German Identity, Intermarriage, and Divorce in Colonial Samoa (1900–1914)
Julia S. Hütten
Global Perspectives on Legal History 27
Frankfurt am Main: Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory 2025. XV, 190 p.
Online version: Open Access (PDF-Download, Lizenz: Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 International)
Print version: 18,21 € (Print on Demand at ePubli)
ISSN 2196-9752
ISBN 978-3-944773-52-0
eISBN 978-3-944773-53-7
Quotation link of the online version: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/gplh27
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.
Contents
XI Foreword
XXV List of Charts, Tables and Images
1 Introduction
Chapter 1
9 Samoa, Pearl of the South Sea
10 1.1
Morality and the Samoan climate
15 1.2
European contact and the matai political system
Chapter 2
27 German Identity and Colonialism
34 2.1
Samoan courtship ans marriage
38 2.2
Taupou, abstinence, and women’s sexuality
43 2.3
Marriage of Samoans in the Western manner
47 2.4
Marriage under German law
49 2.5
Marriages between Samoans and Chinese
Chapter 3
53 Breaking Up Families: The Ban on Interethnic Marriage
54 3.1.
Changing views on race and ethnicity
59 3.2
Citizenship law and Deutschtum
63 3.3
The example set by German Southwest Africa
67 3.4
Defining the legal classification »native« in the German colonies
75 3.5
The Mischehenverbot in Samoa
80 3.6
Planning the Mischehenverbot
89 Chapter 4
89 4.1
New policies in the regulation of divorce in the German empire
94 4.2
Application of family law from the BGB in Samoa
99 4.3
Grounds for divorce under the BGB
101 4.4
Divorces among the faʻa papālagi
126 4.5
Divorces among Samoans in the German courts
131 4.6
Women’s testimony in divorce
133 4.7
A change of stance of Governor Solf in 1907?
134 4.8
Maintenance
137 4.9
Maintenance of illegitimate children
139 4.10
Maintenance aer the 1912 Mischehenverbot
142 4.11
Samoan divorce cases (a selection)
146 4.12
The case of Blanche Reid and the »Lifestyle Test«
155 4.13
Why the »Lifestyle Test ?«
155 4.14
The German interracial marriage debate (Mischehendebatte) in May 1912
167 Conclusion
171 Appendix I:
Samoan terms
173 Appendix II:
Translation of Dr. Wilhelm Solf’s opening statement to the German parliament (May 2, 1912)
177 Bibliography
191 About the Author