Professor Woodruff Smith of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, proposed using the concept of a "culture of respectability" to frame discussions of German colonialism during his keynote address at the German Colonialism conference held last weekend.
Smith arrived at this concept by noting the inadequacy of using only ideas such as socioeconomic modernization or the development of the bourgeoisie to explain the rise of colonization in the nineteenth century.
He said that Susanne Zantop, in investigating how policymakers' fantasies of colonialism developed, similarly sought alternative framing concepts.
Smith noted the ubiquity of the word "respectability" in nineteenth-century literature, but that the word was never clearly defined. Rather, authors and readers alike appeared to understand it implicitly.
According to Smith, while the word "respectable" has existed in English for much longer, the notion of "respectability" was invented only in the 1790s.
The rise of the new parallels the rise of a new culture that prized virtue and morality and reduced some of the traditional stigmas attached to consumption. Smith also defined respectability as "a way of caring for body and objects."
He also said that respectability is fundamentally classless. Previously, Europeans had admired gentility, a virtue attainable only by members of the aristocratic classes. While genteel aristocrats could strive to be respectable, so could the middle and even working classes.
Smith said that the respectable person's tendency to work for the "continuous civilizing of others" led Europeans to colonization.For example, the idea of the natural hierarchy of relationships within the respectable family served as a pattern for relationships between the colonial subject and ruler, he said. Accordingly, colonial literature is full of familial imagery.
The Germans would thus encourage women to settle in their colonies, just so that colonial settlements could come closer to the ideal of respectability. Likewise, the respectability of the two people involved could be used as a defense in cases of miscegenation, he said.
Members of the colonial elites also frequently adopted European notions of respectability and sought to become respectable according to European standards, according to Smith.
Smith also saw a link between this notion of colonization as a civilizing enterprise and the Germans' imagining of their own national identity.
