Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have cited the ‘Hinterland Theory’ or ‘Hinterland Doctrine’ as the framework for European states to claim territory in the Scramble for Africa.Footnote 1 The theory, these accounts tell us, held that a European state’s territory should extend into the interior of the continent along the same lines of latitude or longitude as its coastal possessions. Borders drawn according to the planetary grid would reduce the potential for armed conflict among European states in Africa.Footnote 2 The concept was the European ideal of territorial sovereignty, which depended on creating a clearly bordered space over which a state could claim exclusive power with no room for gradations of authority.Footnote 3 The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 typically appears as the moment at which the Hinterland Theory was put into practice. Though delegates did not explicitly discuss the theory and the conference’s General Act restricted its territorial regulations to the African coast, colonial powers generally accepted that control of the coast entailed control of the area inland from it.Footnote 4 Most obviously, conference delegates agreed to draw provisional borders for the Congo basin (and thus the Congo Free State) along a line of longitude east from where they could agree on the course of the Congo River.Footnote 5 Though it was soon replaced by protectorates or more formal means of drawing borders, the hinterland of the Berlin Conference turned the African interior into territorium nullius, available for European acquisition because local leaders lacked modern sovereignty.Footnote 6
In 1970, another international meeting used hinterland explicitly to divide territory to different ends. The third meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, in Lusaka, Zambia, instituted a union of the ‘littoral and hinterland States of the Indian Ocean’ to create a ‘zone of peace’ in the Ocean, free of superpower conflict.Footnote 7 As in the Scramble, hinterland provided a basis for preventing war over land. But the new body’s classification of nations as ‘hinterland States’ was because their ‘main access to the sea is the Indian Ocean’ rather than latitude,Footnote 8 whereas the hinterland of the 1880s meant the coast projected political control over the interior, the hinterland of Lusaka entailed a purely economic relationship between the two. Both African and Asian nations connected to the Indian Ocean through trade counted as part of the Ocean’s hinterland, a concept now defined by economic connections. The two conferences shared an idea that access to the sea was important, but the Lusaka meeting’s division of territory was meant to limit the reach of the world’s most powerful states rather than provide it with international approval.
Both the late nineteenth century and the postwar period were eras of major change in the global territorial regime. In such eras of flux, hinterland has proven useful for undermining the British and Anglo-American global order. It posits an alternative global territoriality in which political borders matter less than economic networks and cultural connections. Hinterland was originally a German term that migrated into other languages to describe the geographies that the New Imperialism created. In the Hinterland Theory, hinterland took its literal meaning. In German, ‘hinter’ means ‘behind’, and the idea that hinterlands should follow lines of latitude was based on an idea that such regions were ‘behind’ coasts that faced the sea.Footnote 9 This physical hinterland had entered the German language but was extremely rare, as a search for the term in contemporary publications demonstrates (Image 1). Not long after the Berlin Conference, supporters of German colonialism began using an economic meaning for hinterland to link East African coast and interior in histories of the Indian Ocean. These histories were tools to challenge British power in the western Indian Ocean and demand territory from the Sultan of Zanzibar. German classicists and orientalists established the new hinterland through histories of interactions between the East African coast and far-flung areas across the ocean dating to antiquity. They wrote narratives of Indian Ocean World history that portrayed Portugal and Oman as prior colonial powers that had caused East African cities to fall into economic and cultural ruin from a premodern, cosmopolitan golden age. These writings asserted the immutable unity of East Africa’s coast and interior as the basis for Germany’s successful demands for control of the former.
While scholars have long recognized the legacies of territorial borders drawn during the Scramble,Footnote 10 the history of hinterland reveals that more abstract geographical concepts also continued to shape political imaginaries after the end of empire. The first half of the decade marked the height of what Charles Maier calls ‘continentalism’, a concept of territorial sovereignty based on the expansion of continental empires.Footnote 11 At the Berlin Conference, the powers applied the same principles for the expansion of sovereignty into the interior they had used for earlier settler colonies. The invention of economic hinterland signalled the dawn of a new era in European thinking about territory and German attempts to undermine British imperial dominance. This culminated in the development of geopolitics around the turn of the century as European and North American powers sought new ways to assert territorial authority in a world where they had claimed nearly all available space. At a moment when geography and history were solidifying as professional disciplines, economic hinterland marked the dawning of the new era of thinking about the intersections of history and geography in the works of theorists like Friedrich Ratzel, Harold Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, and Alfred Thayer Mahan.
Likewise, the re-emergence of hinterland as a key linking concept in historical syntheses of the Indian Ocean World after 1945 indicates a changing geopolitical environment in the postwar era of nation-state territoriality. Indian nationalists, long ‘entangled’ with German geopolitical thinking, used hinterland to link Africa and Asia in longue-durée syntheses of Indian Ocean history in a new challenge to Anglo-American power on the ocean’s shores.Footnote 12 With the acquisition of additional territory impossible, Indian theorists adopted the Indian Ocean as a framework for positing informal Indian control over hinterlands located across the sea as part of an assertive Indian nationalism. The idea of an Indian Ocean World as a cosmopolitan space pre-dating European expansion and ended by colonialism was adaptable to a number of political projects and continues to offer an antidote to the geographical projects of European imperialism. Footnote 13 Histories of the Indian Ocean World have appeared in many different languages; it has provided a useful frame for political projects spanning the ocean, including as an element in state soft power diplomacy.Footnote 14
Histories of the Indian Ocean World typically define the East African interior as part of the ocean’s hinterland. Defining a region as a hinterland marginalizes its history, thus repeating the problems of the geographical concepts many historians who use it seek to critique. Hinterlands are at the edge of the places where history takes place, the port cities, oceans, or empires that integrate the hinterland into bigger historical narratives, their inhabitants the recipients of change but without the agency to create their own histories. By labelling an area as hinterland, someone can attach it to a larger cultural or geopolitical unit with which it is not tied politically. Such links provide a basis to challenge the dominant power’s informal hegemony over the hinterland. In the century between the Scramble for Africa and the Non-Aligned Movement, a period defined by first British and then American global dominance, the Tanzanian interior was the region where such challenges to informal authority were most appealing. Outsiders understood the region had long been linked to the global economy through trade, that the British did not control that trade, and that there were few British settlers who would have more tightly integrated the area into the British Empire.
