The German Colonies: Topography, Resistance, and the Catholic Missions
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CHAPTER 3 The German Colonies: Topography, Resistance, and the Catholic Missions Established in two waves of annexations, the Reich’s formal colonial empire included four African territories, six island groups in the South Pacific, and Kiautschou, the leasehold around the Chinese port of Qingdao on Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong. The first wave of the mid-1880s engulfed Southwest Africa, Togo, Kamerun, German East Africa, German New Guinea, the Marshall Islands, and Nauru. A second smaller wave of German colonial acquisitions followed in the late 1890s. First, the Chinese government was induced in 1898 to acknowledge Germany’s special economic interests in Shandong as a whole and to grant the Reich a ninety-nine-year leasehold at Kiautschou. Then, in mid-1899 the Spaniards sold the Germans their colonial sovereignty over the Caroline, Palau, and Mariana Islands minus Guam. Finally, German-Anglo- American tripartite rule over Samoa was brought to an end that November through an agreement which conferred the two larger western islands Savai’i and Upolu upon the Reich. While colonial enthusiasts propounded the acquisition of overseas ter- ritories either as a patriotic solution to the perceived problem of excessive German emigration or as a protectionist vehicle for guaranteeing the Reich access to natural resources and consumer markets, Bismarck himself had long doubted that these purported benefits would actually outweigh the risks that an expansionist colonial policy would pose to Germany’s diplomatic position in Europe.1 Therefore, the chancellor’s unexpected conversion to the cause of colonialism in the early 1880s has exercised historians for decades. Whether one sees his colonial campaign as a diplomatic strategy designed to encourage Anglo-French discord, as a domestic political diversion to distract bourgeois or petty bourgeois reformers, or as a genuine belated subscription to the neces- sity of empire, it is clear that Bismarck believed that responsibility for colo- nial administration ought to devolve upon the interested corporations, rather than upon the limited fiscal resources of the Reich.2 However, the prospective 1 Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 3–27. 2 A.J.P. Taylor, Germany’s First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck’s European Policy (London: Macmillan & Co., 1938). William O. Aydelotte, Bismarck and British Colonial © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004306875_005 56 CHAPTER 3 chartered companies either withdrew from the arrangement, as in East Africa and later New Guinea, or they failed to materialize entirely, as in Southwest Africa, Kamerun, and Togo. Only the Jaluit Gesellschaft succeeded in turning a profit that consistently covered the cost of the Reich’s administration of the Marshall Islands.3 Therefore, in spite of Bismarck’s original designs, by the year 1900 German imperial governors sat at Windhoek (Southwest Africa), Lome (Togo), Buea (Kamerun), Dar-es-Salaam (East Africa), Herbertshöhe (New Guinea and the South Seas), Apia (Samoa), and Qingdao (Kiautschou). While Kiautschou was administered through the Imperial Naval Office, oversight over the affairs of all the other territories lay within the jurisdiction of the Colonial Department of the German Foreign Office. The department’s colonial director and his rather limited staff were therefore responsible for the governance of a far- flung, heterogeneous empire with twelve to fourteen million inhabitants and encompassing roughly five times the area of the German Reich.4 Furthermore, due to the preoccupation of the foreign secretary with the demands of his reg- ular diplomatic duties, the Colonial Department had also come to occupy an anomalous jurisdictional position. Namely, as of the early 1890s colonial affairs no longer fell within the purview of the foreign secretary; rather, the colo- nial director was instructed to report directly to the chancellor on all matters Policy: The Problem of South West Africa, 1883–1885 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937; reprint, Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970). Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., “Bismarck’s Imperialist Venture: Anti-British in Origin?” in Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 47–82. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann and Alison Smith, “The German Empire in Africa and British Perspectives: A Historiographical Essay,” in ibid., 709–17. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1969). Wehler, “Bismarcks Imperialismus 1862–1890,” in Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918: Studien zur deutschen Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970). Paul M. Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German-American Relations, 1878–1900 (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974), 25–27. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), 167–78. W.D. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 27–34, 238n42. 3 W.O. Henderson, “Chartered Companies in the German Colonies,” in Studies in German Colonial History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962), 11–32. 4 Hans Meyer, ed., Das Deutsche Kolonialreich: Eine Länderkunde der deutschen Schutzgebiete (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1909–1910) 1:406, 508–10, 512–13, 2:59–60, 110–11, 313, 486, 528–29, 531. Helmuth Stoecker, ed., Drang nach Afrika: Die deutsche koloniale Expansionspolitik und Herrschaft in Afrika von den Anfängen bis zum Verlust der Kolonien, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1991), 36–37, 45, 161..