonomized itself from the central state and from the European
colonial eld of power and developed its own self-referential struggles and specic forms of sym-
bolic capital.’
22
Hence, this account shows how dierent hierarchies and policies were implemented
within the German Empire and thereby foregrounds a dynamic that might be overlooked at times if
the metropole is taken as a bounded space only interacting with the colony rather than the auton-
omy of the colonial state. Furthermore, making present connections and entanglements, which
were previously absented from the narrative of the making of the international continues at times to
reproduce the linear progressive narrative of the making of the international.
23
To further elaborate
on dierent hierarchical processes it is crucial, however, to problematise other analytic bifurcations.
In this respect, another important bifurcation that has been scrutinised is the colony/colony one,
whereby the connections, exchanges, and dialogues between dierent colonies become invisible.
For example, the literature on ‘imperial policing’ has shown that policing was ‘part of a single sys-
tem – bounded by shared institutions and common expectations’ and as such ‘the empire was a
system in which ideas owed not only outward from the metropole and back again but between
19
Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laey, ‘Retrieving the imperial: Empire and International Relations’, Millennium, 31:1 (2002),
pp. 109–27; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking aer Empire: e Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2019); Siba N. Grovogui, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
20
Julia Costa Lopez et al., ‘Forum: In the beginning there was no word (for it): Terms, concepts, and early sovereignty’,
International Studies Review, 20:3 (2018), pp. 489–519; Siba N. Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race
and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); John M. Hobson,
‘Provincializing Westphalia: e Eastern origins of sovereignty’, International Politics, 46:6 (2009), pp. 671–90.
21
Go, ‘Occluding’, p. 125.
22
George Steinmetz, ‘e colonial state as a social eld: Ethnographic capital and native policy in the German overseas
empire before 1914’, American Sociological Review, 73 (2008), pp. 589–612 (p. 608).
23
Çapan, ‘Beyond visible entanglements’.
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Review of International Studies 151
the colonies themselves.’
24
In a similar vein, Robbie Shilliam has problematised the bifurcation that
prevents us from seeing connections between the colonised (i.e., colony/colony connections).
25
For
him, this is due to the ‘cartographic gaze’ whereby the ‘peripheral gures, especially the colonised
among them, can only understand themselves in mute relation to the imperial centre.’
26
Shilliam
thus underscores how Europe continues to be the centre that we refer to or connect back to. is
might result in overlooking colony/colony connections that did not revolve around Europe as its
centre.
While these contributions have been important in complicating the narratives of the
metropole/colony and colony/colony connections, we expand this further as we problematise
‘Europe’ itself by showing how technologies of power developed to produce colonial imaginaries
and control colonies were applied to Africa and the ‘colonies in the East’. e way Europe is taken
as a unied space is part of why the German colonial expansion outside of Europe (by means of
‘protectorates’) and the establishment of German expansionist policies and imaginaries towards
the East of Europe are not analysed as connected events: taking Europe as a unied space does
not allow us to examine the existent hierarchies within Europe. e construction of the space of
Europe can be problematised, and thereby decentred, in two main ways. First, one can excavate the
dierent hierarchies that permeate the space that is designated as ‘Europe’. For example, it has been
discussed how regions and peripherality were constituted in the Balkans and Eastern Europe histor-
ically.
27
As Larry Wol states, ‘Eastern Europe’ was constructed as a site of ‘inclusion and exclusion,
Europe but not Europe. Eastern Europe dened Western Europe by contrast, as the Orient dened
the Occident, but was also made to mediate between Europe and the Orient.’
28
e construction
of these spaces by assigning spatio-temporal hierarchies – outside of Europe/behind of Europe –
constituted a ‘nested Orientalism’ within the space designated as Europe whereby the binaries of
West/East and modern/traditional continued to be narrated and reproduced.
29
Within the German
political discourse, this led to the creation of a specic ‘German myth of the East’. Since the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, and well before German unication in 1871, ‘Germans have so oen
seen Eastern Europe at one and the same time as both a dirty “Wild East” marked by chaos and dis-
organization, and yet also as a land of tremendous future possibilities and potential for Germans.’
30
e imaginary of a German frontier zone revolved mainly around the eastern borderlands of
Prussia and its provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia, Posen, and Pomerania.
31
e second and interrelated direction to problematise ‘Europe’ has been by bringing in
postcolonial and decolonial perspectives to study Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
32
Several contributions have focused on the ‘coloniality of power’ and analysed spaces such as the
24
David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830–1940
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 13. On imperial policing, see Georgina Sinclair, ‘e “Irish” policeman
and the empire: Inuencing the policing of the British Empire–Commonwealth’, Irish Historical Studies, 36:142 (2008),
pp. 173–87; Julian Go, ‘e imperial origins of American policing: Militarization and imperial feedback in the early 20th
century’, American Journal of Sociology, 125:5 (2020), pp. 1193–254.
25
Robbie Shilliam, e Black Pacic: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2015).
26
Shilliam, Black Pacic, p. 3.
27
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997); Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing
Ruritania: e Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Larry Wol, Inventing Eastern
Europe: e Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
28
Wol, Inventing Eastern Europe, p. 7.
29
Michal Buchowski, ‘e specter of Orientalism in Europe: From exotic Other to stigmatized brother’, Anthropological
Quarterly, 79:3 (2006), pp. 463–82.
30
Vejas G. Liulevicius, e German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009),
pp. 1–2; Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2012).
31
Christoph Kienemann, Der koloniale Blick gen Osten: Osteuropa im Diskurs des Deutschen Kaiserreiches von 1871
(Paderborn: Ferdinand Sch ̈oningh, 2018).
32
Agnes Gagyi, “‘Coloniality of power” in East Central Europe: External penetration as internal force in post-Socialist
Hungarian politics’, Journal of World-Systems Research, 22:2 (2016), pp. 349–72; Jill Owczarzak, ‘Introduction: Postcolonial
studies and postsocialism in Eastern Europe’, Focaal, 53 (2009), pp. 3–19.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
152 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
European East by underlining that along with the colonial dierence, there was also the imperial
dierence which was ‘less overtly racial, more pronounced ethnic, and distinct class hierarchies’
underlying the relationship between the ‘European empires and their (former) subjects’.
33
e
‘double imperial dierence’ created ‘an external dierence between the new capitalist core and the
existing traditional empires of Islamic and Eastern Christian faith – the Ottoman and the Tsarist
one’ and an ‘internal dierence between the new and the old capitalist core, mainly England vs.
Spain’.
34
As Walter Mignolo elaborates, ‘the imperial external dierence created the conditions for
the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of Orientalism, while the imperial internal dierence
ended up in the imaginary and political construction of the South of Europe. Russia remained out-
side the sphere of Orientalism and at the opposed end, in relation to Spain as paradigmatic example
of the South of Europe’.
35
Extending on Mignolo’s distinction, Manuela Boatcă argues that there
were three Europes: decadent Europe, heroic Europe and epigonal Europe. According to Boatcă,
decadent Europe ‘had lost both the hegemony and, accordingly, the epistemic power of dening
a hegemonic Self and its subaltern Others’, heroic Europe was dened as ‘the producer of moder-
nity’s main achievements’ and epigonal Europe ‘dened via its alleged lack of these achievements
and hence as a mere re-producer of the stages covered by the heroic Europe’.
36
is relationship
meant that heroic Europe deployed ‘its imperial projects in the remaining Europes or through them’
through two mechanisms. Firstly, heroic Europe used ‘the gains of the rst, Spanish-Lusitanian
modernity to derive the human, economic and cultural resources that substantiated the most char-
acteristically modern achievement’ without integrating the ‘contributions of either the decadent
European South or of the colonised Americas in the narrative of modernity’.
