The German Colonial Empire

Woodruff D. Smith

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780807897812, 9780807813225
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610252
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Although Germany's short-lived colonial empire (1884-1918) was neither large nor successful, it is historically significant. The establishment of German colonies and attempts to expand them affected international politics in a period of extreme tension. Smith focuses on the interaction between Germany's colonial empire and German politics and, by extension, on the connection between colonialism and socioeconomic conflict in Germany before World War I.

Originally published in 1978.

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Part I

The Origins of Germany’s Colonial Empire

1

Prelude to Empire

Bismarck’s surprising acquisition of colonies between 1883 and 1885 was misinterpreted by contemporaries as the product of a brand-new colonialist movement. Actually, German colonialism was a result of social and political changes that had occurred over the course of the whole nineteenth century. Colonialism had been a subject of discussion in Germany since the beginning of the century, and distinct varieties of colonialist ideology had grown up by the 1870s as adjuncts to major trends in political thought. In this chapter we shall discuss first the political aspects of preacquisition German colonialism and then the socioeconomic factors that made colonialism a well-known, if minor, force in German political life.

The Political Background

The possibility of acquiring colonies was discussed at length at the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848. The colonial proposals considered at Frankfurt, like most of those advanced in Germany in previous years, were tied to the problem of the Auswanderung, the massive nineteenth-century emigration from Germany. They ranged from schemes for emigrant-protection societies to plans for outright German settlement colonies, usually in the United States.¹ The latter were based to some extent on actual attempts to establish settlements of Germans in North and South America, some of which had been reasonably successful. To the 1848 liberals the prime function of colonies was to receive the overflow of the German population that was represented by the Auswanderung and that was considered a severe problem in the southwestern German states. The liberals thought that colonies would also drain off lower-class people who had been displaced by changes in German agriculture; it was feared that these people would otherwise become a criminal, and possibly revolutionary, class.² The politicians of 1848 had just had some significant lessons in the revolutionary capabilities of an urban proletariat.

Some advocates of German colonization in 1848 also thought it essential that the new German state pursue an active foreign policy, including colonial expansion, as a method of uniting the sentiments of the nation. It is doubtful, however, whether colonialism in 1848 would have achieved this purpose. Its intellectual antecedents were concerned mainly with colonies in already established states overseas. As private concerns that did not challenge the sovereignty of the countries in which they existed, German colonies had functioned in Texas, Brazil, and other places.³ The situation would have been totally different for colonies established by a German government, which would have desired a political relation with the territories that no foreign government would have tolerated. It was no accident that colonial proposals tended to be tied to the creation of a German navy that could be used to force foreign governments to accept the creation of colonies and regulation of emigration.

Even without the dissolution of the National Assembly, it is unlikely that any real action would have been taken to establish German colonies. Thinking on the subject was too vague to serve as the basis of consistent policy, and the majority of delegates apparently preferred legislation that attempted to improve traveling conditions for emigrants instead of schemes for colonization. Colonial advocates complained that this approach would do nothing about the loss of capital, manpower, and culture that the Auswanderung entailed. However, the general view was that of Assembly President Heinrich von Gagern (the son of an early colonial enthusiast) who believed that these arguments were meaningless except in terms of mobilizing public support for the new constitution.⁴

Perhaps most importantly, in 1848 no major interest groups, except a minority of western German liberals whose prominence in politics in 1848 was very temporary, supported colonial expansion. The state governments most in a position to effect a colonial policy—Prussia, Hamburg, and Bremen—were against the whole idea. Prussia, in which large-scale emigration was something new, had previously opposed efforts to do anything at all about the Auswanderung. In 1841 the ruling bodies of Hamburg had opposed a scheme put forward by one of the city’s leading citizens, Karl Sieveking, for establishing both a colony in the Pacific and a united German navy.⁵ As they continued to do through the 1880s, the elites of the Hanseatic cities believed that German colonial expansion would be perceived as a threat in England and would spoil their special relationship with Great Britain. Until the last quarter of the century, Hamburg and Bremen were basically entrepôts of trade between Britain and central Europe. Since their businessmen traded heavily with Britain and in areas in which they were protected by the British navy, Hanseatic politicians were sensitive about their dependency. The same desire to keep its position as middleman in the British-central European trade lay behind Hamburg’s refusal for many years to join the Zollverein.

