Beware the Allure of Counter-Models

Can American military, diplomatic, and other government practitioners afford to remain aloof to the operating logics and superstructural assumptions permeating national policy and state interaction within the international system? This is perhaps a moral question without a clear answer. In a Western world where geopolitical realism is coming into vogue, do values have a place in policy or in strategy when expediency or success encounter normative barriers? Policymakers in the West have grown comfortable over the last century in creating counter-models. The United States and its allies learned to operationalize counter-modeling after successfully waging two World Wars and the Cold War. Many today seem eager to orient in that familiar direction by framing China as the counter-model by which the West will compete in an era of renewed great power rivalry.

Fortunately, history provides perspective on the artificiality and subjectivity inherent in counter-modeling. The story of German colonialism, especially in German Cameroon, in the decades preceding the First World War lays bare the hypocrisies of a liberal, Anglo-European world order, including the hollow resonance of earlier permutations of humanitarianism and institutionalism. One undercurrent to that history is the retroactive counter-modeling that the Western powers did when Imperial Germany became a great power adversary, despite German colonialism operating within the boundaries of the prevailing norms of world order.

Germans hit the shores of Cameroon in 1884 and fought continuously over the duration of their 30-year colonial empire.[1] German marines landed in Biafra Bight in December 1884 in response to the reports of organized resistance to Germany’s exercise of sovereignty over Cameroon. The Germans employed novel international-legal devices to bring indigenous groups into treaty arrangements that effectively ceded ownership of their land to the German crown.  The Germans executed such arrangements in an ad-hoc fashion, often through private agents on the ground, and they retroactively—such as in the case of protectorates—granted legitimacy in the eyes of Germany and her European peers.[2] The lack of an indigenous basis to legitimate the agreements precluded the foreign and artificial legal regime from spreading uniformly or peacefully.

After the Berlin Conference, violence in Cameroon captured the collective imagination of Europe’s colonial latecomer. Germany’s “first victory in Africa” was the beginning of a wider project to discipline and exploit the potentialities of the African interior, to bring indigenous populations “into culture,” and to claim a leading role within the larger colonial world order.[3] In fact, Entwicklungspolitik, “development policy,” in German Cameroon was ultimately defined by iterative stages of violent policing, military conquest, coerced labor regimes, and invasive social engineering.

Initial resistance in Cameroon to the German presence grew out of those interstitial moments, spaces, and agents who interacted in the haze of an artificially universal and distinctly European legality. The Germans justified sending gunboats and marines to protect German citizens and property from those resistant to this new regime. However, such friction also provided a convenient pretext for further conquest and escalating violence. Organized German violence was not confined to military conquest, nor did it stop afterward. The German colonial regime sustained the destruction begun in 1884 with the pillage of coastal villages and evisceration of livelihoods.

German marines destroyed parts of Bimbia along the coast in 1886, burned down more villages in 1887, with deputy governor Puttkamer in tow, and by 1889 were punishing upstart locals by razing more villages and seizing livestock.[4] The German navy conducted these early actions at the direction of the colonial governor. By Florian Hoffmann’s reckoning, a policy of “deterrence through destruction and pillage” served to adequately subordinate or punish indigenous populations who may threaten trade.[5] Puttkamer later reflected that the only way to impose the gravity of consequence on the population and to gain obedience, was to defeat them in battle.[6]

The German colonial experience in Cameroon is thus a case study typical of Germany’s overseas imperialism—a project characterized by sustained destruction and the economics of coercion.[7] This characterization can be obscured by historiographic tendencies unique to Germany’s colonial history. While the historiography may be unique, violence in the German colonies was not.