37
e second mech-
anism was the establishment of ‘neocolonies in the rural and agricultural societies of the region’
which worked to institute a set of relationships of underlying blurredness – ‘being the West’s par-
tial Other and its incomplete self’.
38
As such, the space of ‘Europe’, which is separated from other
spaces and temporally ahead, is that of heroic Europe.
A focus on these two interrelated dynamics of, on the one hand, historicising the (processes of)
construction of the space of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans and, on the other hand,
foregrounding hierarchies between dierent ‘Europes’ through postcolonial and decolonial per-
spectives has been gaining some attention in dierent academic contexts.
39
In this article, we
further develop discussions with respect to these two dynamics by focusing on how the con-
struction of the spaces of heroic Europe and epigonal Europe needs to be further problematised
in order to move beyond the analytic bifurcation of Europe/non-Europe. e problematisation
of the separation of Europe/non-Europe will be done by underlining two dynamics: rstly, prob-
lematising the construction of the space of ‘Europe’ and, secondly, ‘connecting’ dierent colonial
spaces that had been separated because of the Europe/non-Europe divide. We do this by dis-
cussing imaginaries of German colonialism and how they construct Central and Eastern Europe
as a colonial space. e divisions and hierarchies were part of the imaginaries of heroic Europe. As
such, it was heroic Europe that produced decadent and epigonal Europe (other), and thereby heroic
33
Manuela Boatcă, ‘e quasi-Europes: World regions in light of the imperial dierence’, in omas Reifer (ed.), Global
Crises and the Challenges of the 21st Century (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), pp. 123–53 (p. 132).
34
Manuela Boatcă, Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), p. 98.
35
Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Introduction’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 105:3 (2006), pp. 479–99 (p. 487).
36
Boatcă, ‘Quasi-Europes’, p. 137.
37
Ibid., p. 136.
38
Ibid.
39
Catherine Baker, ‘Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and Southeast European cultural studies’,
Interventions, 20:6 (2018), pp. 759–84; Lucy Mayblin, Aneta Piekut, and Gill Valentine, “‘Other” posts in “other” places: Poland
through a postcolonial lens?’, Sociology, 50:1 (2016), pp. 60–76; Owczarzak, ‘Introduction’; Piro Rexhepi, ‘Imperial inventories,
“illegal mosques” and institutionalized Islam: Coloniality and the Islamic community of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, History and
Anthropology, 30:4 (2019), pp. 477–89. In this context, see already Cedric Robinson’s argument on the ‘blackening’ of Slavic
and Irish populations in Europe, Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: e Making of the Black Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 153
Europe (self). Moreover, focusing on German colonial imaginaries shows that Germany’s own place
within heroic Europe was not stable. Boatcă’s initial classication is organised around ideal types of
(quasi-)Europes: Spain and Portugal represent decadent Europe, France and England heroic Europe,
and the Balkans epigonal Europe. Germany, though, is missing in the list of ideal types. e rea-
son for this is the instability of its position: at rst being in-between epigonal Europe and heroic
Europe and later trying ‘moving into’ heroic Europe when it started to solidify itself within European
hierarchies.
Inuenced by postcolonial perspectives and global history, studies on German colonialism
gained some momentum recently.
40
Firstly, these contributions have focused on making German
colonialism more present in the literature. Secondly, they have underlined how the making of
‘Germany’ cannot be told separately from its colonial endeavours, and vice versa. Conrad argues
that Germany and its colonies should not be treated as separate but rather be approached as a ‘sin-
gle analytical eld’.
41
Furthermore, he points to the ‘need to move beyond colonialism as happening
only in Africa and Asia’.
42
For Conrad, ‘territorial acquisitions overseas and in Eastern Europe oper-
ated within a shared paradigm’ whereby ‘the German notion of Poland was gradually transformed
and, increasingly recongured within national and, soon also, colonial parameters’.
43
To further
problematise the separation of ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’ that makes connections invisible, we
focus in this article on a specic form of colonial and imperial space making, namely blank spaces
on maps, and how this technique was employed in German mapping projects to designate poten-
tial ‘colonies in the south’ and ‘colonies in the East’ as colonial wasteland. e following section
will, thus, discuss the construction of imperial and colonial spaces in general and then turn to the
specic cartographical technicality of blank spaces in nineteenth-century maps.
Empire, mapping, and the production of blank spaces
Building on contributions from critical geography and cartography, maps and mapping techniques,
such as blank spaces, have received increasing attention within IR.
44
According to this strand
of research, mapping is part of the making of the international, oen intertwined with colonial
and imperial projects. As Matthew H. Edney states, ‘[i]mperialism and mapmaking intersect in
40
See, for example, Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2012); Bradley Naranch and Geo Eley (eds), German Colonialism in a Global Age, Politics, History, and Culture (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2014); Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen
Kolonialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003); Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer (eds), German Colonialism and
National Identity (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011); George Steinmetz, e Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German
Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, IL: e University of Chicago Press, 2007); Zimmerman,
Alabama in Africa.
41
Sebastian Conrad, ‘Rethinking German colonialism in a global age’, e Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,
41:4 (2013), pp. 543–66 (p. 545). See also Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), chs 2–3; D ̈orte Lerp, ‘Farmers to the frontier: Settler colonialism in the Eastern Prussian
provinces and German Southwest Africa’, e Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41:4 (2013), pp. 567–83; D ̈orte
Lerp, Imperiale Grenzräume: Bev ̈olkerungspolitiken in Deutsch-Südwestafrika und den ̈ostlichen Provinzen Preußens 1884–1914
(Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016).
42
Conrad, ‘Rethinking German colonialism’, p. 545.
43
Sebastian Conrad, ‘Internal colonialism in Germany: Culture wars, Germanication of the soil, and the global market
imaginary’, in Naranch and Eley (eds), German Colonialism, pp. 246–64 (p. 249).
44
For IR, see Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Laura Lo Presti, and Filipe dos Reis (eds), Mapping, Connectivity and the Making
of European Empires (London, UK: Rowman & Littleeld); Jeppe Strandsbjerg, Territory, Globalization and International
Relations: e Cartographic Reality of Space (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Jordan Branch, e Cartographic
State: Maps, Territory and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Kerry Goettlich,
‘e rise of linear borders in world politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 25:1 (2019), pp. 203–28; Luis Lobo-
Guerrero, ‘On the epistemology of maps and mapping: De la Cosa, Mercator and the making of spatial imaginaries’, in Pol
Bargués-Pedreny, David Chandler, and Elena Simon (eds), Mapping and Politics in a Digital Age (Abingdon, UK: Routledge,
2018), pp. 20–38.
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154 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
the most basic manner. Both are concerned with territory and knowledge.’
45
According to Edney,
imperial mapping is ‘constructed through cartographic discourse that represent a territory for the
benet of one group but that exclude the inhabitants of the territories represented’.
46
In this sec-
tion, we reconstruct scholarship on mapping and its relationship to imperialism, and point to the
importance of the technique of blank spaces in this process.
e ‘post-representational turn’
47
in the study of maps and mapping departs from the ‘ideal
of cartography’
48
and its belief that maps mirror the world ‘out there’. is strand of scholarship
highlights three points. First, maps are not understood as perfect mirrors of a reality ‘out there’
anymore but, in the words of J. B. Harley, ‘performative’.
49
For Harley, maps shape our imagination
and create conditions of possibility of rule and domination: ‘maps anticipate empire’.