This article examines the emergence and use of economic hinterland as a window into changing concepts of territory from the 1880s through the 1940s. First, I analyse the development of European ideas about territorial sovereignty in the 1870s and 1880s that led to the Berlin Conference. The following section explores the emergence of the concept that the East African interior formed the coast’s hinterland through a commission of British, German, and French representatives, which defined sovereignty by territory in a region where Zanzibar had exercised authority through economic control. I next explain how German colonial propagandists transformed the meaning of hinterland in histories of an Indian Ocean World to demand the East African coast for Germany when control of the hinterland alone proved unprofitable for the German East Africa Company. After a brief discussion of the usage of hinterland from 1890 to 1945, I trace the adoption of hinterland into contemporary studies of the Indian Ocean World in Indian claims to regional power status and other political projects during the period of decolonization. The evolution of hinterland is indicative of the adaptability of geographic terms from the era of empire to postcolonial political projects. Even as postcolonial states challenged imperial territoriality, economic geographic concepts such as hinterland lived on in new forms of domination.
Physical Hinterland and international law
The 1870s and 1880s were a transitional period for thinking about territoriality, sovereignty, and international law. The Berlin Conference was the culmination of the era, in which territory ‘triumphed as the principle for organizing collective life’.Footnote 15 It marked the culmination of what Steven Press has labelled ‘rogue empires’, private imperial ventures that drew territorial borders as they saw fit later received state backing.Footnote 16 Rogue empires’ scramble for treaties depended on concomitant changes in international law,Footnote 17 which developed out the Institut de droit international, founded in 1869.Footnote 18 The jurist who did the most to enable new claims was Travers Twiss, who developed the concept of territorium nullius, which provided a means to work around Hugo Grotius’ seventeenth-century argument that sovereignty required effective occupation and to recognize treaties for land that Europeans had signed with Africans over the preceding years.Footnote 19 Recently unified Germany, as the power most interested in remaking the global order, looked to officially reshape ideas about territoriality with the Berlin Conference.
The usage of latitude or longitude to draw state borders in ‘unexplored’ regions was not a nineteenth-century invention. As far back as the fifteenth century, a planetary meridian had been the basis for the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided new discoveries between Spain and Portugal. The same principle undergirded the United States’ expansion west before the Northwest Ordinance resolved competing claims.Footnote 20 Differing interpretations of the Tordesillas border led to conflict in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century involving Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia in various configurations. As was the case with the Scramble for Africa, none of the countries involved could claim effective occupation, so they pinned their hopes on readings of treaties created in the colonial period.Footnote 21 In Berlin, European states hoped to avoid the tensions that had arisen in the western hemisphere.
Though the Berlin Conference did not actually set borders in the African interior, the conference did begin a process of defining European territory in Africa. In the lead up to and during the conference, members of the German colonial lobby agitated for German control of the physical hinterlands of their new colonies of Cameroon and Southwest Africa, a topic discussed between German and British governments.Footnote 22 Ultimately, the conference’s agreement did not extend into the interior because this would require exact bordering of areas about which Europeans knew little, but it did claim universality for European territorial sovereignty and define Africa as Twiss’ territorium nullius.Footnote 23 Physical hinterland provided a temporary solution to allow colonizing nations to expand into the interior along the lines of latitude and longitude without the requirement of additional conferences to resolve differences.
Delimiting Zanzibar’s Hinterland
Physical hinterland faced an immediate challenge from an unexpected source, German colonial enthusiasts. The German government issued a ‘protective letter’ to the German East Africa Company [DOAG] just a few days after the end of the conference, promising imperial protection for the East African territory the company claimed it had acquired, the area shaded on this map. (Image 2) The DOAG claims were inland from the Indian Ocean, which Europeans generally allotted to Zanzibar, but Germany and France had not even considered inviting Zanzibari representatives to Berlin. Governmental recognition of the DOAG treaties did not fall under Article 34 of the Congo Act, which applied only to new coastal possessions. The Zanzibari Sultan, Said Barghash, signed on to the Congo Act soon after the conference and used it to dispute the DOAG’s territorial claims, arguing that his control of the coast between Mozambique and Somalia should mean control of the interior along lines of longitude west. Over the next several months, the German and British Foreign Offices debated the extent of Barghash’s territory on the mainland. The two powers created a delimitation commission, to which they invited France as a third member, to determine the borders of the Zanzibari state. In the discussion, the commissars and governments spelled out limitations on non-European territorial sovereignty, deciding that the Hinterland Doctrine did not apply to Zanzibar. They set limits on physical hinterland as a means of denying Zanzibari territorial sovereignty and creating space for German conquest.
European states had treated Zanzibar differently than most sub-Saharan African politics since the creation of the sultanate in 1856, signing treaties more typical of relations with North Africa or Asia than with the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. The United Kingdom and France guaranteed Zanzibar’s independence in an 1862 treaty. The UK was content to exercise a sort of informal protectorate through the presence of British officials in Zanzibar, an arrangement that Germany’s new colonial ventures threatened to disturb.Footnote 24 Zanzibar was not invited to participate in the Berlin Conference but delegates did agree that free trade stipulations about the Congo basin would also apply to any Zanzibari territory there.Footnote 25 The German desire for colonies produced a rapid shift in approaches to Zanzibar from accepting Zanzibari control of the mainland to applying ideas about territorial sovereignty on the mainland drawn from earlier colonial conquests. Sovereignty was understood as something that had progressed over time, with Africans, including Barghash in this case, continuing to exercise medieval, personal sovereignty.Footnote 26 The DOAG treaties in the East African interior adopted this view, defining the region as territorium nullius and available for European control, rather than subject to Zanzibari sovereignty.
