German Identity, Intermarriage, and Divorce in Colonial Samoa (1900–1914)

Abstract

Germany’s colonial past is again at the center of public debate. This book offers a focused contribution: a study of how the German administration in Samoa (1900–1914) used family law as a tool of colonial governance. Examining marriage, divorce, citizenship, legitimacy, and maintenance, Julia Hütten shows how rules on the most intimate matters became instruments of colonial power and a mirror for ideas of ‘Germanness’. Interethnic families were already part of Samoan society when the imperial flag was raised in Apia in 1900. The new government tried to sort residents into two personal jurisdictions, ‘foreigner’ and ‘native’, yet people of mixed descent rarely fit neatly into either. The German Civil Code (BGB), which had only recently been enacted, granted citizenship to foreign wives of German husbands, but many long-standing unions in Samoa had never been registered as civil marriages. Officials responded by planning to prohibit future interethnic marriages and by compiling a register of so-called ‘half-castes’ born to unregistered unions, thereby expanding the reach of foreign jurisdiction. The formal ban on mixed marriages arrived in 1912, tightening these boundaries still further. Fault-based divorce procedures, unfamiliar in Samoan practice, also unsettled households by compelling spouses to assign blame and expose private life to official judgment. These interventions did not simply transplant metropolitan law; they interacted with Samoan custom, missionary influence, and local knowledge, producing outcomes negotiated by officials, petitioners, and communities. By tracing cases and policies across these 14 years, the book illuminates how colonial law marked racial boundaries, structured belonging, and reordered daily life in Samoan-German households. It also opens a window onto the German Empire itself: its anxieties about race and respectability, its administrative improvisation at the edge of empire, and the contested meanings of citizenship within a plural legal order.