Impossible Missions?: German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa
274
Impossible Missions?: German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa
274Hardcover
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Overview
Nina Berman describes the structures of domination that date back to colonialism but did not disappear with decolonization and are, in fact, integral to today’s global economy. She also critiques the avoidance of African material reality in most of the analyses of European images of Africa, which has led to a perpetuation of the old model of Africanism. By highlighting patterns of domination that did not disappear with decolonization, Impossible Missions? disputes previous assumptions about why global inequality has not only persisted but increased.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803213340 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2004 |
| Series: | Texts and Contexts |
| Pages: | 274 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.28(w) x 9.44(h) x 1.14(d) |
About the Author
Nina Berman is an associate professor of German at Ohio State University.
Read an Excerpt
Impossible Missions?
German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in AfricaBy Nina Berman
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2004 University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
Chapter One
The Modernizing Mission Max Eyth in Egypt
The concept of progress should be based on the idea of catastrophe. - Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project
A Steam Plow Competition in the Nile Delta
In late April 1864 an unusual competition was staged on a deserted field near Shubra in the Nile delta. The objects of contention were two different models of steam plows, each maker claiming that his was the superior model. On the one side four Englishmen were set to demonstrate the power of a steam plow designed by a man named Howard. The challenging team consisted of a group of Egyptian peasants and their supervisor, the German engineer Max Eyth, who entered the competition with a plow originally designed by another Englishman, John Fowler of Leeds, for whom Eyth had worked before entering the service of an Egyptian aristocrat. The goal of the competition was to establish which of the plows was best suited to work the soil of the Egyptian cotton fields. The stakes were high: the winner of the competition was likely to be chosen by the Egyptian viceroy to deliver a number of the superior plows to Egypt, to help develop the booming cotton industry of the country.
The competition unfolded in a most dramatic way in frontof Egyptian aristocrats, European spectators, and Egyptian peasants. Howard's plow was brand-new and technologically advanced; Fowler's plow, however, looked worn-out. It had been used in Egypt for over a year, and Eyth and his team were aware of the possible disasters looming. Nevertheless, Eyth was at an advantage: as the chief engineer of Halim Pasha, son of Muhammad 'Ali and the uncle of Egypt's viceroy Isma'il, he had been in charge of developing the cotton fields for his Egyptian employer since early 1863. Having lived and worked in Egypt for a while, he was familiar with the environment. He had adjusted Fowler's plow to meet the challenges of the Egyptian soil, a soil that turned into a seemingly indestructible solid surface once the Nile flooding receded. And, sure enough, Howard's plow was unable to break up the earth, the furrows were not as deep as those created by the plow that was operated by the more experienced Eyth and his Egyptian workers. At the end of the competition Fowler's machine had plowed a significantly larger section than the plow designed by Howard. As anticipated, the result of the competition inspired the Egyptian viceroy to order a large number of Fowler's plows.
How does this scene from the 1860s in Egypt correspond to notions of a nineteenth-century world divided by nation-state alliances and colonialism? How did a German engineer such as Eyth get to be employed by an Egyptian aristocrat? In what ways can Eyth's work in Egypt be understood in the framework of Edward Said's concept of Orientalism?
Eyth was not only a famous engineer but also a prolific writer, and thus we can find answers to some of these questions in his texts. The engineer's autobiographical writings about his time in Egypt shed light on issues such as his motivation for going to Egypt and his self-image as an agent of development, as a German working for British and Egyptian employers, and as a German supervisor to Egyptian peasants. Seen in the context of Egypt's economic and political history, Eyth's story exemplifies the nineteenth-century fervor for development, and it illustrates the process by which economic development of non-European countries, instigated by Europeans and the local elite alike, ultimately created dependency on European investors and even led to colonization. The case of Max Eyth in Egypt, however, challenges widely held assumptions about the mechanisms of European dominance over non-European countries; his work and its representation in his writings demonstrate that Eyth's attitudes and actions were more deeply defined by universalist ideas about progress and modernization than by racist or cultural prejudice. The story of Eyth is a test case for much postcolonial theory; we will see that culturalist explanations fall short of doing justice to the complexity of developments in nineteenth-century Egypt.
In order to understand Eyth's time in Egypt more clearly, we need to get a sense of what it meant to be an engineer at the time in and outside of Germany. Following an overview of Eyth's coming-of-age as an engineer, a closer look at his views of Europe will provide the contrastive framework to evaluate his portrayal of Egypt. A brief review of Egypt's path to modernization situates the German engineer's stay in the country in a complicated tale of development.
