Paul Rohrbach
Paul Rohrbach was a Baltic German writer, concerned with "world politics." He was born at Irgen manor, Raņķi parish, Skrunda Municipality, in the Courland Governorate. Between 1887 and 1896 he attended the universities of Dorpat, Berlin, and Strasbourg.
Biography
Rohrbach traveled extensively in Asia and Africa, and in 1903-06 he was Settlement Commissioner to Southwest Africa. After returning to Berlin, he became a lecturer of colonial economy at the Handelshochschule Berlin.His writings include many books on political conditions in the countries visited by him, with much attention to the effects of German colonization and interests. His Der deutsche Gedanke in der Welt was translated into English by Edmund von Mach as German World Policies, and Der Krieg und die deutsche Politik appeared in an English translation by P. H. Phillipson as Germany's Isolation: An Exposition of the Economic Causes of the Great War. Most of the latter book was written before the start of the First World War.
Rohrbach was an unapologetic racist and a vocal supporter of German colonial expansion. He unequivocally asserted that Black societies in Africa were racially incapable of creating advanced cultures and sophisticated political structures. From this premise he concluded that Germans were justified in seizing and developing 'underused' land and labor in Africa.
In practice, he endorsed brutal systems of compulsory labor for native Africans in Germany's colonies. He also encouraged colonial governments to expropriate indigenous lands for distribution to white settlers. Rohrbach considered the African labor extremely valuable to colonial economies, and wanted to preserve indigenous populations. However, he recommended that settlers and colonial states freely employ violence to suppress and deter native resistance. He also sanctioned eradicating rebellious African tribes.