Colonies of German countries before 1871

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Colonies of German states before 1871 are colonies of German-speaking countries that were planned or created before the establishment of the German Empire . While other European powers began to gain colonies overseas as early as the 15th and 16th centuries , the German states hardly appeared as colonial powers in the early modern period for various reasons . Of the countries of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Old Reich), which was dissolved in 1806 , the Dutch East India Company , founded in 1602, and the Dutch West India Company , founded in 1621, acquired large colonial possessions, but when the Netherlands left the Empire in 1648 they belonged to them they no longer belong to the Association of the Old Kingdom. A major exception after 1648 was Brandenburg-Prussia , whose head of state, the Great Elector , was closely intertwined with the Netherlands and, like the Dutch, wanted to make a profit from maritime trade. From 1680 he acquired colonial property overseas and participated in the colonial slave trade . All of these colonies were soon abandoned. There is no continuity with the German colonies that were founded in 1884.

A special activity of German sovereigns in the Old Reich was the rental of troops to England and the Dutch companies for use in their colonies. The Duke of Württemberg provided the Cape Regiment for the Dutch East India Company, and the Counts and Princes of Waldeck also provided companies for colonial work and earned money from them.

An episode at the very end of the Old Kingdom was the secret Otaheiti Society founded in Tübingen in 1806 by the student Carl Ludwig Reichenbach to establish a colony in the South Seas on Tahiti . At the end of 1808 the society was discovered by the police and most of its members were arrested on suspicion of high treason.

Some emigrated Germans founded settlements overseas, which are sometimes also referred to as "German colonies", but which did not exercise any sovereignty rights of their country of origin.

The Welser Colony

Location of Little Venice

The Welser Colony (also known as Little Venice or Welserland) was a trading base in Venezuela that Charles V had pledged to the Augsburg patrician family of Wels from 1528 to 1556. However, this was not a colony in the legal sense.

Hanauian India

In 1669, the Dutch West India Company and the County of Hanau agreed in a treaty that the county should receive an area of ​​3,000 Dutch square miles between the Orinoco and the Amazon in Dutch Guiana as a fief. However, the project failed due to financial problems, among other things.

Brandenburg-Prussian colonies

The Brandenburg-Prussian state with its colonies on the Gold Coast in what is now Ghana (top left)

In 1682, Elector Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg sent an expedition to found the first Brandenburg colony in Africa. A year later the Brandenburg red eagle was hoisted at the Cape of the Three Spikes in what is now Ghana and the first " protection treaties " were concluded with chiefs . In addition, the foundation stone for the Groß Friedrichsburg fortress was laid.

In the Brandenburg colonies, slaves , rubber , ivory , gold and salt were traded . The elector leased the Caribbean base of St. Thomas of Denmark for the slave trade .

View of Groß Friedrichsburg at the time the expansion was completed after 1686. Outside the fort, the huts of the Africans. (contemporary)

After a brief bloom, the colonies began to decline gradually from 1695. The reasons for this lay in the limited financial and military resources that Brandenburg-Prussia had at their disposal. Friedrich Wilhelm's grandson, King Friedrich Wilhelm I in Prussia , had no personal connections or inclinations to the navy and colonies and instead concentrated on expanding the Prussian army , for which the majority of the financial resources of the Prussian state were spent. With the treaties of 1717 and 1720 , the king sold his African colonies to the Netherlands-West India Company for 7,200 ducats and 12 “ Moors ”.

The Brandenburg colonies were:

  1. Groß Friedrichsburg (in today's Ghana ), colony 1683 to 1718
  2. Arguin (in present-day Mauritania ), colony 1685 to 1721
  3. St. Thomas ( Caribbean , today part of the American Virgin Islands ), Brandenburg lease area in the Danish West Indies 1685 to 1720
  4. Krabbeninsel (Caribbean, today part of Puerto Rico ), Brandenburg annexation in the Danish West Indies 1689 to 1693
  5. Whydah (in today's Benin ), Brandenburg base around 1700 (just a collection of warehouses, the British and Dutch also had bases in the same place).

