The Perils (and Promise) of German Colonization: Civilizational Hierarchies and Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Romania

Abstract

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Colonial Anxieties, Corruption Scandals and Xenophobia in Nineteenth-Century Infrastructure Development in Romania”, guest-edited by Silvia Marton and Andrei Sorescu.

What does the constant recurrence of “colony” and “colonization” as key concepts in nineteenth-century Romanian public discourse reveal about the nexus between capital, development, civilization, nation, and state? The present article argues that, in the formative stages of Romanian nation-state-building, anxieties regarding the perceived encroachment of (Pan-)“German” expansionism were cast in explicitly “colonial” terms. As part of a self-perceivedly “backward” and underpopulated region which had historically attracted German settlement, the Danubian Principalities (and, subsequently, Romania) were increasingly feared by local political elites to be the final piece of a geopolitical puzzle, within a spatial and temporal colonial continuum of expansion. While colonization could be framed as a civilizational and economic catalyst in the 1840s and 1850s, by the 1860s, proposals for settling Germans alongside a local peasantry not yet fully emancipated from serfdom appeared increasingly dangerous and ultimately prompted a legal prohibition on colonizing “peoples of foreign race.” And, in the 1870s, the major scandal accompanying the building of Romania’s railway network by a Prussian consortium informally backed by the Prussian-born king Carol I saw the continued deployment of colonial topoi, further entangled with an antisemitic rhetoric directed against Bethel Henry Strussberg, the main concessioner. In sum, drawing upon parliamentary debates, press, pamphlets, and economic literature, the present article highlights the importance of recovering historical actors’ own categories and demonstrates the need for reflexively historicizing “colonization” and “colony,” beyond their retrospective usage as analytical categories.