German colonial empire
The German colonial empire constituted the overseas colonies, dependencies, and territories of the German Empire. Unified in 1871, the chancellor of this time period was Otto von Bismarck. Short-lived attempts at colonization by individual German states had occurred in preceding centuries, but Bismarck resisted pressure to construct a colonial empire until the Scramble for Africa in 1884. Claiming much of the remaining uncolonized areas of Africa, Germany built the third-largest colonial empire at the time, after the British and French. The German colonial empire encompassed parts of Africa and Oceania.
Germany lost control of most of its Colonial Empire at the beginning of the First World War in 1914, but some German forces held out in German East Africa until the end of the war. After the German defeat in World, Germany's Colonial Empire was officially confiscated as part of the Treaty of Versailles between the Allies and German Weimar Republic. Each colony became a League of Nations mandate under the administration, although not sovereignty, of one of the Allied powers. Talk of regaining the colonies persisted in Germany until 1943, but never became an official goal of the German government.
Origins
Germans had traditions of foreign sea-borne trade dating back to the Hanseatic League; German emigrants had flowed eastward in the direction of the Baltic littoral, Russia and Transylvania and westward to the Americas; and North German merchants and missionaries showed interest in overseas engagements. The Hanseatic republics of Hamburg and Bremen sent traders across the globe. Their trading houses conducted themselves as successful Privatkolonisatoren , concluding treaties and land purchases in Africa and the Pacific with chiefs and/or other tribal leaders. These early agreements with local entities later formed the basis for annexation treaties, diplomatic support, and military protection by the German government.However, until their 1871 unification, the German states had not concentrated on the development of a navy, and this essentially had precluded German participation in earlier imperialist scrambles for remote colonial territory. Without a blue-water navy, a would-be colonial power could not reliably defend, supply, or trade with overseas dependencies. The German states before 1870 had retained separate political structures and goals, and German foreign policy up to and including the age of Otto von Bismarck concentrated on resolving the "German question" in Europe and on securing German interests on the continent. However, by 1891 the Germans were mostly united under Prussian rule. They also sought a more clear-cut "German" state, and saw colonies as a good way to achieve that.
German Confederation and the Zollverein
In the states of the German Confederation founded in 1815 and the Zollverein established in 1834, there was some call from private and economic interests for the establishment of German colonies, especially in the 1840s. However, governments had no such aspirations. In 1839, private interests founded the, which sought to purchase the Chatham Islands east of New Zealand and settle German emigrants there, but Great Britain had a preexisting claim to the island. Hamburg relied on the Royal Navy for its worldwide shipping interests and therefore gave no political support to the Colonial Society. The Society for the Protection of German Immigrants to Texas, established in Mainz in 1842, sought to expand the German settlements into a colony of "New Germany". About 7400 settlers were involved. The venture proved a complete failure. There was a constant lack of supplies and land and around half of the colonists died. The plan was definitively ended with the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845.Starting in the 1850s German commercial enterprises spread into areas that would later become German colonies in West Africa, East Africa, the Samoan Islands, the unexplored north-east quarter of New Guinea with its adjacent islands, the Douala delta in Cameroon, and the mainland coast across from Zanzibar.
First state-sponsored colonial venture (1857–1862)
In 1857, the Austrian frigate Novara departed from Triest on the Novara Expedition, which aimed to explore and take possession of the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean. The Novara arrived at the Nicobars in 1858, but the Austrians did not subsequently claim the islands.The next state-sponsored attempt to acquire a colony occurred in 1859, when Prussia attempted to claim the island of Formosa. Prussia had already sought the approval of the French Emperor Napoleon III for the undertaking since France was also seeking to acquire colonies in East Asia at that time. Since French interests focused on Vietnam, not Formosa, Prussia could seek to acquire the island. A Prussian naval expedition, which departed Germany at the end of 1859, was tasked with concluding trade treaties in Asia for Prussia and the other states of the Zollverein and with occupying Formosa. However, this task was not carried out, due to the limited strength of the expedition forces and because they did not wish to preclude a trade treaty with Qing China. In a cabinet order of 6 January 1862, the expedition's ambassador, Friedrich Albrecht zu Eulenburg was "released from carrying out the part of his task concerned with the identification of overseas settlements suitable for Prussian settlement."
