German colonial projects before 1871
[4][5]: 9 Before the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, various German states established chartered companies to set up trading posts; in some instances they also sought direct territorial and administrative control over these.
[14] In the mid-seventeenth century, the main motivation for German states seeking to establish colonial ventures was to rebuild their economies in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War.
An attempt to sell it to King Charles II was not successful, and the project finally failed due to the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War the same year.
[28] The colonial ambitions of Brandenburg-Prussia began under Frederick William the Great Elector who had studied at the Dutch universities of Leyden and the Hague.
He engaged former Dutch admiral Aernoult Gijsels van Lier as his advisor and tried to persuade the Holy Roman Emperor and other princes of the empire to participate in the creation of a new East India Company.
In 1651, Frederick William agreed to purchase the Danish possessions of Fort Dansborg and Tranquebar in India for 120,000 reichstalers, but as he was ultimately unable to raise this sum, the agreement was cancelled in 1653.
[30] In 1682, at the suggestion of the Dutch merchant and privateer Benjamin Raule, Frederick William granted a charter to the Brandenburg Africa Company (BAC), marking the first organised and sustained attempt by a German state to take part in the Atlantic slave trade.
With his state still impoverished after the Thirty Years War, the Elector hoped to replicate the mercantile successes of the Dutch East India Company.
[30] In 1683 the red eagle of Brandenburg was hoisted over Cape Three Points in present-day Ghana, and the first "treaties of protection" were signed with local chiefs.
Brandenburg-Prussia was allotted an area near the capital city Charlotte Amalie, called Brandenburgery, and other territories named Krum Bay and Bordeaux Estates further west.
The reasons for this lay partly in the limited financial and military resources available to Brandenburg-Prussia, but also in the determination of the French to drive out an effective commercial rival.
In 1717 he revoked the charter of the BAC and by treaties in 1717 and 1720, sold his African colonies to the Dutch West India Company for 7,200 ducats and 12 "Moors".
Following the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, the main foreign policy objective of Emperor Charles VI was to secure international agreement to the succession of his daughter Maria Theresa.
[46] The new company focused on the China tea trade, particularly lucrative since the American War of Independence meant that few British, Dutch or French ships were sailing to Asia.
[49] On 9 April 1764 Frederick V of Denmark issued an edict granting the privilege of engaging in the slave trade to his subjects in Altona and the other royal enclaves of Holstein, authorising them also to use foreign goods for the purpose.
[5]: 9–10 Indeed, in discussions about national identity, Liberals' emphasis on the symbolically important question of colonies was central to their assertion of social, cultural and political hegemony in Germany.
Dom Pedro's wife was a Habsburg, Maria Leopoldina of Austria, and her confidant Major Georg Anton Schäffer was sent to Germany to recruit colonists.
Adolph Schramm was sent to Rio de Janeiro for negotiations, but these proved protracted; on 30 June 1847, Sieveking died and with the general political situation in Germany deteriorating, the "Society for the Promotion of Emigration to the Southern Provinces of Brazil" was quietly dissolved in the autumn of 1847.
The Prince of Joinville had received large estates in the province of Santa Catarina as the dowry of his wife Francisca, daughter of Dom Pedro, and he was keen to settle them.
[61]: 316–320 From 1850 to 1875 the region around Valdivia, Osorno and Llanquihue in Southern Chile received some 6,000 German immigrants as part of a state-led colonization scheme.
[62] Initial immigration was promoted by German expatriate Bernhard Eunom Philippi whose project Chilean authorities adopted in the late 1840s.
[63] Germans and German-Chileans developed trade across the Andes, controlling mountain passes establishing the settlement from which Bariloche in Argentina grew out.
On 12 September 1841, a memorandum had been signed in Hamburg by John Ward for the New Zealand Company and Karl Sieveking for the still-to-be established German Colonisation Society to purchase the Chatham Islands for 10,000 pounds sterling on the basis that the Crown had never formally claimed sovereignty over them.
[7] In November, Sieveking published a booklet with various reports on the Chathams under the title "Warrekauri" and a prospectus entitled "The German Antipodes Colony".
[66] Although the New Zealand Company had been told in early December 1841 to end the arrangement as the Crown would not relinquish sovereignty, Ward continued to negotiate.
Godeffroy & Son, Eduard Johns, Ross, Vidal & Co., Schiller Brothers & Co., Adolph Schramm and Robert Miles Sloman.
[68] After the Crown became aware of the project, it had its chargé d'affaires in Hamburg inform Sieveking that John Ward was not authorised to enter into negotiations and letters patent signed by Queen Victoria on 4 April 1842, confirmed that the Chatham Islands were part of the colony of New Zealand.
[70] These commercial ventures later formed the basis for annexations under the German Empire, but before 1871 the government maintained a firm policy of avoiding colonial expansion.
The expedition leader Karl von Scherzer then began promoting the idea of a renewed Austrian colonisation plan, which the government rejected.
For example, German traders in Fiji put forward a proposal for the annexation of the islands, but Bismarck rejected it in March 1870[8]: 8 although he did appoint a consul.