50
ey are
important for the imagination, organisation, and execution of colonial projects. Second, mapping is
never a fully stable and concluded process, as maps circulate and are permanently (re)interpreted.
51
Similarly, colonial projects are never entirely stable; they are always in the making and in need of
stabilisation through technologies of power such as maps. ird, maps and mapping appear as
technical exercises and, hence, apolitical. However, it is important to understand the politics of
technicalities involved. Maps and mapping techniques – technicalities of cartography – need to be
seen as central aspects of the negotiation in projects of exploration, conquest, and colonisation.
Technicalities render political projects ‘scientic’. In this article, we analyse one specic technicality
of mapping, namely the production of blank spaces.
Blank spaces gure in modern maps to delineate ‘unknown’ territories. According to Harley,
‘there is no such thing as an empty space on a map’.
52
Instead, Harley argues, ‘blank spaces’
or (‘silences’, as he prefers to call them) are ‘positive statements’ and not ‘merely passive gaps
in the ow of language’: they are ‘active human performances’.
53
Blank spaces are a particular
feature of modern maps. In European medieval maps, blank spaces were used, as Alfred Hiatt
explains, to depict ‘the land that was rather a product of hypothesis rather than exploration’; in
later periods, these blank spaces were replaced with longer texts or ‘pseudo-topography’ such as
‘speculative mountain ranges, vegetation and rivers’.
54
It was in 1749, when, as Siobhan Carroll
puts it, ‘Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville erased the world.’
55
In a map of Africa, d’Anville had
45
Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: e Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 1. See also Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Laura Lo Presti, and Filipe dos Reis, ‘Mapping and the making
of Imperial European connectivity’, in Lobo-Guerrero, Lo Presti, and dos Reis (eds), Mapping, Connectivity and the Making
of European Empires, pp. 1–18. We focus on the link between European imperial and colonial space making and mapping
during the nineteenth century. However, as Ballantyne and Burton point out, from ‘the Romans to the Mongols, from the
Ottomans to the conquistadores, from Timor to Suleiman and beyond, one of the chief outcomes of the imperial impulse …
has been the acquisition of new spaces and their transformation into new places marked by the structural and cultural imprint
of the imperial power... [G]raing one space upon another, whether cartographically or imaginatively or both … is perhaps
the signature moves of would-be imperial powers.’ Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette M. Burton, Empires and the Reach of the
Global, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 28, 29. A good example of the use of maps in a
non-European colonial context is Qing China; see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in
Early Modern China (Chicago, IL: e University of Chicago Press, 2001).
46
Matthew H. Edney, ‘e irony of imperial mapping’, in James R. Akerman (ed.), e Imperial Map (Chicago, IL: e
University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 13.
47
See, for example, Dodge, Kitchin, and Perkins (eds), Rethinking Maps.
48
Edney, Cartography.
49
Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’.
50
J. B. Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds), e Iconography of Landscapes
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277–312 (p. 282).
51
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, ‘Rethinking maps’, Progress in Human Geography, 31:3 (2007), pp. 331–44.
52
J. B. Harley, ‘Silences and secrecy: e hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe’, Imago Mundi, 40:1 (1988),
pp. 57–76 (p. 71).
53
Harley, ‘Silences’, p. 58.
54
Alfred Hiatt, ‘Blank spaces on the Earth’, e Yale Journal of Criticism, 15:2 (2002), pp. 223–50 (pp. 230, 244, 245).
55
Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 1.
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Review of International Studies 155
reintroduced the technique of blank spaces in order to depict ‘unknown’ territories. Finally, by
the ‘mid-nineteenth century the blank interior of Africa – marked, if at all, with captions such
as “unexplored”, “unknown interior”, “unexplored by Europeans” – was a fairly standard feature
of maps of the continent’.
56
By this time, blank spaces gured prominently on maps of Africa,
Australia, and the Polar regions.
Conceptually, blank spaces help create the modern, enlightenment-driven, ‘ideal of cartog-
raphy’, that is, that maps objectively depict the world.
57
In this imaginary, politics and science
are constructed as separate realms, where maps appear as neutral.
58
Moreover, in line with
(and reinforcing) the ‘empiricist’ worldview of the nineteenth century, blank spaces create the
impression that those parts on a map, which are lled with, for example, topographical details,
are composed of objective, scientic, and accurate knowledge. is entails that they become vali-
dated, meaning what is depicted must be true; nothing speculative or ctitious, it seems, can be on
a map as ‘unknown’ territories are marked as ‘blank’ or ‘empty’; either something is known, or it
is unknown; tertium non datur.
59
Furthermore, these blank spaces on maps were vital in creating
imaginaries of exploration and thereby attracting travellers, hunters, missionaries, and explorers,
all aiming to extinguish the ‘horror vacui’ on maps. However, following Harley, blank spaces do
not only demarcate unknown territories. ey also create an imaginary and a ‘promise of free and
apparently virgin land – an empty space for Europeans to partition and ll’.
60
Blank spaces designate
colonial wasteland. ereby, the landscape becomes ‘de-socialize’
61
and even ‘de-humanized’.
62
In
this respect, blank spaces resemble other technologies in the justication of empire and the delin-
eation of ‘no-man’s land’, particularly the concept of terra nullius as the absence of possession in
international law, which gained prominence from the late nineteenth century onwards.
63
is article focuses on the production and circulation of blank spaces on maps and how this
technique has gured as an important part of the imperial project. Within the eld of IR, Jordan
Branch emphasised the link of maps and empire by suggesting the concept of colonial reection.
is term describes the ‘reection of techniques used rst in colonial areas onto European internal
political arrangements’.
64
Branch, thereby, addresses the analytic bifurcation of Europe/non-Europe
and highlights how techniques used in colonial spaces were then transferred to Europe, thus under-
lining the circulation and connection rather than separation. In this article, we intend to further
advance this discussion by focusing on how techniques circulated through colonial spaces that
were perceived as being separate because of the division of Europe/non-Europe.
56
Hiatt, ‘Blank spaces’, p. 245.
57
Edney, Cartography.
58
John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World (London, UK: Routledge,
2004), p. 65.
59
omas J. Bassett, ‘Cartography and empire building in nineteenth-century West Africa’, Geographical Review, 84:3 (1994),
pp. 316–35 (p. 322).
60
Harley, ‘Silences’, p. 70.
61
Bassett, ‘Cartography and empire building’, p. 326.
62
Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, p. 303. See also Pickles, History of Spaces, pp. 119–20.
63
Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
64
Jordan Branch, “‘Colonial reection” and territoriality: e peripheral origins of sovereign statehood’, European Journal of
International Relations, 18:2 (2012), pp. 277–97. While Branch speaks of colonial reections, i.e., how certain policies emerged
rst in colonial spaces and were then applied in Europe, others have brought forward dierent conceptualisations of the circu-
lation of geographical knowledge through maps. For instance, Kapil Raj challenges the idea that modern mapping techniques
were transplanted from Europe to the rest of the world and emphasises how ‘processes of encounters, negotiation, and recong-
uration of knowledge’ happened in ‘spaces of circulation’. Kapil Raj, ‘Networks of knowledge, or spaces of circulation? e birth
of British cartography in colonial South Asia in the late eighteenth century’, Global Intellectual History, 2:1 (2017), pp. 49–66
(p. 52). Bruno Latour, in his early work, on the other hand, conceptualised maps as ‘immutable mobiles’ as they are relatively
stable and ensure connectivity between ‘centers of calculations’ and the ‘eld’. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow
Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Edney, in turn, criticises this and
stresses that maps should be seen as ‘mutable mobiles’ as ‘people are always undertaking mappy acts: making maps, circulating
them, using them, ignoring them’. Edney, Cartography, p. 48.