Barghash’s power on the mainland lacked the clear markers of territoriality that European observers expected, but he cited other factors as proof of his sovereignty in a letter to Bismarck. The Sultan’s letter claimed that his rule stretched all the way to the Great Lakes. He wrote that his authority was ‘firmly established’ as far away as Lake Tanganyika. His rule was ‘clear and indisputable’.Footnote 27 Knowing Europeans were likely to ignore the testimony of Africans, Barghash added that his authority had been proven by European explorers using letters of introduction signed by him on their travels across all of East Africa.Footnote 28 The Sultan claimed for himself an area linked to the coast by trade rather than borders drawn along lines of longitude, prompting a response that would take factors other than physical geography into account.
The spatial imaginaries of the precolonial Swahili coast have long been an issue of scholarly debate. Connections to the Indian Ocean World had long been sources of power and prestige among members of coastal society. Coastal elites elaborated connections to the Middle East for themselves as markers of their superiority over people of the interior.Footnote 29 In the nineteenth century, trade between the Indian Ocean World and the East African interior became the basis of power for BuSaidi sultans in Zanzibar.Footnote 30 The Zanzibari Empire was comparable to other non-European empires on the margins of Euro-American expansion in the nineteenth century in its focus on control of economic resources rather than explicit territoriality.Footnote 31 The prominence of Zanzibar and coastal towns, and diasporic communities within them, led scholars to fixate on their transoceanic connections. An older view held that coastal societies mostly looked out over the ocean.Footnote 32 Such scholarship, even if it did not state so specifically, depicted interior societies as static and primitive compared to dynamic, cosmopolitan Swahili society. More recent scholarship has shown that Swahili culture continued to form through connections with interior as well as the ocean. Though coastal merchants participated in economic and legal structures that spanned the Indian Ocean, coastal society was ‘simultaneously African and engaged in foreign trade’, and Swahili society shared connections with societies deep in the interior.Footnote 33
To resolve the dispute between Zanzibar and Germany, British and German diplomats assembled historical narratives of the relationship between coast and interior that supported their positions. British officials deployed a narrative in which Zanzibar was the hub of an Arab ruling race, a group of outsiders who had come to East Africa and brought a degree of civilization to African societies.Footnote 34 John Kirk, the British Consul General in Zanzibar, argued that Zanzibar had ‘been ruled by successive waves of northern races, of Arab and Persian origin’, since the outset of the ‘Mahommedan era’. There was no ‘trace of a native ruling race’, and ‘barbarian’ Africans had blocked the progress of civilization.Footnote 35 The UK claimed Zanzibar’s borders stretched at least sixty miles inland and that there was evidence of Barghash’s sovereignty further west, near Mount Kilimanjaro.Footnote 36 The German Foreign Office disagreed, based on a narrative of East Africa in which Zanzibar was a foreign interloper with limited territory. Zanzibari power lacked ‘a proper territorial character’, and the sultanate only controlled ‘twenty-five to thirty widely distant’ customs houses. Areas between them were ‘completely independent’, full of ‘numerous barbarous tribes’ hostile to Zanzibar. West of the coast, no Zanzibari sultan had ever ‘exercised any of the rights of sovereignty’.Footnote 37 Together, these opinions indicate that the British argued for an expansive view of Zanzibar’s borders while Germany tried to restrict them to contain as little mainland territory as possible.
To resolve the disagreement, the powers agreed to create a commission that would delimit Zanzibar’s hinterland on the African mainland. The Commission, made up of one member each from the German, British, and the (theoretically neutral) French governments, would decide the hinterland’s borders. The three commissars were all diplomats: Otto Schmidt-Leda, Herbert Kitchener, and Achille Raffray.Footnote 38 They were unanimous in a decision to exclude Barghash from participation in the commission, as Zanzibari participation was ‘neither in the interest of their work nor the spirit of their instructions’.Footnote 39 The commissars questioned what officials they could find in each town, typically Barghash’s liwalis or akidas, the officers he paid to manage justice and customs.
The testimony of the officials the commissars interviewed made clear that Zanzibar did not have defined territorial borders, giving Schmidt what Germany wanted, a basis for defining Zanzibari sovereignty narrowly.Footnote 40 Officials were not forthcoming with information because they thought the commissars were investigating slavery.Footnote 41 Many simply provided general statements about their territories’ extent to the west. One elder claimed Zanzibari power existed as far away as three to four months’ march. Dar es Salaam’s liwali claimed he sent soldiers at any report of a crime within five days’ march. Chiefs came to him, but upon questioning, he could not name one. He did know the names of coastal villages whence people came for justice.Footnote 42 Schmidt found a way to argue that these claims about Zanzibari authority inland in fact meant Barghash only exercised power on the coast. He stressed the fact that several of the interviewees could not name the regions [pays] over which they claimed authority, something he took to mean a lack of Zanzibari power there. Support for Schmidt’s position came from some of the interviewees not appointed by Barghash. An unnamed ‘old Ugogo caravan leader’ told the commissars that he recognized another chief instead of Barghash.Footnote 43 The interior region of Ugogo, then, clearly failed to meet the requirements for Zanzibari sovereignty Schmidt demanded.
