Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

In his description of the results of Allied bombing in Germany, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the US Treasury secretary, noted that a “surprisingly large number of factories were damaged only superficially while many were entirely unscathed.” This could not have been accidental: “Some of the latter apparently owed their escape to the careful, precise work of the Allied airmen,” he observed. Ford and British Courtauld plants at Cologne “shared the immunity of the famous cathedral.” General Motors’ Opel works “were said to be almost the only buildings intact in Russelsheim.” In the face of “the seemingly miraculous escape of the IG Farben works at Hoechst, … London’s New Statesman noted that American firms had been associated in the enterprise before the war.”5 After the war, a report led by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith found that strategic bombing had been a “disastrous failure” as “German war production had, indeed, expanded under the bombing.”