In recent decades, historians have reinvigorated the study of Imperial Germany and its colonies.[8] Such histories once buttressed postwar discourse about Germany’s Nazi legacy. The recent “colonial turn” in German historiography yields fruitful work on Germany’s colonial wars, the position of colonial political agitation and imagination within the larger stream of German social consciousness, and the role of German women at home and abroad.[9] In the wake of the revival in colonial studies, contemporary work continues on the topics of racism and violence that were prominent in Cold War scholarship.[10] Books by Isabel Hull, Susanne Kuss, and Tanja Bührer, for example, explore Germany’s colonial wars and extreme violence.[11]

Historians writing after World War II, on both sides of the iron curtain, emphasized German cruelty in the colonies.[12] Histories of German colonialism then arrived amid a postwar discourse focused on the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, and reevaluating the unified narrative of modern German history. Historians then and now seem bound by the specter of Hannah Arendt and the vestiges of Sonderweg methodology. Those histories linked violence in Germany’s colonies to Nazi atrocities or cast out-sized coverage on specific violent episodes in German East Africa and German Southwest Africa, thus crowding out stories of sustained, unseen, and often systemic violence in the German colonies.[13]

In contrast, Harry Rudin and other interwar historians operated under a worldview unchallenged by historians writing in the post-colonial, post-Holocaust era. Among these were the presumptions surrounding colonial development, racial difference, and public good. Rudin and his contemporaries saw colonial violence as an unfortunate yet normal byproduct of empire. They believed that violent conquest was a necessary stage en route to enlightened rule and measurable achievement.[14] Cameroon was his premier example.

Despite retaining some fin de siècle sensibilities, inter-war historians had to rationalize Germany’s status as the first “post-colonial power in a colonial world.”[15] The rush to appraise German colonial history was in tension with an imperative to justify stripping Germany of its colonies after World War I and an imperative to justify the fraught perpetuation of European colonialism. Andrew Zimmerman succinctly traces the West’s rhetorical shift in considering Germany a “model colonizer” at the turn of the century to “counter-model” during the war and the Versailles peace process.

The starkness of such a rupture and its shaping effect on the historiography has since faded from memory. However, 19th century arch-liberals such as E.D. Morel, known for exposing Leopold’s atrocities in the Belgian Congo, and Lord Cromer, known for British colonial exploitation in Egypt, had contemporaneously advocated or endorsed the transfer of the abusively mismanaged Belgian Congo to German administration. They would change their tune during and after the war.[16] It is no surprise, then, that scholars and politicians alike, in Germany and elsewhere in the West, were earnestly debating German colonialism through the 1930s and well into World War II.[17]

The historiographic contours sketched above imply that scholarship on German colonialism is like layers of sediment, each produced in waves and defined by a particular turn fraught with biases and assumptions. As a result, although German Cameroon has received considerably more attention in recent years, especially from area specialists, it remains a footnote in the larger story of German colonialism despite its more prominent position in contemporaneous accounts and earlier histories. Its position in the historiography and in our collective historical consciousness has been displaced by German ambition in East Africa and German atrocities in Southwest Africa.

This is actually proportional to the position of those colonies within the consciousness of those who lived through Germany’s colonial period.[18] However, Zimmerman’s own work emphasizes that the limited public discussion of “genocidal war” in German Southwest Africa before World War I “came to replace the Amani Institute of German East Africa and the Tuskegee-run cotton programs of German Togo as the emblem of a peculiarly German colonialism.”[19] An enlightened, liberal, scientific program of development once defined German colonialism, only to be thoroughly revised after two jarring historiographic turns that roughly comport with the two world wars. The history itself underwent counter-modeling, but not without that initial revision that sought to expunge German laudits within the Anglo-European international system and to characterize German violence as somehow apart from the pervasive violence inherent in all spheres of European colonial activity.

The rise of China in the 21st century generates anxiety in the Western world, such that many herald the return of great power competition. Geopolitical competition has, in turn, revived Manichean discourse over ideology and has spawned a cottage industry of writing on Chinese revisionism. There is an imperative in the West, then, to broadly frame China as an alternative or competing model.