The British and German governments deployed legal concepts that had shaped the Berlin Conference to support their positions on Zanzibar’s borders. The debate reflected long-standing European belief that the Indian Ocean was ‘a distinctive sort of ocean space – one of crowded sea lanes dominated by coastal polities and ethnic traders’.Footnote 44 Hugo Grotius had laid out his theory of sovereignty and the freedom of the seas in Mare liberum based largely around rebutting Portuguese claims to control the Indian Ocean after the conquest of several East African city-states.Footnote 45 The UK’s legal position relied on the natural environment to define borders. Its Foreign Office decided that control of a coast should entail the control of the area through which rivers flowed that emptied on that coast. It attributed this theory to the Swiss jurist Johann Kaspar Bluntschli.Footnote 46 Bluntschli’s relatively recent (1868) Das modern Völkerrecht der civilisirten Staten, a key text in the development of international law, had used ‘hinterland’ in its strictly territorial sense to describe the bordering of territory inland from a colonized coast.Footnote 47 Like the Hinterland Theory of the Berlin Conference, this theory of sovereignty depended entirely on physical geography with no concern for how Zanzibari authority worked. German officials depicted Zanzibar as a ‘coastal state’, different in character from European states and therefore in need of a different kind of hinterland from that used at the Berlin Conference. The German Foreign Office cited the eighteenth-century Dutch theorist Cornelius von Bynkershoek’s theory of the ‘cannon shot rule’ to argue that a coastal state, such as Zanzibar, only maintained sovereignty so far as its weapons could reach from the sea.Footnote 48 Such precedents supported a limitation of the Zanzibari hinterland.
In sorting through a political situation they did not understand, the Commission accepted the German argument that Zanzibar had not historically exercised sovereignty in the interior and enshrined the DOAG’s argument that the Hinterland Theory did not apply to non-European nations such as Zanzibar. It decided that the Zanzibar’s western border was ten miles west of the Indian Ocean coast. As Jan-Georg Deutsch has argued, the delimitation commission invented ‘a particular concept of Zanzibari sovereignty…in order to afford the British and German occupation of the coastal areas of the East African mainland an appearance of legality and legitimacy’.Footnote 49 The commissars chose to ignore other indications of Zanzibari authority in favour of a model that limited Barghash’s power to as small an area as possible, given earlier international agreements and declarations about Zanzibari power on the African mainland. In the words of the German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs, what was left to Zanzibar was a ‘small coast space, the Vorland of the German and English Hinterland’, a statement that supported his eliminationist views of Arab and African populations in the face of European advancement. Footnote 50 The Commission’s decision created territorial borders for Zanzibar that would allow the DOAG to expand its colony without concern for Zanzibari claims. In contrast to polities that fended off European domination like Siam, Zanzibar had failed to establish markers of its territorial sovereignty that Europeans could or would recognize.Footnote 51
Though their argument had won the day, German colonial propagandists lamented that Germany had not been aggressive enough in demanding territory. The German government had recognized Zanzibari sovereignty over territory on which they had designs as part of the German colony. Carl Peters, the rabidly nationalist and racist leader of the DOAG, remained convinced that it would be ‘child’s play’ for Barghash not only to keep German occupation of the hinterland ‘in check’, but to completely ruin the Company by occupying the coast. The owner of the coast was ‘naturally sovereign of the entire hinterland in terms of trade’, Footnote 52 as it was much cheaper to get goods to world markets with control of the coast. Over the next few years, these figures would refine the meaning of hinterland attain that control.
Hinterland for writing Indian Ocean histories
Economic hinterland formed the theoretical cornerstone of the German challenge to British power on the East African mainland. German demands entailed more than simply claiming that the coast was necessary for profitability. They meant reimagining the history of East Africa to make German claims to the coast appear the next step in the region’s historical progress. The histories that DOAG members and their allies wrote posited deep economic connections between the coast and the interior, dating back centuries, and made those economic connections out to be the most important factor in the region’s history. They treated the interior as a region where people and societies were at such a low level of evolution that they could not possess sovereignty. The interior thus became the coast’s hinterland not through a physical relationship but through an economic one. The result was the DOAG and its supporters claiming a territory that looked much like that Zanzibar had claimed during the delimitation process.
Contemporary ideas about historical sources predisposed German colonialists to foreground Indian Ocean connections over connections to inland communities. Evolutionary conceptions of history and adoration of Ancient Greece enabled colonialists to imagine a Golden Age of East Africa connected to Indian Ocean trade in antiquity. That ancient glory had later been destroyed by Latin (Portuguese) and Oriental (Arab) colonists. Many of the scholars who promulgated the new idea of an Indian Ocean World regularly wrote or spoke to wider audiences than would read purely scholarly works. Most were scholars of the classical world, indicative of the academic terrain of late nineteenth-century Germany. Though growing numbers of educated Germans praised the Italian Renaissance in the late nineteenth century, educated Germans exalted ancient Greece as the pinnacle of human achievement prior to the nineteenth century and condemned Latin and Oriental influences that had subsequently diluted Greek culture.Footnote 53 German historians took a philological view of the past, privileging the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century text, and early modern Portuguese and German written sources, which highlighted aspects of coastal culture recognizable to Europeans rather than connections to interior societies.Footnote 54
In the second half of the nineteenth century, German economic geographers had started to use hinterland to mean not just a physical relationship, but an economic one. Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s ring model of economic development, one of the first applications of spatial analysis to economics, used hinterland to denote areas supplying food or raw materials around a city.Footnote 55 By the 1870s, geographers were applying Thünen’s concept to port cities.Footnote 56 The rise of hinterland in accounts of international trade was tied to the politics around German colonialism following the nation’s 1871 unification. The most prominent National Liberal author, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, used economic hinterland as a device to link together different early modern German states in his narrative of Germany’s path to unification and overseas expansion.Footnote 57 But, as noted above, hinterland remained uncommon. It appeared only once in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin in the second half of the 1870s, and once again in the first half of the 1880s. It was only after the creation of a German overseas empire that economic hinterland became ubiquitous in German economic geography.Footnote 58
The political control that had been so important to the Delimitation Commission disappeared in the new descriptions of the relationship between East Africa’s coast and interior. Renowned Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch supported claims of connections between ancient Egypt and East Africa in a speech to the Berlin branch of the German Colonial Society.Footnote 59 Brugsch told his audience that ‘Hamitic’ peoples had travelled to East Africa centuries before Portugal’s arrival. Their superior knowledge of shipbuilding and construction allowed them to become ‘leaders and teachers of the negro races [Negerstämme] in the Hinterlands of the East African coast’. Footnote 60 Thus, Brugsch, claimed, culture in East Africa was not a Zanzibari imposition but the creation of earlier migrants. Reichstag deputy Friedrich Hammacher laid out a version of East Africa’s history as part of an Indian Ocean World through connections to Europe in antiquity.Footnote 61 According to Hammacher, East Africa had traded with Greece and Rome, but with the fall of the Roman Empire, it slipped out of the European geographical imaginary and became part of the Indian Ocean World through migration of Arabs to East Africa and East African troops to Baghdad. Footnote 62 These were connections based on the movement of people and goods, not the political control of the Delimitation Commission.
