Colonization of Asia, German
Years: 1871 - 1920
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Many of its members remain opposed to German unification because they fear Prussia's gradual
absorption by the empire.
The Conservatives also detest the Reichstag because it is elected by universal suffrage.
The Free Conservative Party represents industrialists and large commercial interests.
The views of this party most closely match those of Bismarck.
Its members support unification because they see it as unavoidable.
The National Liberal Party is composed of liberals who have accepted Germany's lack of full
democracy because they value national unity more.
They continue to favor a laissez-faire economic policy and secularization.
In time, National Liberals will become some of the strongest supporters of the acquisition of colonies and a substantial naval buildup, both key issues in the 1880s and 1890s.
From this point on, conservative groups have the upper hand in German society.
The German middle class begins to imitate its conservative social superiors rather than attempt to impose its own liberal, middle-class values on Germany.
The prestige of the military becomes so great that many middle-class males seek to enhance their
social standing by becoming officers in the reserves.
The middle classes also become more susceptible to the nationalistic clamor for colonies and "a place in the sun" that is to become ever more virulent in the next few decades.
His triumph, however, is a secret alliance he forms by means of the Reinsurance Treaty with
Russia in 1887, although its terms violate the spirit of the treaty with Austria-Hungary.
However much these agreements contributed to German security, Bismarck's plunge into the
European scramble for overseas colonies ultimately weakens it by awakening British fears about Germany's long-term geopolitical aims.
Subsequent feelers he puts out with a view to establishing an understanding with Britain are rebuffed.
The German flag is flown over Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the Bismarck Archipelago and the German Solomon Islands on November 23, 1884, under the auspices of the Deutsche Neuguinea-Compagnie (New Guinea Company).
The first Germans in the South Pacific were probably sailors on the crew of ships of the Dutch East India Company: during Abel Tasman's first voyage, the captain of the Heemskerck was one Holleman (or Holman), born in Jever in northwest Germany.
Hanseatic League merchant houses were the first to establish footholds: Johann Cesar Godeffroy & Sohn of Hamburg, headquartered at Samoa from 1857, operated a South Seas network of trading stations especially dominating the copra trade and carrying German immigrants to various South Pacific settlements; in 1877 another Hamburg firm, Hernsheim and Robertson, establishes a German community on Matupi Island, in Blanche Bay (the northeast coast of New Britain) from which it trades in New Britain, the Caroline and Marshall Islands.
By the end of 1875, one German trader reports: "German trade and German ships are encountered everywhere, almost at the exclusion of any other nation". (Hans-Jürgen Ohff (2008) Empires of enterprise: German and English commercial interests in East New Guinea 1884 to 1914 Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics; p. 26 quoting Schleinitz to Admiralty, 28 Dec. 1875, Drucksache zu den Verhandlungen des Bundesrath, 1879, vol. 1, Denkschrift, xxiv–xxvii, p. 3.)
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, an active minority, stemming mainly from a right-wing National Liberal and Free Conservative background, has organized various colonial societies all over Germany in order to persuade Chancellor Bismarck to embark on a colonial policy.
The most important ones are the "Kolonialverein of 1882" and the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation, founded in 1884.
Bismarck's initial response may be summed up by a marginal note he wrote in 1881: "Colonies demand a fatherland in which the national feeling is stronger than the hatred of the parties [for each other]".
(Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, "Domestic Origins of Germany's Colonial Expansion under Bismarck" (1969) Past & Present 42 pp 140–159 at p 144 citing Deutsches Zentralarchiv Potsdam, Reichskanzlei 7158.)
On April 24, 1884, Bismarck had signals a change in policy by placing German trading interests in southwestern Africa under the protection of the German Empire.
Bismarck tells the Reichstag on June 23, 1884 of the change of German colonial policy: annexations will now proceed but by grants of charters to private companies.
On his return to Germany from his 1879–1882 Pacific expedition, German ethnographer, naturalist and colonial explorer Otto Finsch had joined a small, informal group interested in German colonial expansion into the South Seas led by the banker, Adolph von Hansemann.
Finsch had encouraged them to pursue the founding of a colony on the northeast coast of New Guinea and the New Britain Archipelago, even providing them with an estimate of the costs of such a venture.
The foreign powers have also taken over the peripheral states that had acknowledged Chinese suzerainty and given tribute to the emperor.
France had colonized Cochin China, as southern Vietnam is called at this time, and by 1864 had established a protectorate over Cambodia.
France also takes Annam following a victorious war against China in 1884-85.
Britain gains control over Burma.
Russia penetrates into Chinese Turkestan (modern-day Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region).
Japan, having emerged from its century-and-a-half-long seclusion and having gone through its own modernization movement, defeats China in the war of 1894-95.
The Treaty of Shimonoseki forces China to cede Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan, pay a huge indemnity, permit the establishment of Japanese industries in four treaty ports, and recognize Japanese hegemony over Korea.
In 1898 the British acquire a ninety-nine- year lease over the so-called New Territories of Kowloon (Jiulong in pinyin), which increases the size of their Hong Kong colony.
Britain, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and Belgium each gain spheres of influence in China.
The United States, which has not acquired any territorial cessions, proposes in 1899 that there be an "open door" policy in China, whereby all foreign countries will have equal duties and privileges in all treaty ports within and outside the various spheres of influence.
All but Russia agrees to the United States overture.
Germany acquires a number of colonies in Africa and the Pacific, but Chancellor Otto von Bismarck has succeeded in achieving general peace through his balance of power strategy.
When William II becomes German emperor in 1888, he discards Bismarck, begins using bellicose language, and plans to build a navy to rival Britain's.
"He who does not know how to give himself an account of three thousand years may remain in the dark, inexperienced, and live from day to day."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-Eastern Divan