Why is it important for anyone other than an academic to think about Cameroon during its few decades of German colonial rule in the context of China and the 21st century? First, the narrative told of Germany’s tenure in Cameroon is emblematic of the foundation for counter-modeling. History is often deployed as intellectual window-dressing for a particular agenda when it is brought into the realm of policy or politics. To penetrate that historiological veil, it is useful to consider generally unfamiliar cases to promote the intellectual humility and production of new knowledge necessary to escape the weight of such narratives. Thus, as an obscure but consequential instance of German colonialism, Cameroon is particularly useful for introducing a perspective that can challenge core assumptions against the pull of our own entrenched national mythologies, historical tropes, or educational methodologies.[20]

The ability to parse the narrative is particularly important given the normative weight that policymakers confer to the predominant concepts of international law, international relations, economics, human rights, as well as their associated institutions. Of course, there are numerous bodies of critical literature or historiography. Much like the challenge faced by Germans and others thoroughly critical of colonialism at the turn of the 20th century, though, it can be difficult for academic or critical discourse to gain purchase in the actual development or implementation of policy. National policy implementation, even with a coherent strategy or organizing logic, is iterative and contingent and inevitably encounters friction.

Within the complex international system, actors adjust their security policies according to their own assumptions to advance their self-interest. The incumbent Western powers did exactly this after World War I preserving the colonial system even as they remade that system by stripping Germany of its colonies, deeming it unfit to rule over colonial subjects. They compartmentalized systemic failures in the colonial system, such as extreme violence, to Germany’s failings under a revised counter-model that simultaneously created exceptions for their own actions within the system.

The present renewal of counter-modeling reflects the reflex that Western policymakers had developed through the discourse that defined Cold War national policy and shaped international institutions. The reinterpretation of German colonialism demonstrates how ideological frames and/or conceptual models can be an artificial policy tool more than an empirically grounded description. By the time Soviet communism emerged as an existential threat in the eyes of Western liberalism and capitalism, Western elites had become accustomed to conceptually erecting systemic competitors through the experience of two world wars.

World War II constituted an earnest attempt by disruptive powers to remake the international system while World War I did not. Nonetheless, the European powers performed a manner of ex post facto counter-modeling in the Treaty of Versailles where the narrative of German colonialism served to bridge the world wars.[21] In the mind of some scholars, the fact that the world wars were bridged, rather than a second war avoided, implicates the recasting of German colonialism after World War I as an active policy tool of the victors and not a passive revelation.

During the peace process in 1919, the Allies "produced memoranda and collections of evidence” meant to justify stripping Germany of its overseas empire.[22] The Western powers reoriented German colonialism as an issue "among European powers and the United States," rather than one primarily characterized by unique conditions abroad.[23] Germany's forced decolonization vectored existing and increasingly radical expansionist sentiment "at their height" onto the European continent.[24] Colonial fantasies, once wed to the ambitions of Imperial Germany, combined with racialized biopolitics to generate "the paradigm for the Nazi revision of the postwar order."[25] In other words, the dysfunctions that materially contributed to the precursors of World War II were seeded in a revised narrative of German colonialism that was oriented to allow the incumbent powers to perpetuate colonial policies and to recalibrate international relations around Germany’s diminished power.[26]

Directing attention to pre-1914 German Cameroon reveals that German colonial authorities—public administrators, private commercial actors, and uniformed military alike—operated within the broad umbrella of European norms. Military conquest and coercive —often violent—policies oriented towards economic ends were features of the colonial system, not bugs. German efforts to discipline the people, the environment, and the resources towards those ends drew praise and admiration from their European peers. As such, German Cameroon—and German colonialism, broadly speaking—represented but one relatively brief operation within the broader scope of European imperialism, and an operation aimed at the optimization of the ways and means employed to reach those ends.[27]

In German Africa and elsewhere, Europeans recognized that Germans pushed boundaries but demonstrated competence enough to seriously consider Germany’s colonial trajectory as a component of the Anglo-European world order. It is unnecessary to conclude whether German Cameroon actually was a model of one thing or another, as Harry Rudin framed his book. Rather, Cameroon is a window into state policy, effectively executed, that proved disruptive yet normal within its international context. Reflecting on the iterative and potentially flawed historiography which underpins our understanding of German colonialism—what is emphasized, what is broadly remembered, and from what we generalize—should give practitioners pause today about their assumptions of current Chinese activity.

