For anyone interested in how the political dynamics of Wilhelmine colonialism reflected the changing social structure and evolving bureaucratic professionalism of the Kaiserreich, Jürgen Kilian’s prosopographical study of Germany’s colonial governors is an indispensable work. Examining all of Germany’s vice regal representatives in all of Germany’s African and Pacific colonies, Kilian’s Habilitationsschrift is certainly extremely ambitious in its scope. Added to this geographical expansiveness, the book surveys not only the cohort’s terms as governors but also their family and social backgrounds, their education, and their career trajectories prior to colonial service. Following Pierre Bourdieu, Kilian seeks to establish a vice regal habitus in the hope of shedding light on the social logic of colonial administrators and their evolving relationship to German society more broadly.

As was the case in most other European colonial powers of the period, governors were, it turns out, minor nobles or members of the educated or mercantile upper middle classes, many with a period of military service behind them, who mostly married within the minor nobility or the upper middle classes. In this sense, the gubernatorial habitus reflected the continuing embourgeoisement of the German political classes while still offering a role to an increasingly bureaucratised aristocracy.

Despite the broad homogeneity of the cohort, a variety of approaches to colonial government emerge in Kilian’s study. Some governors showed little interest in visiting regions outside of the town that provided them with a colonial seat of government. Others vigorously toured the furthest reaches of their territories, engaging with subordinates and local officials in areas that were far from being under German control and where their claims to power were nominal at best.

Kilian makes it clear that, despite varying attitudes towards the use of violence to support German rule, even the most putatively liberal of governors never completely dispensed with it in their colonies. This violence ranged from the quotidian use of corporal punishment on contract labourers through to radically violent “punitive” military campaigns against ostensibly recalcitrant rulers and, ultimately, in sites such as Southwest Africa, genocidal warfare. In vivid detail, the extent and role of German colonial violence is made clear, even during the most fleeting of governorships. “The Governor lives for kill”, Africans warned one another when discussing Acting Governor Bruno von Schuckmann, who toured Cameroon hanging local kings and emptying villages of their terrified inhabitants as he approached (p. 318).

In its close and careful attention to the variety of approaches to colonial governance employed by Germany’s vice regal representatives, and to the extent and limits of their capacity to rule their territories, Kilian’s monograph is without doubt a major achievement. It demonstrates his clear capacity to view Germany’s colonies as both a whole that reflected a metropolitan expansionist endeavour and as a heterogeneous set of territorial possessions in very different regions with very different histories and social dynamics. Yet the scale of the book is both its great strength and its Achilles’ heel. There is an enormous wealth of detail drawn from an impressive array of archival and printed materials, however at times the work’s encyclopaedic ambition, as it catalogues people and places across the globe, sees detailed analysis occasionally sacrificed in favour of breadth and completeness. It is only when Kilian stops for air in smaller, fascinating subsections such as those dealing with colonial sexuality (pp. 212–220) or racialisation (pp. 462–482) that a sense of the immense analytical possibility offered by close attention to Germany’s colonial governors emerges. Following this line of detailed analysis across the entire contents of the book would have been, of course, well beyond the possibility of any single volume, and in that sense “Des Kaisers Gouverneure” opens the door for new research that might now drill into the material on offer here to focus on the role of individual governors or a series of governors and their officials in a single colony or collection of colonies. It would also offer a starting place for transimperial studies of vice regal power in particular regions.

One other element of the book worth noting is that the book is firmly centred on German matters, and how the role and person of the governor functioned within the political matrix of Imperial Germany. As Kilian argues, the governors’ role was to consolidate German rule, to work towards German commercial, political and strategic goals and to establish colonial structures that would enable them to do this (p. 12). Frequently, particularly under Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg, this revolved around seeking out ways to make the colonies move towards profitability and pushing colonised populations towards forms of work that met the requirements of German capital. Although working largely independently as “men on the spot” in Africa and the Pacific, Germany’s governors understood themselves as ultimately dependent upon and working towards metropolitan priorities.

Two things emerge from this. The first is that the governors, while enjoying a great deal of latitude in their actions, were clearly responsive to directives from the Colonial Division of the Foreign Office (and later the Colonial Office). Whenever governors found themselves seriously at odds with metropolitan colonial officials, Kilian shows, they were replaced. For its part, the Colonial Office itself was far more responsive to the global commercial and strategic imperatives and domestic political pressures emanating from the press, commercial lobby groups and the Reichstag than to the sporadically expressed (and frequently circumvented) wishes of the emperor. As such, Kilian demonstrates, the emperor played only a marginal role in the governors’ colonial duties, despite their formal role as vice regal representatives of the monarch (p. 509).

The second is that the power of the governors was constrained not only by metropolitan pressures but also by the inescapable difficulties and harsh realities of ruling over often vast territories that were host to well-established pre-existing political hierarchies that continued to play a key role, whether by resisting or mediating German rule. The colonies were far from laboratories of a future “totalitarian” politics but were instead zones of unavoidable compromise, patchwork control and the deployment of violence as a substitute for any other means of effecting German rule where it was weak or contested.

It is probably fair to say that more focus on the interplay between local rulers and Germany’s governors might have been possible. To the extent that they are a presence in Kilian’s book, the colonised frequently appear as simple objects of rule. Africans in particular appear and disappear as mere instantiations of colonial problems that the governor and his administrators had to solve to the satisfaction of the metropole. Almost nowhere does any sense emerge of how these governors were perceived by those they ruled. Archival materials read against the grain, as well as numerous ego-documents from the colonies and the governors themselves, offer a surprising amount of detail about the perspective of the colonised, especially of colonised elites whose role was heavily impacted by German claims to rule. Future works focused on vice regal power might seek to tease out further the way in which German high officials and local elites interacted and shaped one another’s scope for action.