In his biography of 1823, the well-traveled navigator Joachim Nettelbeck reported that in memoranda of the years 1774 and 1786 he recommended the kings of Prussia to return to colonial policy. He suggested taking possession of a not yet colonized coastal strip on the Corantijn between Berbice and Suriname in South America, but neither Frederick the Great nor Frederick William II responded to his letters. In 1814, when Nettelbeck, meanwhile a popular hero, suggested to his patron August Neidhardt von Gneisenau that Prussia should let defeated France cede an island in the West Indies that had already been colonized , he received an answer to his plans for the first time. Nettelbeck informed his readers that Gneisenau had written to him that it was part of Prussia's “system” to forego colonies, as their possession would make it dependent on the sea powers.

Austrian colonies

The trading post and headquarters of the Ostend Company in Banquibazar in India on the Ganges in Bengal around 1730.

Since the Habsburg crown lands did not represent an empire of their own before 1804, the Austrian colonies in Asia and Africa were also formally colonies of a land of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation .

Danish colonies

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Duchy of Holstein was simultaneously part of Danish state influence and an original member of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation through personal union (the Danish King as German Duke in Holstein). In particular, the Holstein city of Altona , which at that time did not yet belong to Hamburg , had brisk trade with the Danish West Indies .

New Ascania

The New Askania estate in today's Ukraine was founded in 1828 as a colony of the German Duchy of Anhalt-Köthen . In the first ten years, sheep were farmed successfully on the pasture grounds . Nevertheless, due to mismanagement, the colony repeatedly had to be financially supported by the duchy. After Askanija-Nowa had passed into the possession of the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau , he sold the unprofitable colony to a German-Russian nobleman in 1856.

German Empire from 1848

In 1848, in the course of the establishment of the German Empire in Frankfurt am Main, the capital of the Reich at that time, colonial associations were founded in Leipzig and Dresden, which were followed by others in Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Hanau, Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. The colonial movement that emerged in the 1840s seemed to be able to achieve its goals with the resurrection of the empire . Richard Wagner wrote in June 1848: “Now we want to sail across the sea in ships, here and there to found a young Germany. We want to do better than the Spaniards, for whom the new world was a clerical butcher's house, unlike the English, for whom it became a shopkeeper. We want to make it German and wonderful. "

The imperial constitution of March 28, 1849 also allowed the establishment of colonies. Paragraph 102 of the Reich Constitution: A Reichstag resolution is required in the following cases: 7) If parts of the German state are to be ceded or if non-German areas are to be incorporated into the Reich or otherwise linked to it.

The establishment of the imperial fleet also created a sea power that was able to enforce colonial aspirations. In 1848, both the Hamburg Naval Commission and Adalbert von Prussia as head of the Technical Naval Commission in his “Memorandum on the Formation of a German Navy ”, modeled on the British Royal Navy, demanded the worldwide establishment of 'stations' for the German fleet for protection of German trade. Due to the end of the Reich in 1848 in the following year, colonial ambitions in the Reich could not be realized, but Adalbert von Prussia became Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of the North German Confederation in 1867 and was then able to set up the overseas naval stations planned in 1848 , which finally provided the military requirements for the acquisition of the German colonies created.

See also

literature

  • Susanne M. Zantop: Colonial fantasies in pre-colonial Germany (1770-1870). Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-503-04940-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sebastian Conrad: German colonial history. CH Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-56248-8 , p. 18.
  2. ↑ Gisela Graichen and Horst Founders : German Colonies - Dream and Trauma . 2nd edition, Ullstein, Berlin, 2005, p. 23; Ferdinand Hahnzog : Hanauisch India then and now . Hanau 1959, p. 21.
  3. ↑ Petra Schellen: Altona, built from slave gold , in: taz , article from June 12, 2017, accessed on September 16, 2017.
  4. ^ Johanna Elisabeth Becker: The establishment of the German Colonial Institute in Hamburg. Hamburg 2005, p. 6
  5. ↑ Cord Eberspächer: The German Yangtze Patrol - German Gunboat Policy in China in the Age of Imperialism 1900 - 1914 , Verlag Dr. Dieter Winkler, Bochum 2004, p. 58