Despite this, one ship from the expedition, the Thetis was sent to Patagonia in South America to investigate its prospects as a colony, since the Prussian naval command in particular were interested in the establishment of a naval strong point on the South American coast. The Thetis had already reached Buenos Aires and the commander of the ship decided to return to Germany due to the exhaustion of the men after the year-long expedition and the need for repairs to the ship.
Bismarck's rejection of colonization (1862–1871)
, foreign minister and minister president of the Kingdom of Prussia and later chancellor of Germany, was opposed to any state-sponsored efforts to establish overseas colonies, a sentiment summarized in the influential biography Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman as "he said repeatedly: 'I am no man for colonies'".While notably not rooted in humanitarian, legal or moral concerns like later anti-colonialism, Bismarck's scepticism was based on the perceived non-profitability, infeasibility, lack of strategic relevance and incompatibility with his balance-of-power-based foreign policy approach.File:Kamerun Alte Woermann-Faktorei.jpg|thumb|Woermann-Linie factory in Cameroon. From the 1830s, German shipping participated in trade with Africa and established factories there. From the 1850s, trade and plantation agriculture were undertaken by German companies in the South Seas. Some of these economic enterprises eventually formed the basis for the regions' conversion into German colonies.
After the Second Schleswig War in 1864, colonialist societies in Prussia aspired to take possession of the Nicobar Islands which had previously been in Danish possession. For its part, Denmark unsuccessfully proposed to exchange the Danish West Indies for some of the lost territory in Schleswig in 1865. In 1866 and then again in 1876, Jamal ul-Azam, Sultan of the Sulu Islands, located between Borneo and the Philippines, offered to place his islands under Prussian and then Imperial German control, but both times he was rebuffed. Ahmad ibn Fumo Bakari, the Sultan of Wituland asked the Prussian traveler to establish a Prussian protectorate over his lands, but this request was never considered in Berlin.
In the 1867 constitution of the North German Confederation, article 4.1 declared "colonization" as one of the areas under the "oversight of the Confederation", which remained the case in the Imperial constitution established in 1871.
In 1867/8, Otto von Bismarck dispatched the screw corvette to the Caribbean to show the flag of the North German Confederation. At the personal urging of Prince Adalbert, the commander of the North German Federal Navy, and without Bismarck's knowledge, the commander of the Augusta, conducted negotiations with José María Castro Madriz, President of Costa Rica with a view to establishing a naval base at Puerto Limón. Bismarck rejected the acquisition, due to the American Monroe Doctrine. This desire to avoid antagonising the United States also led him to reject a Dutch offer to establish a naval base on the Dutch island of Curaçao.
In 1868, Bismarck made his opposition to any colonial acquisitions clear in a letter to the Prussian Minister of War Albrecht von Roon:
The policy of the North German Confederation at this time focussed on the acquisition of individual naval bases, not colonies. With these it would be able to use gunboat diplomacy to protect the global trade interests of the Confederation through a kind of informal imperialism. In 1867, it was decided to establish five overseas bases. Accordingly, in 1868, land was bought in Yokohama in Japan for a German naval hospital, which remained in operation until 1911. In 1869 the "East Asian Station" was established there by the navy as the first overseas base, with a permanent presence of German warships. Until the German Empire's acquisition of Qingdao in China as a military port in 1897, Yokohama remained the base of the German fleet in East Asia. It later proved useful following the acquisition of colonies in the Pacific and in Kiaochow.
In 1869, the Rhenish Missionary Society, which had been established in southwestern Africa for several decades asked King William of Prussia for protection and suggested the establishment of a naval station at Walvis Bay. William was very interested in this suggestion, but the matter was forgotten following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.