The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa George Steinmetz Germany’s overseas colonial empire was relatively short lived, lasting from 1884 to 1918. But Germany had radical and long-lasting effects on the societies it colonized, enacting surprisingly different policies in each: in Southwest Africa, German troops carried out a brutal slaughter of the Herero people; in Samoa, authorities pursued a paternalistic defense of native culture; in Qingdao, China, policy veered between harsh racism and cultural exchange. Why did the same colonizing power act in such differing ways? Tackling this question through a cross-cultural analysis of German colonialism, George Steinmetz uncovers the roots of colonial behavior in precolonial European ethnographies. This ambitious and nuanced history ultimately leads to a new conceptualization of the colonial state and postcolonial theory. George Steinmetz is professor of Sociology and German studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of: Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany and the editor of State/Culture: State Formation after the Colonial Turn and The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others