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156 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
For this purpose, we introduce in the next section archival material of the mapmaking activ-
ities and writings of cartographers at the Justus Perthes press in Gotha. Between the second half
of the nineteenth and the rst half of the twentieth centuries, Justus Perthes gured as the lead-
ing German-language publisher when it came to the collection, evaluation, and distribution of
geographical knowledge and expertise. It became recognised for its production of maps of both
European and non-European territories. As we argue, some of the cartographic work at Perthes
needs to be seen in connection with the German colonial movements – sometimes as a reec-
tion of it, sometimes as a driving force. We are interested in how cartographers connected in
their imaginaries, by using the mapping technique of blank spaces, European and non-European
territories as (potential) colonial and imperial spaces. We focus, therefore, on two episodes and
their related projects. First, we reconstruct attempts to map and explore territories depicted as
blank spaces in the interior of Africa since the mid-nineteenth century. is project, even though
presented as being driven by ‘scientic’ interest in the exploration of ‘unknown’ territories, was
intertwined with a specic politics of knowledge as it helped create an imaginary of what counted
as ‘unoccupied’ land. is construction also served to identify spaces that the future Kaiserreich
might take possession of aer its unication and, thereby, ‘catch up’ with other European pow-
ers in their colonial expansion of territories outside of Europe. Second, we reconstruct a project
that emerged during the last decade of the nineteenth century and used a colonial imaginary for
Europe – and here the East of Europe – itself. Here we trace the work of Paul Langhans, one of
the leading cartographers at Perthes, and the way he designed, executed, and edited the Deutscher
Kolonial-Atlas (German Colonial Atlas) between 1893 and 1897. As Langhans was also part of the
v ̈olkische Bewegung, the leading ethnic-nationalist movement in Germany, and devoted his work
to nd traces of Deutschtum (Germandom) around the world, the Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas was
not restricted to German colonies outside of Europe but also dealt considerably with Germandom
in the East of Europe. is imaginary uses blanks spaces to construct ‘unoccupied’ territories for
German settlement and colonisation in the East of Europe by ‘emptying out’ these spaces of its
population.
From ‘unknown land’ to ‘No Man’s Land’: The use of blank spaces in Africa
Founded in 1785 by Johann Georg Justus Perthes (1749–1816) in Gotha, the Justus Perthes publish-
ing house developed into one of the most signicant European cartographic presses within a few
decades.
65
While early publications included the court almanac of Gotha and a famous necrology,
the Justus Perthes press began from 1815 onwards to specialise in scientic maps and atlases and,
consequently, changed its ocial name into Justus Perthes’ Geographische Anstalt (Justus Perthes’
Geographical Institute). Along with geographical societies, such as the Royal Geographical Society
in Britain,
66
private geographical rms, such as Murray in Britain, Hachette in France, or Perthes
in Germany, developed during the nineteenth century not only into important sites for the pub-
lication of geographical products but played a signicant role in the collection and production of
geographical knowledge itself. As the academic discipline of geography was only in an early stage
of development, these private initiatives acted as centres of geography.
67
Private cartographic pub-
lishers started, for instance, to organise explorations to non-European territories, oen intertwined
with colonial imaginaries, aspirations, and enterprises.
During the rst half of the nineteenth century, Justus Perthes became widely recognised for its
production of atlases. Atlases, which oen came in the format of convenient hand atlases, were
among the most popular geographical products. ey were aordable for a growing educated
65
Imre Josef Demhardt, ‘Justus Perthes (Germany)’, in Mark Monmonier (ed.), e History of Cartography, 6: 2 (Chicago,
IL: e University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 720–5.
66
Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultues of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001).
67
Federico Ferretti, ‘Networking print cultures: Reclus’, Nouvelle Géographie universelle at the Hachette publishing house’,
Journal of Historical Geography, 63 (2019), pp. 23–33.
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Review of International Studies 157
Figure 1. Map of Africa in Stielers Hand-Atlas, Justus Perthes Gotha (1820).
Source: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt, SPA 2
∘
00742.
middle class interested in geography, guided private, or state-run expeditions, and documented
‘scientic progress’. Additionally, atlases had the advantage that they were produced in subsequent
instalments, which made it possible to adapt them relatively quickly in the event of new ‘discoveries’.
e production of the Stielers Hand-Atlas in 1816, edited initially by the cartographer and adminis-
trator Adolf Stieler (1775–1836), became the rst signicant cartographic success of the publishing
house and ‘provided the basis for the nineteenth-century atlas concept [as it] became the longest-
lived, the most well-known and above all the most successful German hand-atlas of the nineteenth
century’.
68
Typical for this atlas was that it le those parts of the world, of which Europeans only had
incomplete and fragmented knowledge, as blank spaces. e distinction between what is ‘known’
and the ‘unknown’ of blank spaces was further increased as ‘known’ areas were depicted as detailed
as possible. is had the eect that maps oen appeared as cluttered and were dicult to read. e
blank spaces of these maps encompassed large areas outside Europe, such as in the Polar regions,
Australia and, in particular, the interior of Africa (Figure 1). By publishing its maps in several instal-
ments and subsequent editions, Stielers Hand-Atlas created an imaginary of ‘cartographic progress’
68
Wolfgang Scharfe, ‘German atlas development during the nineteenth century’, in John A. Wolter and Ronald E. Grim
(eds), Images of the World: e Atlas through History (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1997), p. 219. For example, by
the 1830s, Perthes had sold already around 100,000 copies of the Stielers Hand-Atlas, Jason D. Hansen, Mapping the Germans:
Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2015), p. 108.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
158 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
and triggered an ethos of discovery as the blank spaces on the map began to ‘shrink’ from edition
to edition.
69
Importantly, however, knowledge on maps was much more precarious, as the imaginary of sci-
entic accuracy and objectivity claims. It was oen rather an illusion. For instance, maps of Africa
in the Stielers Hand-Atlas feature, as many other nineteenth-century maps, an extensive mountain
range called the Mountains of Kong. ese mountains start in Western Africa, in the highlands of
Guinea, and extend along 10 degrees of latitude into the interior of Africa. e Mountains of the
Kongo played an important role in explaining two phenomena: on the one hand, the direction of
drainage of large African rivers and, on the other hand, the question of why there was no com-
mercial exchange between Africa’s coastal and interior regions. Although these mountains were
included in numerous European maps and became inuential in depicting Africa and produced
several hypotheses about the African continent (such as trade and climate), they were eventu-
ally imaginary mountains: the Mountains of Kong never existed. is, however, was revealed in
the 1890s only. e episode of these imaginary mountains shows the authority of maps and their
worldmaking capacity. And, it points to the question of authoritative knowledge for maps, and
the hierarchies and politics of knowledge involved. European mapmakers of the nineteenth cen-
tury based their knowledge on a few, oen precarious, sources of European travellers or even on
authors from antiquity. Non-European sources were usually not included. In other words, spec-
ulation was possible in these seemingly objective and scientic maps, but only if it would t the
Europeans’ gaze of Africa.