These histories redeployed hinterland as a historical concept to link longue-durée historical narratives that culminated in nineteenth-century Germany as the pinnacle of political and social evolution. Articles in the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung claimed the formerly glorious Kilwa had been overgrown by forest. Per the articles, there had been only decline to late nineteenth-century bamboo and straw huts after bygone days of ‘Asiatic’ murals and panelling, East Africa had thus undergone a similar process of decline as Germany from its early modern heyday. It was now time for it to rise again, as Germany had from the destruction of the Thirty Years’ War. Footnote 63 These histories portrayed a glorious, long-ago past for the East African Coast that had been interrupted by Arab colonialism, which brought only destruction. DOAG member and former Reichstag deputy Carl von Grimm took the farthest step in this direction with The Pharaohs in East Africa, meant to be the first in a series connecting East Africa to the Egyptian and classical worlds to establish it as eternally colonized space. Although more scholarly reviewers dismissed Grimm as a hack, the colonial press responded enthusiastically.Footnote 64 According to Grimm, Germany was thus not a destructive interloper, but promised rather to restore the glory of East Africa held in the ancient world by eliminating the negative influences of Arab colonization. Footnote 65
Grimm’s history was one of several that tapped into the ‘Black Legend’ of Iberian colonialism, elaborated in detail in the following decade in Justus Strandes’ Die Portugiesenzeit von Deutsch- und Englisch-Ostafrika.Footnote 66 Strandes, the first German historian of East Africa to conduct extensive archival research, which he carried out in Portugal, argued that East Africa had changed little since before the Portuguese arrived. Coastal towns still had the same contrast between ‘relatively civilized’ city people and ‘half-wild neighbours’, thus drawing a line between coastal towns and hinterland. Strandes noted that the Portuguese never extended their power over the hinterland.Footnote 67 What civilization did exist in East Africa came from across the Indian Ocean in this narrative, according to Strandes. He credited the Phoenicians with building Great Zimbabwe, and trade with the Indian Ocean beginning in ‘grayest antiquity’ and Semitic settlement from ‘times immemorial’ for creating the relatively high level of development Portugal found on arrival.Footnote 68 Since Portuguese rule, he claimed, the region had only declined further.
The narrative of East Africa’s development through connections with the Indian Ocean World and suspended by Portuguese and Arab colonialism became the DOAG’s official line. A DOAG report stated the ‘coast of East Africa had stood in contact with the old cultured races [Kulturvölkern] of Asia and the Mediterranean’. The report then laid out a narrative of that contact and evidence of it from sources of antiquity and the early modern period. Per the report, ancient Mediterranean peoples had laid the groundwork for culture in the region. Evidence came from relief in Thebes, which showed today’s Somalia, and the fact that the Sasanian Empire had created the slave trade in East Africa. ‘Little blooming sultanates’ along the coast developed a relatively high level of culture from those Mediterranean roots before either Portugal or Zanzibar had conquered the coast, the report stated. The Portuguese had built a plantation economy but were oriented primarily toward the ‘rash fleecing of the land’, so they could not build lasting rule. Zanzibari claims had moved forward only through British machinations, again a European influence. Footnote 69 In this narrative, German intervention could restore the East African coast to its premodern glory by removing the baleful influences brought by previous colonists.
The new histories meant a new hinterland, one defined by economic and cultural connections rather than physical geography. The DOAG depicted the interior as dependent on the coast since time immemorial and as subject to the same forces of Arab colonization that the Delimitation Commission had denied as the basis for demanding control of the coast from Zanzibar. Said Barghash died on 26 March 1888, easing the DOAG’s path. The new sultan, Khalifa bin Said, was unable to continue his predecessor’s policy of ignoring German demands. The Company would succeed in signing a lease that confirmed the new definition of hinterland and German narratives of East Africa’s history shortly thereafter.Footnote 70 Coast and hinterland would be inextricably linked as one territorial unit. German power on the continent would thus look much like Zanzibar’s had before German encroachment. Germans had apparently overcome their concerns that economic power in a few coastal towns did not entail territorial sovereignty. Economic hinterland had served its purpose, challenging informal British power on the East African mainland. German colonialists continued to agitate for more territory, but the German and British governments moved toward conciliation. After rivalry between the two nations’ most aggressive imperialists nearly resulted in conflict over expeditions to rescue the explorer Emin Pasha, the two governments signed a treaty dividing African territory more permanently, the Helgoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890. The treaty included a provision that the United Kingdom would establish a protectorate over Zanzibar and force the Sultan of Zanzibar to cede additional territory to Germany. In signing the treaty, the British government adopted the German viewpoint of limited Zanzibari sovereignty, as the United Kingdom would now force the sultanate to cede territory for British ends.Footnote 71
Hinterland, 1890–1945
Physical hinterland collapsed as a concept in colonial Africa by the end of the century, as it did not resolve borders between territorial claims that overlapped. The concept soon melted into other categories, ‘sphere of interest’ most clearly. Writing in the 1920s, British jurist Mark Lindley and Frederick Lugard, then the British governor of Nigeria, both described the Hinterland Theory as a short-lived contrivance that was replaced by more robust means of legally taking control of territory.Footnote 72 Economic hinterland was far more influential in the long term.