Having established a habit of counter-modeling over the course of the 20th century, Practitioners must ask whether Chinese disruptive behavior operates within the broad and multi-faceted norms of the international system. The colonial case explored here reveals a system rife with internal contradiction. The broader historiography reveals contradiction in the application of norms and perception. Is the tendency to counter-model inertial? Is the position of Chinese disruptive behavior outside the normative boundary a function of China’s out-group status? The other European powers certainly did not discover German colonial ineptitude or egregiousness until Germany found themselves on the outside looking in. Chinese activity, especially that which may be framed as neocolonial or neoimperial, would be understood differently if European nations or even Japan were doing so instead.

The imperative for practitioners here is to honestly examine bias and hypocrisy in the development of strategy and policy. Knowledge of an obscure colonial story—and the story of the story—may attune one to the complexity of international relations and shifts in norms and perceptions. Practitioners must think in time. A glance back at a time before Germany was the militaristic bogeyman in popular memory reveals that, rather than a wolf in sheep’s clothing all along, the logics of the colonial system they inherited and aspired to optimize were inherently violent and coercive. The international system itself was flawed, and the United States and its allies must realize that it still is. Has the erection of subsequent counter-models to define and lionize a system perpetuated the flawed logics and assumptions underlying the evils some strive to place outside the boundaries of their own model? The full histories of German Cameroon and German colonialism lie beyond the scope of this article. However, German Cameroon’s story and its attendant historiography signal for us the pitfalls of constructing conceptual counter-models.

German Cameroon demonstrates that violent assumptions, ethnocentric contradictions, and moral hypocrisies may nonetheless underlie national policy from conception through execution. German policy in Cameroon iterated in response to local friction and within a normative framework consistent with the European international order of the time, including the favored employment of military conquest and punitive expeditions. The consensus view among Western powers toward Imperial Germany changed with Germany’s emergence as a hostile great power competitor. The fundamental structure of the international order and its attendant contradictions did not change, though. A German counter-model may have helped to preserve Europe’s incumbent colonial order for a time, but it also created a paradigm where Western powers began to parse German actions differently, as hostile or beyond established norms.

The contradictions and inequities of late European imperialism borne through assumptions and operationalized logics still exist today. Western nations, especially the United States, overtly wield the state of exception in the international order as they did a century ago. The most important areas to consider, then, are the implementation of national strategy, the biases inherent in its creation, and the core assumptions underlying practitioners’ worldview. One must beware the attraction of counter-models, their iteration in policymaking, and inconsistency in the application of established norms. In a best case scenario, practitioners may simply misconstrue the behavior of great power competitors as malignant when actually innocuous or within the bounds of established norms. In a worst case scenario, competitors artificially positioned in the outgroup may find recourse in forcefully revising the international order in their favor.

Kristofer Seibt is a U.S. Army officer and a graduate student at Columbia University in the City of New York. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not represent those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] I credit Prof. Robert Neer (Columbia University) for the image of continuous conflict. He asserts, in the context of America’s global military history, that “Americans hit the beaches in Virginia and Massachusetts and have been fighting ever since.” Mapped onto the same period in question here, American history takes on a similarly violent, colonial hue.

[2] See “General Act of the Conference of Berlin Concerning the Congo,” The American Journal of International Law 3, no. 1 (1909): 7–25; for a good analysis of international law, norms, and their discursive history vis-a-vis the Berlin Conference, applied to one case of German colonialism, see Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Grovogui also expands on the “protectorate” as a peculiar legal device unique to this late imperial period; one can observe the legal discourse playing out in real time in a publication such as Franz Florack, Die Schutzgebiete, ihre Organisation in Verfassung und Verwaltung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1905).

