B<scp>ernhard</scp> G<scp>issibl</scp>. <i>The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa</i>.

In The Nature of German Imperialism, Bernhard Gissibl ranges over a number of subfields of history with an ease that astonishes. At once imperial history, transnational history, gender history, domestic German history, and animal-human history, Gissibl’s exhaustive work is a multilayered account of wildlife management as it related to colonial governance in what was then German East Africa. In a somewhat unconventional organization, Gissibl divides the book into three parts, the first two of which offer a chronological account of the former German colony from just prior to European arrival until World War I; the last section eschews chronology for a thematic approach around physical and intellectual notions of space and transborder cooperation in game and wildlife conservation. Taken together, the book makes a decisive case for the importance of animals, and above all elephants, in the history of colonial Tanzania. Part I investigates the myriad ways in which the German colonizers both co-opted and transformed indigenous patterns of conduct with African wildlife. In stark contrast to the notion that Europeans arrived in Africa to find static hunter-gatherer societies, Gissibl makes plain that indigenous hunters in what became German East Africa had tapped into complex religious and commercial trade networks for their goods in precolonial times. And no good became as sought-after as ivory. Utilizing preexisting hunting patterns, the German colonial government entered the ivory trade in frenzied fashion. Gissibl has uncovered a staggering number of salient details about the ivory trade that show not only the thirst for ivory abroad—the Heinrich Adolf Meyer trading company, for example, sold roughly 70,000 billiard balls made from ivory annually in the late 1880s (42)—but the terrible toll it took on elephants, with estimates in the 1890s of more than 42,000 killed annually (44). In order to meet this demand, German colonial authorities co-opted the indigenous idea of “big men”—local hunting lords who had amassed wealth and recognition. Gissibl brilliantly uses the lens of wildlife to illuminate the space that existed for indigenous agency within the colonial framework.

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