Hinterland entered English and French in the late nineteenth century with an economic meaning rather than a physical one in order to describe the changing global economy. The first three editions of the leading English-language economic geography reference, George Chisholm’s Handbook of Commercial Geography, did not include the term. The fourth edition, published in 1903, defined hinderland (Chisholm’s translation of hinterland into English) economically, as ‘the land which lies behind a seaport or a seaboard, and supplies the bulk of the exports, and in which are distributed the bulk of the imports of that seaport or seaboard’.Footnote 73 The editors of the largest-circulation French newspaper, Le Figaro, conducted a vigorous debate in 1895 over whether hinterland should be adopted into French with an economic meaning. Those in favour won out, as the editors determined it was necessary to have a word for what they deemed an important concept to describe new colonial economies.Footnote 74
Supporters of colonialism in multiple nations adopted economic hinterland as a justification for their own expansionary projects into areas where expanding states recognized existing economic systems but not states. Mostafa Minawi argues that Ottoman officials adopted hinterland into Turkish to justify expansion south from the Mediterranean ‘because a literal translation was deemed not to convey its contextual power’.Footnote 75 More consequentially, the same belief that political borders should capture existing economic networks underlay the European and Japanese expansion west in China. The China Association of London claimed that South China was ‘the hinterland of Hong Kong’ as France looked to expand there,Footnote 76 and the American Chamber of Commerce in China worried about the cession of the ‘absolute control of Qingdao and its hinterland’ to Japan after the First World War.Footnote 77 In all these cases, hinterland served to justify territorial expansion as merely turning an existing economic region into a political one.
Historians also adopted hinterland in the 1890s as part of a wider trend of adopting geography as a historical explanation. Hinterland was just one answer to more general questions about how to incorporate regions that were not yet part of the states involved into state-centred histories. Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier, the most influential spatial concept in historical scholarship, allowed Turner to centre the narrative of American social and political development in areas that were not yet part of the United States. As much process as place, the frontier as a concept served to incorporate territory into American history even before the United States had extended its political control to that territory.Footnote 78 Hinterland and frontier both appeared as historical categories to explain and justify the expansion of industrial nations. Both denied the existence of politics in the areas they described. But hinterland’s historical depth was different from frontiers. An area defined as frontier, wherever in the world it was found, was constructed as lacking a history until settlers arrived and began the process of state building there. It was an unknown space being incorporated into formal state control. Even as Igor Kopytoff adapted the concept to African history, the frontier was an ‘institutional vacuum’ open to settlement that extended an existing state or incubated a new one.Footnote 79 In contrast, hinterlands as they appear in scholarship precede white settlement and political control; they are pre-existing, organic economic and cultural systems.
Similar intellectual currents were at play in the adoption of hinterland among scholars in the emerging field of geopolitics. As with international law, hinterland functioned as part of a transitional period as geographers and scholars in related disciplines developed spatial narratives of world history that pointed toward new thinking about intercontinental spatial constructions.Footnote 80 With continentalism having reached an end with the exhaustion of land not claimed by other European states, theorists like Friedrich Ratzel, Harold Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, and Alfred Thayer Mahan developed alternative models for thinking about European expansion in which territory was less important than other forms of power. Mahan made the argument that control of the sea, and projection from it, was as important as control of land, a clear opening for the hinterland to link control over land to sea power.Footnote 81
Physical hinterland became influential in the Arctic in the 1910s and 1920s, indicating the continuation of older thinking about territorial sovereignty in areas inhabited by people whom Europeans and North Americans viewed as primitive. International debate over control of the poles repeated many of the discussions of Africa.Footnote 82 Canadian senator Pascal Poirier proposed the ‘sector theory’ in 1907, ‘a policy of containment to be employed by all Arctic nations’.Footnote 83 As was the case with the Hinterland Theory, Poirier claimed the division of the Arctic by longitude would prevent international conflict. Canada applied the sector theory to the Northwest Territories in 1925, incorporating an area previously open to explorers and scientists from other nations as exclusively Canadian territory. As in the Scramble for Africa, this process elided indigenous land claims in the interest of white-owned companies’ exploitation of natural resources.Footnote 84 The Soviet Union took up the sector theory to claim the Arctic to its north the following year and the principle became the de facto means of dividing the Arctic, even if not part of international law.Footnote 85 Soviet jurist W. Lakhtine claimed that since ‘effective occupation’ was impossible in the Arctic, nations had to resort to other means of asserting sovereignty. In this case, longitude was the best means.Footnote 86 American David Hunter Miller compared the sector theory directly to the Hinterland Theory, coming to the conclusion that other countries would have to accept if the US, Canada, and the Soviet Union all agreed to use it.Footnote 87 Physical hinterland was again deemed acceptable in a region of scrambling for territory where European and North American states believed no states already existed.
German imperialists again turned to hinterland in the 1930s and 1940s, this time for expansion in Europe. The National Socialist geographer Walter Christaller used the concept as part of his Central Place Theory, in which hinterland served as a shorthand for explaining connections between major cities and their dependent small cities, towns, and countryside.Footnote 88 Christaller’s writing served as a conceptual framework for German expansion in Eastern Europe, where Germans aimed to disrupt the global order with an alternative territoriality that treated existing states in the region as primitive. Christaller worked in the Planning and Soil Department during the Second World War and his theories ‘established the basic plans for German settlement in occupied Poland’.Footnote 89 Nazi functionaries first deterritorialized Poland and then reterritorialized as German based on a structure of central places and agricultural hinterlands inhabited by German settlers.Footnote 90 Central Place Theory, and the attendant economic hinterland, became one of the most popular concepts in English-language geography from the 1950s through the 1970s. Christaller’s zentralen Orte was published in English translation in 1966, stripped of its problematic origins for Anglo-American readers.Footnote 91
Hinterland and the new Indian Ocean world
The version of the Indian Ocean hinterland used at the Lusaka meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement developed out of a broader challenge to the American-dominated global order in the wake of the Second World War. The war had introduced a new era of geopolitical thinking, posing Alfred Thayer Mahan’s vision of a world dominated by seapower versus Karl Haushofer’s belief in continentalism.Footnote 92 In its aftermath, political activists and scholars adopted an Indian Ocean World framework to challenge the ascendant Anglo-American military power in the ocean and on its shores. The new histories of the Indian Ocean World brought back the hinterland of nineteenth-century German histories. Like those earlier histories, postwar Indian Ocean histories foregrounded hinterland connections that predated colonialism to advance alternatives to the dominant form of territoriality.