Also absent in 1848 were the great economic-interest organizations that later were major factors in the process of decisionmaking in Germany. Early industrialists such as Camphausen, Hansemann, and Mevissen were very active in liberal politics, but they did not form industrial pressure groups until later. Nor, for that matter, were the industrialists particularly interested in colonies. Most people perceived colonialism in 1848 as a solution to the problem of emigration. Colonialism was not yet popularly related to the needs of German industry, which was only beginning to emerge.

However, colonialism as a political idea did not die out after 1848. It remained a minor element of liberal nationalist political thought and retained its focus on the Auswanderung. Yet certain newer varieties of colonialism, linking the concept of overseas colonies with the new industrial sector of the German economy, did come to public attention after 1848. This was not originally a major trend, but it was occasionally found as a subsidiary aspect of colonial writings that followed the dominant line of emigra-tionist colonialism.

In the 1860s colonialism again became a public issue during the events in which Prussia unified Germany. Proposals that Germany acquire overseas colonies appeared in a number of places, apparently as a result of rekindled thinking about the possible consequences of a unified Germany and also as part of a campaign orchestrated by procolonial elements close to Bismarck—particularly Lothar Bucher, one of the chancellor’s leading idea men in the Foreign Ministry, a former 1848 Liberal, and a colonialist. Bismarck himself remained publicly opposed to overseas colonies until the 1880s, but he was apparently willing to allow his assistants and some of his mouthpiece newspapers to appeal to sentiment in favor of colonies in order to rally support for unification in western Germany. In 1867 the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper under Bismarck’s control, published a series of articles advocating vigorous overseas colonization by the North German Confederation.⁶ The Norddeutsche essentially followed the traditional emigrationist view, even to the extent of suggesting settlement colonies in other sovereign countries. Probably inspired by Bucher, the articles were written not as much to advance colonialism as to direct colonialist sentiment toward the support of Bismarck. Bucher’s own view of the reasons for acquiring colonies did not actually correspond to that set out in the articles; he was more interested in colonies as aids to industrial development than he was in emigration.⁷

Members of the Prussian military establishment also debated the question of colonial acquisition during and after the Franco-Prussian War. The leaders of the tiny Prussian navy suggested that Germany pick up French colonies—possibly including Indochina—as economic dependencies and as naval bases.⁸ The implication for the navy was obvious: in order to protect the colonies, Germany would have to build a larger navy. Despite support for this position from some civilian publicists, neither Bismarck nor the leadership of the army was particularly impressed. The naval argument for colonies had little force in Germany until the 1890s.

With unification, colonialism took on a new aspect in German politics. Even before 1871 it had been argued that German economic integration through the Zollverein would eventually force Germany to seek her own overseas colonies.⁹ It was thought that the Zollverein might come to be considered by Britain and other countries as an economic rival against whom informal sanctions, and possibly tariffs, would have to be levied. An adverse British reaction might exclude German merchants from trade with the British Empire and might create problems for Germany in areas of indirect British influence. Under these circumstances overseas colonies would become a necessity, at least as a guarantee of sources of raw materials that could not be acquired in trade with central Europe. Moreover, the economic area defined by the Zollverein eventually might not be large enough to support continuous industrial growth and might require expansion of markets overseas, perhaps through colonies.

These considerations became more urgent after 1871. The presence of a strong and united Germany in the middle of Europe had an extremely unsettling effect on international relations, which Bismarck spent the rest of his career attempting to counteract. The effect of German unification, especially when combined with intense international economic competition following the crash of 1873, was to give an unwonted importance to German colonialism and to relate colonialism to the interests of significant economic groups within Germany for almost the first time.

Two major, related sets of interest groups propagandized for German acquisition of economic colonies from the mid-1870s. In one category were organizations representing certain areas of commerce and industry, and in the other were Hanseatic tropical trading interests. The concerns of the two groups did not always correspond exactly. Most business interests did, however, share a basic desire for government protection in the face of the post-1873 depression and the threat of foreign competition.

Led by the Hamburg merchant Adolf Woermann, the tropical traders sought to stabilize trading conditions in West Africa and the South Pacific and to prevent the monopoly of their trading areas by the British and French. The trading interest put direct pressure on the government to declare protectorates in those areas and also to grant economic support to failing commerical firms.