70
While the Justus Perthes publishing house obtained information in its initial phase by acquiring
maps from competitors or directly from explorers, this changed from the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury onwards as the press transformed itself into a genuine ‘center of calculation’
71
and began
to organise its own explorations. is development is closely associated with the cartographer
August Petermann (1822–78). Petermann’s trajectory is a good example of metropole/metropole
connections and how the Enlightenment-driven ‘ideal of cartography’ circulated and expanded
within Europe. Petermann was trained by Heinrich Berghaus, who published in close cooperation
with Alexander von Humboldt, based on Humboldt’s magnum opus Koinos, the Physikalischer
Atlas (Physical Atlas) with Justus Perthes. Petermann emigrated in the 1940s rst to Edinburgh,
where he prepared the English translation of the Physikalischer Atlas with the inuential car-
tographic publisher W. and A. K. Johnston, and moved later to London, where he established
himself as a well-known independent geographer and cartographer, became a member of the Royal
Geographical Society, was awarded the honorary title of a Physical Geographer to the Queen, and
created a network with several explorers. Petermann joined Justus Perthes in 1854 and established
his own geographical journal, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen (Petermann’s Geographical
Messages), one year later. By mobilising his network, the Mitteilungen became one of the leading
European outlets for the study of geography and held this status for nearly a century.
72
One of
the innovations of the journal was its map-oriented approach. As Petermann explained, ‘[t]he end
result and the nal goal of all geographical research, exploration, and surveying is, rst of all, the
69
Matthew H. Edney, ‘Cartography without “progress”: Reinterpreting the nature and historical development of mapmaking’,
Cartographica, 30:2–3 (1993), pp. 54–68.
70
For a discussion of the Mountains of Kong, including their appearance in the Stieler’s Hand-Atlas, see omas J. Bassett
and Philip W. Porter, “‘From the best authorities”: e mountains of Kong in the cartography of West Africa’, e Journal of
African History, 32:3 (1991), pp. 367–413; Bassett, ‘Cartography and empire building’.
71
Latour, Science in Action. For the context of mapping, this has been discussed, for example, by Pickles, A History of Spaces,
ch. 3; Strandsbjerg, Territory, pp. 58–62; Edney, Cartography, p. 94; Filipe dos Reis, ‘Empires of science, science of empires:
Mapping, centres of calculation, and the making of imperial spaces in nineteenth-century Germany’, in Lobo-Guerrero,
Lo Presti, and dos Reis (eds), Mapping, Connectivity and the Making of European Empires, pp. 105–37.
72
Imre Josef Demhardt, ‘Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen’, in Mark Monmonier (ed.), e History of Cartography,
6: 1 (Chicago, IL: e Chicago University Press, 2015), pp. 1095–9.
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Review of International Studies 159
depiction of the surface of the earth: the map.’
73
Moreover, according to Petermann, the primary
mission of geography was to ll in the last ‘blank spaces’ on maps.
For this purpose, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen attempted to include the newest avail-
able information in each issue. It published, for example, letters of Alexander von Humboldt or
travelogues of famous explorers such as David Livingstone and Heinrich Barth, for which the
journal acquired exclusive publishing rights (at least for the German-speaking market). In addi-
tion, by means of the journal, Petermann started to organise and fund his own expeditions to
explore unknown areas and tied this to a still rather vague colonial imaginary. Readers of the
Mitteilungen could follow the trajectory of these missions from issue to issue. e rst signicant
expedition organised by Petermann was the so-called German Inner-Africa Expedition (Deutsche
Inner-Afrika Expedition) between 1860 and 1863. Figure 2 displays a map created for this mission,
which was part of the instructions the members of the expedition received before their departure
and which includes several travel routes. e goal of the expedition was to explore the ‘mythi-
cal’ Wadai Empire, which is portrayed as blank on the map and was considered ‘untouched’ by
Europeans. Although the German Inner-Africa Expedition ended tragically, with most of its mem-
bers dying during the mission, Petermann considered it a success as it had shown that the areas it
started to explore ‘deserve a special interest; they are not deadly African swamps or sandy deserts
that would deserve to be visited only every 100 years by a geographical traveller, but areas that
have a history and a purpose, … and which are an El Dorado when it comes to their nature’.
74
Despite these ‘favourable natural conditions, these areas are a kind of “no man’s land” to which any
European power could extend its hand’.
75
By organising expeditions and using precise cartographic techniques, Petermann created a sci-
entic imaginary that claimed to depict the world objectively and constructed politics and science
as separate. However, the use of the specic technique of ‘blank spaces’ is embedded in the wider
politics of creating potential imperial and colonial spaces. ‘Blank spaces’ create the idea of ‘empty
space’ – empty in terms of rival (European) territorial claims, yet full of natural resources – which
could be lled by future colonial projects. is also has signicant repercussions for the con-
nection between a – still imaginary – metropole and – still imaginary – colonies. Taking place
a decade before the German unication of 1871, Petermann saw in the expedition an opportunity
to bring together voices that intended to overcome the particularism of the German Confederation
(Deutscher Bund) and advocate instead a German nation-state. As such, the Mitteilungen launched
a public fundraising campaign asking each of the several sovereigns of the Confederation to donate
to the development of ‘German science’ and thereby contribute to the larger ‘German empire’.
For Petermann, Germany could only become a true state if it acquired colonies. As such, the
imaginative nation was an ocial German state, holding ocial state-run colonies. is also has
repercussions for the well-established separation between empire and nation, where the former
develops into the latter, as the case of Germany shows that empire building and nation building are
‘not two stages of a consecutive development, but rather were dependent on each other’.
76
Taken
together, the German Inner-Africa Expedition can be read as an initial attempt to nd an ‘empty
space’ for future German colonisation.
77
73
August Petermann, ‘Notizen über den geographischen Standpunkt der Erde’, Geographisches Jahrbuch, 1 (1866),
pp. 581–600 (p. 581).
74
August Petermann, ‘Vorwort’, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, 13 (1864), pp. i–ii. For a contextualisation of such
a cartographic imaginary, see Pickles, History of Spaces, p. 119.
75
Petermann, ‘Vorwort’, p. ii.
76
Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation, pp. 2–3.
77
In addition to the German Inner-Africa Expedition, Petermann organised between 1866 and 1870 two major arctic expe-
ditions, the rst and second German North Pole Expedition. e interest in the North Pole goes back to his stay in Britain
in the 1840s, when the British press closely covered the tragic Franklin expedition and the loss of the two ships Terror and
Erebus in their attempt to nd the North-West Passage. Petermann was a leading advocate of the hypothesis of an open polar
sea, which assumed a navigable ocean at the North Pole surrounded by a barrier of ice. According to Petermann, this ocean
would contain colonisable land. At Justus Perthes, he was able to organise ship expeditions to the North Pole, which attempted
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160 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
Figure 2. Map of Africa including itineraries for the ‘German Inner-Africa Expedition’, Justus Perthes Gotha (1860).
Source: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt, SPA ARCH PGM 062/14, Bl. 2280.
‘Scientic’ enterprises, such as Petermann’s German Inner-Africa Expedition, created proto-
colonial imaginaries at the eve of German unication in 1871. While these aspirations were not
further pursued in the initial phase of the Kaiserreich, the German colonial policy began to
shi from the mid-1880s onwards with Chancellor Bismarck organising the Berlin Conference
in 1884/5, the acquisition of German overseas colonies in the same year, and Wilhelm II, who
became emperor in 1888, adopting the imperial foreign policy of Weltpolitik (world politics). Yet,
by this period, the search for colonial territory was more complicated than initially expected, and
Germany had diculties nding its own ‘spot under the sun’. Much of what was depicted as ‘blank
space’ on maps in previous decades had been explored and taken into possession by other colonial
to nd the open polar sea. ese expeditions had little success in terms of reaching far north, as they became quickly stuck
in ice. However, they were also an important event in the development of a German patriotic spirit, with the departure of the
second German North Pole Expedition being attended by Otto von Bismarck. See dos Reis, ‘Empires of science’, pp. 127–32.