A German Engineer
Recounting the early life of Max Eyth and the advancement of engineering in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century highlights the coincidental development of modernization in parts of Europe and similar processes in parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Germany industrialized later than England and France and became a nation-state and colonial power only at the end of the century. The shift from the preindustrial to the industrial phase of the German economy is generally dated from 1795 to 1835, while the first phase of industrialization is said to have occurred between 1835 and 1873. A few representative developments highlight the extent of the changes Germany experienced during the transition to the industrial age, which unfolded at a different pace in Germany's various regions. In Prussia the October Edict of 1807 introduced the emancipation of peasants, the freedom to choose an occupation, and the freedom to dispose of land, key factors enabling the process of industrialization. Free choice of occupation was a precondition for the development of existing and new professions and, by granting free movement to workers to wherever they found work, for the growth of the manufacturing sector and industry. The emancipation of the peasants brought about the extension of agricultural land and the introduction of new methods of agricultural production, including developments in the livestock sector. It also led to a stronger social differentiation among peasants, especially an impoverishment among large groups of landless peasants-in Marxist terms, the divorce of the producers from the means of production. With the growth of rural lower classes, their already miserable living conditions worsened: "The farm labourers often lived squeezed together near the animals in fairly primitive, dark, unhygienic shacks with one common room and one bed-room." Life in the cities was not appealing either; sewerage systems were only gradually introduced (in Hamburg in 1848, Berlin in 1852, and Frankfurt in the 1860s), flats were overcrowded, and bathrooms were generally shared by several families. For most of the century the majority of agricultural workers, homeworkers, servants, day laborers, factory workers, and casual workers were noncitizens, without political rights and influence. Petitions and letters of complaint directed at factory owners and at political and legal authorities are moving testimonies documenting the daily struggles and humiliations of ordinary people.
The extent of the changes German society underwent in the nineteenth century is difficult to imagine today. The scale and scope to which the life of the population was altered, for example, by the introduction of the electric light or the development of the railway system, still exceeds any of the developments the twentieth century had in store. Apart from the overall social and economic changes, agricultural crises, increasing public debt, famines, food riots, epidemics, poverty of large groups who moved to the urban centers, high infant mortality, and short life spans characterize the century. People worked ninety hours per week and more, and children and women were used increasingly in the workforce. 3 In the course of the century, especially during its final thirty years, living and working conditions improved for most parts of the society; "hunger and malnutrition were largely overcome in the 1850s, with the end of pauperism and a rise in real wages." The considerable wealth that was produced during the Wilhelmine Empire, however, was enjoyed by no more than a small portion of the society.
As a representative of the new age, Eyth personifies a cultural figure that has come to stand for the overall change German society underwent at the time. The engineer, historically crucial to the development of civilizations, is connected to industrialization and modernization in fundamental ways. Engineering in the modern sense begins in the eighteenth century, with the invention of the first atmospheric steam engine in 1711 by Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729) and its pathbreaking development into the double-acting steam engine by James Watt (1736-1819) in 1769. This machine did for the first time what human beings had always dreamed of: it produced energy that could be used for a variety of purposes. Following the invention of the steam engine, European industries transformed from the domestic or cottage industry to the factory system of industrial capitalism. The new engineering profession designed machines for use in all areas, especially the coal mining, metal, and textile industries. Engineers invented locomotives, constructed roads, railroads, bridges, and tunnels and thus developed an infrastructure that was the motor of industrialization.
As members of a new profession, engineers or technicians, as they were alternately called throughout the nineteenth century, worked in a wide range of positions. While the word Techniker "could also refer to a lower species of technologist," the word Ingenieur was used as a "generic term for all technical functions above skilled blue-collar work and foreman duties." The engineering profession included factory owners and directors as well as employees, professors, consultants, civil engineers, and others. In the mid-1800s these various occupations reflected substantial differences in educational training; both the wide range of jobs reflecting varying social standing and the discrepancies in training gave the new profession a disorganized and uneven image. This contributed to the fact that engineers had to struggle to gain public recognition. It took several decades before their training was integrated into the higher educational system, and, still today, engineering colleges (such as Technische Hochschulen and Ingenierschulen) do not have the same status as other academic institutions within the German university system.
In early nineteenth-century Germany the development of engineering lagged behind in comparison to the situations in France and England. This was mostly connected to the absence of an educational framework but also to the lack of a central nation-state that would foster trade and development and enable the implementation of the unified educational system. Friedrich List's customs union (Allgemeiner Deutscher Zollverein, 1834) was an important milestone toward achieving all three goals. The lifting of trade barriers in parts of Germany initiated developments, such as the building of a railway system, that were crucial breakthroughs on the road to industrialization. One important event was the founding of the Organization of German Engineers (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, VDI) in 1856. The organization's foremost mission lay in pursuing the goals of the engineering profession, and its nationalist orientation and interest in unification was a logical consequence. The organization became one of the key players that contributed to bringing about national unity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Impossible Missions? by Nina Berman Copyright © 2004 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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