Indian Ocean histories re-emerged as an element in increasingly assertive Indian nationalism. Two of the most important books in this new historiography were K.M. Panikkar’s 1945 India and the Indian Ocean and Keshav Vaidhya’s 1949 Naval Defence of India.Footnote 93 Panikkar argued that the Japanese conquest of Singapore in the Second World War had made clear that control of the Indian Ocean was essential for independent India. This had demonstrated India’s ‘future is dependent on the freedom of that vast water surface. No industrial development, no commercial growth, and no stable political structure are possible for her unless the Indian Ocean is free and her own shores fully protected. The Indian Ocean must therefore remain truly Indian’.Footnote 94 Like German colonial propagandists, Panikkar called upon a history before the expansion of Portugal and Oman to East Africa to challenge British dominance. He described the ocean as ‘undoubtedly the first centre of oceanic activity’, driven by Indian merchants until the fourteenth century.Footnote 95 That period was clearly the ocean’s golden age, an era of Indian imperial power stretching from the coast of East Africa to Southeast Asia.Footnote 96 Vaidhya cast India as an imperial power, writing that ‘between fourth and twelfth century A.D. [sic] India was probably the greatest colonial and maritime power the world has ever known’, with not just a presence but ‘domination’ from Madagascar and Mozambique to the Philippines.Footnote 97 He went so far as to suggest than Indian ‘invasions over the sea to distant islands and distant countries…showed to the foreigners how to reverse the process’, providing a model for colonialism that Europeans adopted.Footnote 98 For Vaidhya, the Indian Ocean could be a zone free of superpower conflict, instead controlled by India and its regional allies. He suggested India acquire territory and build bases as far away as the Cape of Good Hope. Both writers adopted a colonial framework of thinking about colonized parts of Africa and Southeast Asia as on a lower level of evolution, without sovereignty.
As David Scott has demonstrated, both men based their analyses on Mahan’s Influences of Sea Power upon History, but both also drew on German conceptions of geopolitics. Panikkar and Vaidhya saw their nation as the heir of British dominance in the Indian Ocean. The former was among the Indian nationalist intellectuals ‘entangled’ with German ideas in the interwar period. Kris Manjapra has examined the ‘joint rebellion of Germans and Indians against the legacies of the nineteenth century’, which produced interlocking Indian and German geopolitical concepts in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 99 Indian and German theorists together challenged British power with new conceptions of geopolitics in which the world was divided into natural or cultural regions rather than the political borders of empires or nations.Footnote 100
Hinterland functioned for Panikkar to link far-flung areas across the ocean to India as an informal economic empire, in contrast to both the territorial empires that were disappearing from the globe and the emerging world of nation-states.Footnote 101 To make his case for Indian Ocean dominance as a geopolitical goal, Panikkar reiterated aspects of nineteenth-century German histories of the Indian Ocean World. In both cases, hinterland served in the same sense as a term to link land to maritime power. A comparison to Vaidhya’s territorial vision is indicative of the value of hinterland. Vaidhya suggested a clunky metaphor of Hind-Purush or ‘INDIA-Man’ submerged in the Indian Ocean, with Madagascar as one leg and Burma and Ceylon as limbs.Footnote 102 Economic hinterland, on the other hand, offered historical depth and a justification for links to India. For Panikkar, The Persian Gulf possessed ‘the historic land of Mesopotamia as its hinterland’.Footnote 103 In more recent times, the fact that the region was ‘completely backward’ meant that German goals for the Berlin-Baghdad railway would have required ‘a complete reorganization of the hinterland’ for success, he wrote.Footnote 104 In this narrative, the Indian Ocean World served as a means to posit an alternative, informal form of empire in which India was metropole rather than colony.
As had been the case in Germany in the 1880s, the vision of power projection based on informal economic power was prominent in India for just a short time before a new territorial order solidified. Jawaharlal Nehru utilized India’s position as the ‘pivot round which the defence problems of the Middle, East, the Indian Ocean and South-east Asia revolve’ of the Indian Ocean to argue for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.Footnote 105 His own vision of world history, however, was far more territorially based than Panikkar’s or Vaidhya’s. In his prison letters from the early 1930s, Nehru compared European and Asian histories to demonstrate Asia’s precolonial glory. Unlike Panikkar and Vaidhya, with their focus on Indian power in the Indian Ocean, Nehru cited territorial empires, most explicitly the Mongol Empire, as counterparts to European power. The world’s focus, thought Nehru, would return to Western Asia, which had ‘often been the pivot of world affairs’, as ‘the highway between East and West passes through them’.Footnote 106 With Nehru setting India’s foreign policy agenda, Panikkar and Vaidhya lost out to territorial perspectives.Footnote 107
Both Panikkar and Vaidhya presented only one possible version of the Indian Ocean’s history, one with India at the centre. But Indian Ocean history proved adaptable to political projects in other imperial and linguistic contexts. What these claims had in common were assertions that the claimants were restoring the precolonial past before the unnatural rupture of European colonialism. For example, mwambao activists in coastal Kenya deployed the history of the Indian Ocean World to argue for independence from Kenya. In their telling, the coast was part of the Indian Ocean World and not fully African. It should not then become part of an African nation.Footnote 108 An alternative view came from islands in the ocean colonized by France, where historians challenged both British and Indian claims to superiority over the ocean with narratives of cosmopolitanism.Footnote 109 These histories posed alternatives to the economic systems dominated by superpowers based on premodern golden ages of commerce. Hinterland became ubiquitous, its usage spreading far beyond those who had read any German geography.