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Review of International Studies 161
powers in the meantime. In the next section, we reconstruct a colonial project, which centred
around an imaginary of the ‘colonies in the east’, that is, located within Europe and here mainly
in what it refers to as the ‘Slavic’ countries.
Mapping Pan-German colonial imaginaries: The ‘colonies in the East’
e Justus Perthes press published between 1893 and 1897, in 15 instalments, one of the rst atlases
dedicated to the newly established German colonial empire: the Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas (German
Colonial Atlas) was designed and edited by Paul Langhans (1867–1952), a young cartographer
and demographer who had joined Perthes in 1889.
78
Within a few years, Langhans became ‘the
most important representative of ethnocentric geography’
79
in Germany and gured as the ‘doyen
of German-nationalist cartography’.
80
Langhans was a member of several far-right organisations,
including the Pan-German League. He had studied Geography in Leipzig, where he was inu-
enced by Friedrich Ratzel and his idea of Lebensraum (‘living space’). In the decades around 1900,
Langhans further radicalised a population-based vision of Lebensraum geopolitics by ‘translating’
the v ̈olkische ideology of the Pan-German League into cartographic projects.
81
e Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas is compiled of more than thirty main maps, supplemented by sev-
eral small auxiliary maps. Two characteristics of these maps stand out. First, the atlas includes
mainly topographical maps for most colonies but hardly portrays any topographical detail for
areas that are considered to have a larger ‘German’ population. For these areas, it focuses almost
exclusively on thematic maps, some of which depict economic and trade issues, but most are ethno-
graphic maps. Nonetheless, these maps still follow the tradition of Justus Perthes in designing very
detailed maps to create a scientic imaginary – this time of mapping ethnographic entities. Second,
and contrary to what one would expect of an atlas of the German colonial endeavour at the end
of the nineteenth century, the Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas is not limited to German colonies outside
of Europe. While it features, on the one hand, ocial colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, which
had been acquired by Germany in the previous decade following the ‘standard European colonial
convention’ and thereby ‘resembled those [atlases] of other European powers’, Langhans’s atlas con-
tains, on the other, ‘signicant anomalies’:
82
it starts in Europe and constructs the European East
as a colonial space in its own.
As such, the Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas includes several maps claiming to portray the ‘German
Colonisation in the East’ (‘Deutsche Kolonisation im Osten’). For example, one of these maps is
concerned with the German colonisation ‘On Slavic soil’ (Figure 3). e main map is surrounded
by various auxiliary maps, which carry titles such as the ‘German Colonies in Poland’ (‘Deutsche
Kolonien in Polen’), ‘German Colonies in South Russia’ (‘Deutsche Kolonien in Südrussland’),
78
Paul Langhans, Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1897). See also Imre Josef Demhardt, ‘Paul Langhans und
der Deutsche Kolonial-Atlas 1893–1897’, Cartographica Helvetica, 40 (2009), pp. 17–30.
79
Kienemann, Koloniale Blick, p. 69.
80
Demhardt, ‘Paul Langhans’, p. 17.
81
e v ̈olkische Bewegung emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century on the far-right of the Kaiserreich
and advocated an aggressive expansionist policy driven by a mythical German Volk, which is united through Deutschtum
(‘Germandom’) and in search of ‘living space’. For a general overview, see Dennis Sweeney, ‘Pan-German conceptions of colo-
nial empire’, in Naranch and Eley (eds), German Colonialism, pp. 265–82. For cartography, see Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and
Filipe dos Reis, “‘Making up Germans”: Colonialism, cartography and imaginaries of “Germandom”’, in Luis Lobo-Guerrero,
Suvi Alt, and Maarten Meijer (eds), Imaginaries of Connectivity: e Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance (London, UK:
Rowman & Littleeld, 2019), pp. 127–52. Ratzel’s Lebensraum travelled further in time and space. From the 1920s onwards,
Karl Haushofer radicalised the notion. While Haushofer is best known for making it a building block of the justication of
later Nazi expansionism toward the European East, he also linked it to non-European spaces by, for example, constructing
an imaginary of a ‘Pan-Pacic’ as a Japanese Lebensraum, which is not driven by extension over soil but over water. For a
reconstruction of this episode, see Alison Bashford, ‘Karl Haushofer’s Geopolitics of the Pacic Ocean’, in Kate Fullagar (ed.),
e Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Eects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), pp. 120–43.
82
Kopp, Germany’s Wild East, p. 1; Kienemann, Koloniale Blick, p. 70.
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162 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
Figure 3. Map of ‘German Colonisation in the East. On Slavic Soil’, in Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas, Justus Perthes Gotha
(1893–1897).
Source: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt, SPA 2
∘
00205.
or ‘German Wolga-Colonies’ (‘Deutsche Wolga-Kolonien’). Some of these maps seem to depict
contemporary German ‘colonial’ enterprises, while others are designed as historical maps.
Langhans justies the unconventional composition of the Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas in an intro-
duction, which was added to the nal instalment. e tone of the introduction is overall expan-
sionist and v ̈olkisch-nationalist, and includes a signicant redenition and ‘enormous broadening’
of the concept of ‘colonialism’ itself.
83
As Langhans writes, the ‘recent turn to the acquisition of
ocial colonies by the German Reich through overseas protectorates has one-sided the use of the
concept of the colony so much, namely in favour of the idea of the state-colony, that it might be
bold to give the name colonial atlas to all settlements of Germandom’.
84
It is through the notion
of Germandom (Deutschtum) that Langhans redenes the concept of colonialism. For Langhans,
the German colonial enterprise is divided into two separated colonial projects: one driven by the
state and one by the Volk. While the former has been realised through the acquisition of ‘pro-
tectorates’ by the Kaiserreich and is located outside of Europe, the latter involves a more ‘hidden’
colonial project, namely the project of Germandom that is driven by a mythical Volk. e Volk, as
83
Philipp Julius Meyer, Karthographie und Weltanschauung: Visuelle Wissensproduktion im Verlag Justus Perthes 1890–1945
(G ̈ottingen: Wallstein, 2021), pp. 63, 75–7.
84
Langhans, Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas, p. 1.
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Review of International Studies 163
an ethnic marker, is distinguished from modern and traditional notions of both state and nation.
85
It existed before German unication and can ‘survive’ outside of the boundaries of the state. is
also becomes visible in the map of German colonisation ‘On Slavic Soil’ (Figure 3). Pink-coloured
areas, which indicate German settlements, dominate the map. ere is no clear demarcation of the
eastern border to Prussia. Moreover, the fact that the border of the Kaiserreich does not overlap
with German settlement ‘leave[s] the impression that the territory formally under German rule
was not congruent with the German territory, dened as the space settled and thus claimed by the
German people’.
86
It gives the illusion of an open frontier space in the East of Europe.
Langhans’s colonial project of the German Volk predates the Kaiserreich, and it is a particu-
lar historical narrative plotted to justify German colonial settlements in the East. As Langhans
claims, ‘today’s colonial policy of the German Reich is nothing abruptly new, but … it is neces-
sary to understand this in line with and the context of the century-long colonial activity of the
Germans.’
87
us, according to Langhans, Germans were involved in colonial activities before the
German unication of 1871. In this narrative, Germany is neither new nor late in its colonial acqui-
sitions. ese earlier activities remained, however, unnoticed as they were not necessarily tied to
the ocial colonial project of a state. In order to colonise, Germans do not need a state; the Volk
is enough. Contemporary colonialism is legitimised by framing migration movements of the past
as colonial activities and thereby producing a historically grown and established German colonial
identity.
