Medical Doctors, Depopulation and the Plantation Economy of German New Guinea

Summary This article examines how the colonial state of German New Guinea sought to manage Indigenous people’s reproductive labour in the decade prior to World War I amidst growing colonial anxieties about depopulation and fertility decline. As a plantation colony whose economy depended overwhelmingly on the availability of Indigenous, indentured labourers, concerns about health and medicine were thoroughly entangled with concerns about labour and the plantation economy. The colonial state sought to combat and, ideally, reverse low birth rates among Indigenous peoples through labour reforms and medical research. Examining discourses produced by administrators and medical experts working for the colonial state, this article argues that in the early twentieth century, New Guinean women assumed novel importance as objects of colonial government policy and medical-ethnographic enquiries, which worked to pathologise Indigenous women while rendering them responsible for the biosocial reproduction and economic subsidisation of the colonial labour force.