Family law and colonial governance in German Samoa

Volume 27 of the Global Perspectives on Legal History out now

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’.

The colonial 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. The official prohibition of future interethnic marriages and the new fault-based divorce procedures 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, its administrative improvisation at the Oceanic edge of empire, and the contested meanings of citizenship within a plural legal order.