88
By invoking the historical myth of century-long colonial activities, Langhans also shis the
space of colonisation. While the conventional use of colonialism was limited to territories out-
side of Europe, the new focus on ‘Germandom’ makes it possible to locate German colonies, and
the claims and aspirations for German future colonial activities, within Europe itself. ese colo-
nial activities do not occur in a void of ‘population-free territory’, but colonisation is regarded
as a recurring struggle between dierent ethnic entities. As explained in the introduction of the
Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas:
Apart from the Reich-German protectorates, those countries are most intensively examined,
which have proven to be the most benecial for the settlement activities of German migrants
and in which Germandom could relatively preserve its independence against foreign inu-
ences: the German agricultural colonies. Arduous conquest and the settlement policy of the
Guelphs, the Ascanians, the Hohenzollerns and also the Habsburgs, as well as the Teutonic
Order towards the east, did Germanise the lands between Elbe and Vistula and large areas of
the Hungarian lands and mountain ranges.
89
e Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas follows in its maps and introduction a certain narrative of the
European East, which had been established in the German-speaking territories during the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries and which portrays Central and Eastern Europe as dierent,
namely as less ‘ordered’ and in a permanent state of turmoil. is ‘East’ is a frontier space and
a ‘Wild East’.
90
Langhans understands the ‘Wild East’ as a conict zone between Germans and
Slavs, and frames it, as other v ̈olkisch thinkers, through ‘a proliferation of water metaphors’,
91
where
German agricultural colonisation of the soil is presented as a ‘fortress’ and ‘dam’ against the danger
of a ‘Slavic ood’. Central and Eastern Europe is constructed as a colonial space. As a ‘Wild East’,
it needs colonial intervention to establish order, and it is the destiny of the German Volk, due to
85
On these concepts and their dierences in the discourse of Imperial Germany, see Peter Walkenhorst, Nation – Volk –
Rasse: Radikaler Nationalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1914 (G ̈ottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).
86
Lerp, ‘Farmers’, p. 569.
87
Langhans, Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas, p. 1.
88
Kienemann, Koloniale Blick, p. 71; Meyer, Karthographie und Weltanschauung, p. 77.
89
Langhans, Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas, p. 1.
90
Kopp, Germany’s Wild East.
91
Liulevicius, German Myth, p. 117.
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164 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
Figure 4. Map of ‘The Work of the Prussian Settlement Commission in the Provinces of Western Prussia and Posen,
1866–1896’, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen (1896).
Source: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt, SPA 4
∘
00101(42).
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Review of International Studies 165
Figure 5. Map of ‘The Worldwide Distribution of Germandom’, in All-Deutscher Atlas, Justus Perthes Gotha (1900).
Source: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt, SPA 4
∘
00417.
its ‘century-long colonial activity’, to do so by providing ‘culture’.
92
is justies for Langhans an
aggressive and imperialist expansion of Germandom in the future.
93
Although Langhans addressed in the Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas mainly ‘colonial’ activi-
ties ‘beyond’ the German state, he considered the state-organised Royal Prussian Settlement
Commission of 1886 a step in the right direction. e Commission continued a longer tradition
of Prussian imperialism, particularly towards Poland, which was initiated by the First Partition
of Poloand in 1772 and later also entailed population policies.
94
While the Prussian authorities
insisted rst on a policy of coexistence between German- and Polish-speaking populations, the
Commission replaced this with a more aggressive settlement policy, which included the settlement
of (Protestant) German-speaking farmers in (Catholic) Polish-speaking areas.
Aer completing the Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas, Langhans published various maps, using dier-
ent publication platforms of Justus Perthes, in which he documented the ‘progress’ of the Prussian
Settlement Commission. Blank spaces play a central role in these maps. In 1896, for example,
Langhans included a map in Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, for which he had obtained
exclusive information from the Royal Prussian Settlement Commission (Figure 4). e map aims,
as Langhans writes in a short description, to display the ‘success of modern state colonisation in
the East of Prussia’.
95
It depicts German-speaking areas from before 1890 as red and acquisitions
of the Settlement Commission as green. Territories with a Polish-speaking majority are white, that
is, depicted as blank space. ‘As the Polish territory remains white’, Langhans explains, ‘it is possible
92
Conrad, ‘Internal colonialism’, pp. 247–51.
93
Kienemann, Koloniale Blick, p. 58; Lerp, ‘Farmers’; Liulevicius, German Myth.
94
Lerp highlights an important colony/colony connection namely that the First Partition of Poland, especially when it comes
to the use of maps, anticipated the partition of Africa at the Berlin Conference: in both events, a territory has been divided on
a map without asking the local rulers or population. Lerp, Imperiale Grenzräume, pp. 24–6.
95
Paul Langhans, ‘Die bisherige ätigkeit der Ansiedlungs-Kommission für die Provinzen Westpreußen und Posen’,
Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, 42 (1896), pp. 118–20.
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166 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
Figure 6. Percentage of world’s land in All-Deutscher Atlas, Justus Perthes Gotha (1900).
Source: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt, SPA 4
∘
00417.
Figure 7. Percentage of world’s population in All-Deutscher Atlas, Justus Perthes Gotha (1900).
Source: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt, SPA 4
∘
00417.
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Review of International Studies 167
Figure 8. Map on ‘Germany Towards the East’, in All-Deutscher Atlas, Justus Perthes Gotha (1900).
Source: Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt, SPA 4
∘
00417.
to insert new acquisitions.’
96
is is a signicant reformulation of the relationship between blank
spaces and the depiction of cartographic progress in two ways. First, while blank spaces were used
in previous maps of areas outside of Europe to depict territories and populations ‘unknown’ to
Europeans, Langhans uses blank spaces in territories ‘known’ to Europeans. Second, the ordinary
reader is invited to become an active participant in this colonial movement by simply using pen
and pencil.
Blank spaces and similar cartographic techniques were also pivotal in another large atlas project
of Langhans, the All-Deutscher Atlas (Pan-German Atlas), which was published in 1900 and is
directly tied to the leading organisation of the v ̈olkische Bewegung, the Pan-German League.
97
e
rst map of this atlas is intended to provide an overview of the worldwide spread and distribu-
tion of ‘Germandom’ (Figure 5). e map is accompanied by two small auxiliary maps, one on
the worldwide distribution of land between countries (Figure 6) and the other on the worldwide
distribution of population between countries (Figure 7).
While these smaller maps seem to provide, on a rst view, ‘neutral information’, reading them in
conjunction with the main map serves as a justication for German imperialism towards the East.
While the map on land distribution lists the Kaiserreich with 2.3 per cent of the world’s land and
4.2 per cent of the world’s population, the Russian Empire covers 16.5 per cent of the world’s land
but has ‘only’ 8.7 per cent of the world’s population.
98
ese numbers create an imaginary where
96
Langhans, ‘ätigkeit’, p. 118.
97
Paul Langhans, Alldeutscher Atlas (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1900).
98
Like maps, statistics developed throughout the nineteenth century into a wide-spread technology of power. Statistics share
with maps that they are part of an imaginary of ‘scientic’ objectivity and accuracy. Langhans oen combined the two. He used
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168 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
Figure 9. ‘Germandom in the Baltic Countries and the Black Sea’, in All-Deutscher Atlas, Justus Perthes Gotha (1900).