Hanseatic tropical trading influence was generally exerted through the Foreign Office. The leaders of some of the major enterprises, including Woermann himself, were closely connected by friendship, business and political ties, and family relationships to key officials. They attempted to use these ties to promote an active colonial policy after 1879.¹⁰ Their main contact was Heinrich von Kusserow, a Foreign Office counselor whom Bismarck put in charge of colonial affairs after his own conversion to colonialism. Kusserow was probably chosen for this role, not because Bismarck listened to his advice, but because he wanted to use Kusserow’s business connections. When colonial acquisition did occur after 1883, the locations of Hanseatic trading interests often provided guides to the territories to be claimed. Colonialist thinking had in the past been directed toward various areas of the world, but most particularly toward South America. Primarily due to the influence of Woermann and his allies, German colonialism focused on areas of Africa and the South Pacific with potential for trade in tropical agricultural products but with little likelihood of supporting the kind of European settlement that many German colonialists sought.

Despite their political connections, however, the role of the Hanseatic merchants in creating the German overseas empire was severely circumscribed. Many of the tropical trading houses of Hamburg and Bremen, including Woermann’s, were comparatively small and unprofitable in the 1870s. One of the largest, the Godeffroy firm, was approaching bankruptcy.¹¹ Hamburg did only a small amount of its total trade with the areas of future colonization. Furthermore, the tropical trading interest usually had little political clout, and most Hanseatic leaders still opposed colonies. Woermann’s influence apparently counted for more in Berlin than in Hamburg, and even there Bismarck was under no obligation to respond to it.

The other major colonial interest group consisted of a number of organizations of businessmen and industrialists, many with financial interests in overseas trade and export-oriented manufacturing. Some companies had direct reasons for supporting colonialism. For example, the Bleichröder investment bank was one of Woermann’s financial backers. Several other financial houses were apparently interested in safe (and possibly government-subsidized) investments in tropical areas; a few of them actually invested in colonial enterprises in the late 1880s, but not very many did and they did not invest extensively.¹² Part of the influence that the tropical trading interest exerted on the government was directed through big-business spokesmen with governmental connections. Nevertheless, the direct financial involvement of industry in tropical enterprises was limited. The major concerns of the chambers of commerce and other business interest groups that adhered to the colonial movement in the early 1880s were related to the general set of imperialist ideas of which colonialism was a part and to the role of those ideas in German politics rather than to the specific interests of German businessmen in particular areas.

Socioeconomic Change and Colonialist Ideology

Although industrialization was the major event of German economic history in the nineteenth century and a prime influence on German colonialism, it was not the only one. The emergence of colonialism in the Vormärz period, both as a political movement and as a set of ideologies, resulted from economic and social changes that preceded industrialization. In particular, the restructuring of agriculture in many areas of Germany, which caused massive cycles of emigration throughout the nineteenth century, also helped to create a colonialist theory that looked to overseas colonies as a solution to the problems of emigration.¹³ The initial agricultural restructuring in southwestern Germany was interpreted by observers as overpopulation. It was believed that rural society had simply produced too many people for the economy to support and that some of the excess had to leave the country. From a more modern standpoint we can perceive that emigration was the product, not of absolute overpopulation, but of the development of German agriculture toward larger-scale capitalistic forms under severe economic pressure, compounded by a gradual reduction in the size of independent farms through their division among the sons of farmers.

Changes in the rural economy affected not only farmers but also members of various occupational groups that existed on the periphery of rural enterprise: retail shopkeepers, artisans, and small-scale dealers in agricultural products. Together with farmers and farm laborers, these groups made up the bulk of Aus-wanderer. The Auswanderung, accentuated by dislocations due to industrialization after 1850, continued to occur in cycles throughout the century. After a period of intense emigration in the 1890s, the Auswanderung declined precipitously as the German industrial economy reached maturity and became an importer of labor.

As we have seen, most early versions of German colonialism concentrated on the utility of colonies as solutions to the problem of emigration. The connection between emigrationist colonialism and the Auswanderung was the main basis on which middle-class support for colonialism rested. As a concept the Auswanderung became an article of faith among the lower ranges of the middle class, especially among the occupational groups that supplied most of the emigrants. Freedom to emigrate if conditions should become too unbearable was widely accepted as the ultimate recourse of the lower orders of respectable society, and parties (such as t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The German Colonial Empire
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations in Text
• Part I The Origins of Germany’s Colonial Empire
• Part II The Colonies, 1885–1907
• Part III Colonial Politics in Germany, 1890–1906
• Part IV The Dernburg Era and its Aftermath
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index