Displacement, colonization, and domestic work: children’s institutions and German imperial settlement in the Polish territories of Prussia around 1900

Abstract

ABSTRACT Around 1900, Imperial Germany pursued expansion abroad and internal consolidation within its continental borders. Facing a resolute Polish national movement, Prussia, the dominant German power, sought to secure its majority Polish border region by changing the region's ethnic composition. Large estates were purchased, land was divided, and German families were settled in small and medium farms. Colonization, however, relied on Polish workers for land preparation and farm labor. To replace Polish workers in settler-villages with Germans, the state took up the example of Child Migration in the British Empire and supported the establishment of a network of Protestant institutions that used child welfare legislation to bring about 1,500 destitute urban children from urban centers to the border region and place them with German families. The article looks at the institutional practice of child displacement and the pan-imperial networks and trans-imperial borrowings that facilitated the use of children for colonization. It discusses specific cases of children and shows that they insisted on determining their future. The interconnections of places of internment, education, care, and work across Germany's continental empire reveal a social logic of colonization that combine repeated (dis)placement of children with child labor as a system of training and exploitation.