[3] Recent treatments of German colonialism’s impact on German society and politics can be found in John Phillip Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012): 132-147; see also “Der erste Sieg der Deutschen in Afrika: Der Kampf bei Hickory,” Über Land und Meer 53, no. 20, (October 1884-1885): 436; two relevant and contemporaneous examples of the consensus on acculturating indigenous populations can be found in Vohsen, Ernst. “Baumwollenkultur in den Deutschen Schutzgebieten,” 1891. R1001/8144. Bundesarchiv, 8-9, and Jesko von Puttkamer, Gouverneursjahre in Kamerun (Berlin: G. Stilke, 1912).

[4] Florian Hoffmann, Okkupation und Militärverwaltung in Kamerun: Etablierung und Institutionalisierung des kolonialen Gewaltmonopols 1891-1914 (Cuvillier Verlag, 2007): 45; by upstart, I refer to Hoffmann’s quote of Governor Soden, who described the natives as breaking forth from their remote residential areas; one can find more granularity on additional German practices such as bounties on heads in Stoecker, Kamerun unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft, 189.

[5] Hoffmann, Okkupation und Militärverwaltung in Kamerun, 45. Original quote: “Zum Schutz der Handelsinteressen glaubte man mit einer Politik der Abschreckung durch Zerstörung und Brandschatzung als 'Strafmaßnahme' gegenüber 'unbotmäßigen' Dörfern ausreichende Maßnahmen zu ergreifen.”

[6] Puttkamer, Gouverneursjahre, 102-104.

[7] Both characterizations borrow from prevailing concepts.The “economics of coercion” umbrella the appraisal of Germany’s African empire in Lewis H. Gann, "The Economics of Colonialism,” ed. Peter Duignan, vol. 4, Colonialism in Africa, 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969): 223; I offer “sustained destruction” to balance the argument that expressions of extreme violence in German colonial wars sprung from a military doctrinal ideal (Vernichtungsschlacht), offered in Hull, Absolute Destruction. And while the Herero-Nama War of 1904-1907 captured German attention in the last decade before World War I (and a later turn in historiography), Cameroon could be considered Germany’s sustained war of colonial conquest.

[8] The German colonial project, in this case, refers to the German Empire’s formal acquisition and administration of overseas colonies following the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Of course, German colonialism did not start abruptly in 1884. See evidence of colonial speculation (Somalia, Formosa, Fiji, etc.) decades prior to 1884, as well as correspondence in the years immediately preceding, collected and translated in Knoll and Hiery, The German Colonial Experience, 2-24; Reinvigoration of interest in the topic over the last few decades has also led to a rediscovery of initiatives undertaken by German states in the early modern period. A good example is Ulrich van der Heyden’s Rote Adler an Afrikas Küste: Die Brandenburgisch-Preußische Kolonie Grossfriedrichsburg in Westafrika; The use of evidence of early modern German colonialism was used to mobilize support for its latter form, as discussed in Daniel Purdy, “Mobilizing the Archive in Support of Colonialism during the Kaiserreich,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 53, no. 3 (September 20, 2017): 219–33.

[9] For a good summary of the proliferation of different strands of work on German colonialism, see Bradley Naranch, “German Colonialism Made Simple,” in German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–18.

[10] “The German Colonial Imagination,” German History 26, no. 2 (April 1, 2008): 251–71; Most recent literature builds on Susanne Zantop’s book, Colonial Fantasies (1997), and sits alongside innovative studies such as Lora Wildenthal’s book, German Women and Empire (2001). Earlier scholarship rested on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which implicitly linked German colonialism to the Nazi experience, and Horst Drechsler’s Let Us Die Fighting (1966), which invigorated the discourse of German violence in German Southwest Africa (modern day Namibia), alongside Helmut Bley’s Kolonialherrschaft Und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894-1914 (1968).

[11] Recent discussions of the impacts of colonial warfare on the German military can be found in Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Susanne Kuss and Andrew Smith, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); see also Tanja Bührer, Die Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika: Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und Transkulturelle Kriegführung, 1885 bis 1918 (München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011).