Germany is too small for its growing population while Russia has more than enough land. Put
dierently, there is enough ‘empty’ space for German colonialism in the East. Another map of the
atlas, which is coined ‘Germany towards the East’ (‘Deutschland nach Osten’) (Figure 8), depicts
the spread of Germandom in the East of Europe. Two auxiliary maps portray ‘Germandom in the
Baltic Countries and the Black Sea’ (Figure 9), depicting ‘German settlements’ in pink and leaving
everything else blank.
e last two sections discussed two episodes of the use of blank spaces on maps in the context
of the German colonial and imperial discourse. Juxtaposing these two episodes demonstrates sim-
ilarities and dierence. While the blank spaces in Stielers Hand-Atlas and Petermann’s expeditions
could serve as moments of imagination of a future German colonial enterprise towards Africa,
Langhans’s blank spaces could do the same for spaces in Central and Eastern Europe: creating
colonisable land. e rst one operates with the assumption that an ‘empty’ space has to be made
knowable to ‘the European’. e second project assumes that a ‘lled’ space needs to be emptied
and made unknowable to ‘the European’. Moreover, both projects also had repercussions for the
politics of constructing ‘Germany’ itself. For a gure like Petermann, scientic explorations were
closely tied to creating a political entity that was realised through the Kaisserreich of 1871, while
in Langhans’s Pan-German project ‘Germany’ did not equal the ocial state but was constructed
through a population-based notion of Germandom.
Conclusion
e social sciences and humanities in general and IR specically are organised around what Julian
Go has called ‘analytic bifurcation’, which articially structure and divide analytic spaces into, for
example, Europe/non-Europe, inside/outside, and state/empire. Historical work focusing on con-
nections and entanglements has been important when it comes to problematising and theorising
statistics to ‘scientically’ dene and measure nationality, which he used then for nationality maps. On Langhans’s use of maps
and statistic, see Hansen, Mapping the Germans, ch. 3. See also Meyer, Karthographie und Weltanschauung, pp. 99–100, and
Çapan and dos Reis, ‘Making up Germans’.
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Review of International Studies 169
these separations. erefore, the starting point of this article was a reconstruction of how scholar-
ship focusing on connections and entanglement has addressed the metropole/colony bifurcation.
Building on this, we suggest that two aspects have not (yet) received sucient attention: rst,
connections between colonial spaces rather than between metropole and colony and, second, the
Europe/non-Europe division. By problematising this, we have pointed to processes of hierarchi-
sation within Europe and how, in particular, the European East has been constructed as a space
of ‘othering’. us, instead of approaching and contrasting ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’ as closed
containers, our contribution points to the need to analyse imperial and colonial spaces in Europe
and outside of Europe as connected. is makes previously invisible connections between dier-
ent colonial spaces visible. We reconstructed how mapping practices, specically the use of blank
spaces, were applied during the nineteenth century to construct imaginaries of colonisable land in
spaces outside of ‘Europe’, in particular Africa, and in the project of the ‘colonies of the East’.
ese two examples of the use of blank spaces, one in Africa and one in the East of Europe,
demonstrate how the hierarchisation of knowledge made ‘local’ knowledge and population invis-
ible within maps. In the rst example of maps of Africa, blank spaces were used to create an
imaginary of ‘scientic progress’ and to dierentiate between what is ‘known’ and what is ‘unknown’
to ‘the European’. Yet, as we have shown, knowledge was far more precarious. For instance, ‘indige-
nous’ knowledge was excluded from maps, while, at the same time, European speculation about
imaginary mountains could be included. us, the use of blank spaces in these maps exemplies
how ‘cartographic science became, within the European discourse, a crucial marker of dierence
between Europeans (the knowing Self) and non-Europeans (the un-knowing Other).’
99
Such a
dynamic of the hierarchisation of knowledge continues in our second example of Paul Langhans’s
‘translation’ of a v ̈olkisch-nationalistic programme of the Pan-German League into the Deutscher
Kolonial-Atlas and other cartographic products. In these maps, ‘cartographic violence’ of imperial
and colonial mapping becomes visible as large populations of the East of Europe are actively written
‘o the map’.
100
e two examples illustrate how the hierarchisation of knowledge was visualised in
maps to make ‘other’ forms of knowledge and ‘foreign’ population invisible.
Our contribution also draws attention to broader implications and future avenues for critically
engaging with (the history of) the making of the international. ere are two points that might
be interesting. First, focusing on one analytic bifurcation alone runs the danger of overlooking
important connections, entanglements, events, and hierarchies. is means one needs to broaden
the perspective by analysing dierent bifurcations and their interplay. In the present article, we have
explored how multiple hierarchies link spaces and processes, which have been traditionally taken
as being separated and isolated. We have done this by problematising ‘Europe’ and the multiple
hierarchies within this space – a space that is usually conceptualised as a homogenously bound
entity. Elaborating, for example, on Germany’s place between ‘heroic Europe’ and ‘epigonal Europe’
makes a variety of concurrent hierarchies visible. It thereby draws attention to how Germany moves
between these dierent ‘Europes’ by invoking colonial imaginaries and how this can be read as an
attempt to situate itself within the hierarchies of the international. Second, problematising dierent
analytic bifurcations draws attention to dynamics in ‘spaces’ beyond predened ‘metropoles’ and
predened ‘colonies’. is enables to study relations between dierently constructed spaces such
as East/West, Europe/non-Europe, or inside/outside. It thereby highlights how these imaginaries
produced space through the employment of technologies of power but also how these technologies
produced these spatial imaginaries in the rst place.
Acknowledgements. is article has been in the making for quite some time. For support, discussions, and comments
at dierent stages, we would like to thank Oliver Kessler, Pinar Bilgin, Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Julia Costa Lopez, and Benjamin
Herborth. Earlier dras have been presented at the 2021 EWIS workshop ‘Making the State-System Unfamiliar: e Dynamics
of the Global Empire-System, 1856–1955’ and at the research colloquium of the Center for Political Practices and Orders,
University of Erfurt, in 2022. We would like to thank all participants for their feedback. We would also like to thank Sven
99
Edney, ‘Irony’, p. 13.
100
Mark Neocleous, ‘O the map: On violence and cartography’, European Journal of Social eory, 6:4 (2003), pp. 409–25.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
170 Zeynep Gülşah Çapan and Filipe dos Reis
Ballenthin and the Gotha Perthes Collection for help with the archival material and providing us with digital reproduction of
the maps. Finally, we would like to thank the journal editors and three anonymous reviewers for their guidance, constructive
comments, and suggestions.
Zeynep Gülşah Çapan is Senior Lecturer at the chair group of International Relations at the University of Erfurt. Her research
focuses on critical theories of International Relations, philosophy of history, historiography, and sociology of knowledge. Her
book Re-writing International Relations was published by Rowman & Littleeld in 2016. She has published in journals such
as ird World Quarterly; Review of International Studies; and International Studies Review. She is co-editor of e Politics of
Translation published by Palgrave in 2021. Author’s email: [email protected]
Filipe dos Reis is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations and International Organization at
the University of Groningen. His recent work focuses on the history, theory and politics of international law, Imperial
Germany, and maps. He is co-editor of two recent edited volumes: e Politics of Translation in International Relations (2021,
Palgrave) and Mapping, Connectivity and the Making of European Empires (2021, Rowman & Littleeld). Author’s email:
Cite this article: Çapan, Z. G., dos Reis, F. 2024. Creating colonisable land: Cartography, ‘blank spaces’, and imagi-
naries of empire in nineteenth-century Germany. Review of International Studies 50, 146–170. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0260210523000050
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000050 Published online by Cambridge University Press