The 1970 Lusaka meeting’s adoption of its conception of ‘littoral and hinterland states of the Indian Ocean’ brought from national to international politics. Contemporary reports reveal the committee’s connections to Cold War tensions and the Afro-Asian movement. The new vision of the Indian Ocean World and its hinterlands developed out of the ‘Spirit of Bandung’ that swept through much of the decolonizing world to challenge the bipolarity of the Cold War.Footnote 110 To justify the selection of participating states, the Committee provided a definition for ‘hinterland states’ as ‘States whose main access to the sea is the Indian Ocean’.Footnote 111 But one of the nations included was China, which does not border the ocean.
China’s participation, and the meeting more generally, can be explained by a changing geopolitical context in which control of territory was receding in significance. Two years before the Lusaka meeting, the United States and United Kingdom had begun building a military base on Diego Garcia, an island several hundred miles east of Tanzania. The base began a new era of the militarization of the ocean. Both China and India, two of the hinterland states at Lusaka, wanted to counter superpower influence on the ocean. They were also, however, rivals for leadership in independent Africa. China was attempting to reset its international standing from a low point during the Cultural Revolution.Footnote 112 Zambia, the meeting’s host, had begun constructing a railway through Tanzania with Chinese help to provide an outlet to the Indian Ocean, bypassing white minority or colonial governments that otherwise could control Zambia’s copper industry. The Indian Ocean was cast as a place of connection for formerly colonized countries, a link between Africa and Asia.Footnote 113 In the meeting’s aftermath, the United Nations established the Ad Hoc Committee on the Indian Ocean, in 1972. The Committee declared the ocean and its hinterland would be ‘a zone of peace from which great Power [sic] rivalries and competition as well as bases conceived in the context of such rivalries and competition should be excluded’.Footnote 114 China used the movement and economic hinterland to establish a means to challenge American power in the ocean, though relations between the countries soon began to improve.
At a historical moment in which the global territorial regime was shifting, political leaders and historians turned to a spatial concept invented during the period of the last major shift. Hinterland connections appealed to political leaders in the decolonizing world because of their potential for challenging Anglo-American visions of a world of territorial nation-states. Indian Ocean World histories, with their longue-durée narratives that decentred European colonialism, provided adaptable national and international narratives for geopolitical goals. As they had in the 1880s, hinterland reappeared as a means for a new power on the Indian Ocean, independent India, to establish a sphere of influence over land that it did not territorially control. Over the following decades, hinterland migrated to other political challenges to the global order, to new African states and to the assertion of their independence from the bipolar conflict of the Cold War.
Conclusion
At Berlin and Lusaka, hinterland provided a means to divide the world differently from prevailing systems of territoriality. Hinterland began as a concept to describe a physical relationship in space, denoting the areas behind a coast. As the German East Africa Company struggled to turn a profit, its members wrote histories of an Indian Ocean World predating Zanzibari arrival in East Africa. To structure these histories, Germans reinvented hinterland as a term meaning economic connections more than physical geography. At a moment of transition in both international law and academic disciplines, hinterland bridged the old era to the new as a justification for imperial expansion as western states claimed nearly the entire globe. Colonial propagandists used the new economic hinterland in histories of the Indian Ocean world to demand control of the coast from Zanzibar and create what it thought would be a unified economy in mainland Tanzania.
The same hinterland buttressed a new challenge to British dominance in the wake of the Second World War. K.M. Panikkar used hinterland to border an Indian-dominated Indian Ocean World that he and other promoters of Indian naval strength set up as a model for India’s future international position. Longue-durée historical narratives provided attractive alternatives to Eurocentric histories and became the basis for new political identities in the decolonizing world. A concept developed to justify German colonial conquest became part of alternative geographies of the Indian Ocean that were directed against the legacies of European borders. As German colonial enthusiasts had used hinterland posit the existence of a kind of imperial space based on economic connections rather than territoriality to challenge British power in East Africa, so Indian geopolitical thinkers used the term to argue for Indian informal empire over the ocean’s shores. In both cases, hinterland served as a tool to challenge the dominant form of territoriality.
Other projects overtook those in which hinterland played a central role in the 1890s and the 1970s but similar issues of dividing the earth are prevalent in discussions of the Arctic today. Canada and Russia continued to claim portions of the Arctic based on the sector theory as ice melts and dreams of resource wealth take off.Footnote 115 Decisions on Arctic borders are now subject to an international decision-making body, the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. Where states are trying to remake the territorial order, they continue to produce geographies that elide human presence and politics in the areas they claim.Footnote 116 Hinterland’s evolution thus illustrates a fundamental aspect of the global history of empire, the importance and malleability of supposedly apolitical, descriptive geographical ideas in expansionary politics.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many people who provided feedback on drafts of this article or help with sections of it: Ashley Parcells, Chris Rominger, Heidi Tworek, Sean Wempe, Jesse Hingson, Pier Larson, Alex Lichtenstein, participants in the UNF history department seminar, and the anonymous reviewers.
Matthew Unangst is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Oneonta. His current book project, Colonial Geography: German Colonialism, Race, and Space in East Africa, 1884–1907, explores the development of a German colonial ideology of Kultur in the encounter of German, African, and Indian Ocean geographies in East Africa and is under contract with the University of Toronto Press. Articles from the project have appeared in Central European History and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. His new project analyses the ways that Tanzania, West Germany, and East Germany turned the historiography of German East Africa into a site of geopolitical struggle from the 1960s through the 1980s.