[12] This is most notably demonstrated in Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, and Bley, Kolonialherrshaft; The Cold War divide is most directly seen in parallel accounts by West- and East-German historians. See Karin Hausen, Deutsche Kolonialherrschaft in Afrika: Wirtschaftsinteressen und Kolonialverwaltung in Kamerun vor 1914 (Freiburg: Atlantis Verlag, 1970); Helmuth Stoecker, Kamerun unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft, Studien (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1960).

[13] See Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz,” Central European History 42, no. 2 (2009): 279–300.

[14] See the judgments reached in Harry R. Rudin, Germans in the Cameroons, 1884-1914: A Case Study in Modern Imperialism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968); See also von Koenig, “German Colonies,” 282. The author echoes Rudin’s sentiment about military spending towards uprisings in German Southwest Africa: “Such expenditure is lamentable, but inevitable in colonial development.”

[15] See Gerwarth and Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts,” 284. The authors here refer to a conceptual frame offered by Pascal Grosse.

[16] Andrew Zimmerman, “Ruling Africa,” in German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 104. See also John H. Harris, Dawn in Darkest Africa (London: Murray, 1914).

[17] Harry Rudin and Mary Townsend were among the American scholars producing histories of German colonialism in the inter-war period, with Townsend providing the first (and best, according to Rudin) overall account of the German colonies in English. Rudin is critical of her lack of German archival sources and her assertion that Bismarck favored colonial policy; Germany’s former colonies were the subject of official and unofficial (i.e. colonial societies) studies in German in the 1930s (especially after the Nazis rose to power), part of public and diplomatic discussion surrounding the 1938 Munich Agreement, and were a frequent topic in newspapers and elite publications such as Foreign Affairs into the 1940s.

[18] German East Africa, anchored initially in the mature trading environment in Zanzibar and later in the scientific ambition to transform agriculture, captured the imagination of some as a future “German India.” German Southwest Africa was considered climatically suitable for a future settler colony, alongside prospects for mining and animal husbandry. See, for example, Zimmerman, “Ruling Africa”; See also Horst Gründer, ed., …da und dort ein Junges Deutschland Gründen: Rassismus, Kolonien und Kolonialer Gedanke vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999); Quantitatively, these two colonies would come to absorb the greatest public investment, mostly for military purposes.

[19] Zimmerman, “Ruling Africa,” 104.

[20] This is most notable in American policy discourse, despite the burgeoning literature on American colonialism and its global historical context. Within the scope of German colonialism, here, see Gerwarth and Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts,” 286-288, for the relevance of American activity in the Philippines; see also Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

[21] Zimmerman, “Ruling in Africa”; see also Gerwarth and Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts,” regarding Germany’s pre-mature “postcolonial” experience.

[22] Pascal Grosse, “What Does German Colonialism Have to Do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Germany’s Colonial Posts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 125.

[23] Ibid, 130.

[24] Ibid, 119.

[25] Ibid, 129.

[26] One need only look at the perpetuation of European colonialism under the Mandate system in the interwar period; see, for example, “Polizei in Kamerun,” R 1001/9722, Bundesarchiv, one study by a German official assessing the relative continuity of German colonial administration, to include the arrayal of operational plantations. Works by Patrick Bernhard and Eric Roubinek have developed the notion of an iterated “fascist colonialism”; this is too far outside the scope outside of this article to recount in detail, but one can scan discourse in Foreign Affairs, Liberty, and syndicated newspapers in Germany and the West through the 1930s to get a sense that the German colonial question never went away. It evolved, even playing a constituent role in the negotiations surrounding the Munich agreement in 1938.

[27] Beyond the previous reference to Grovogui, international law, and the Berlin Conference, it is worth considering the mechanisms of European geopolitics. By the late 19th century, European nations had been using quasi-institutional conferences and multilateral agreement to relieve conflicts of interest on the European continent. The Scramble for Africa in some ways reflects this mapping of continental practice and theory onto new arenas of European conflict abroad. While not bearing directly on Africa or the late imperial period, useful discussion of quasi-institutional systems in 19th century Europe can be found in Jennifer Mitzen, Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).