2025/10/20 by Sibylle Scheipers · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Military History and Strategy #Military, Security, and Education Studies #World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2574295
openalex publication_date 2025/10/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck is best known as commander of the Schutztruppe in German East Africa during the First World War. His previous career as a colonial officer with deployments in the Boxer Rebellion (1900–1901) and during the war against the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa (1904–1906) has received much less scholarly attention. This article asks whether Lettow-Vorbeck’s experience as a colonial officer offered him opportunities to acquire knowledge that he could bring to bear on the campaign in German East Africa. The theoretical perspective that the article is based on brings together the concept of imperial biographies with notions of transimperial knowledge exchange and the ‘imperial cloud’. Based on Lettow-Vorbeck’s diaries and autobiographical writings, this research demonstrates that Lettow-Vorbeck engaged in transimperial knowledge exchange during these deployments. However, there is surprisingly little evidence of learning in the area of the ‘colonial way of war’, which has been the focus of recent research on colonial warfare and transimperial knowledge transfer. Instead, other areas of transimperial knowledge, such as civil-military relations, turns out to be relevant.