The German colonial empire lasted a mere thirty years, and is thus one of the most short-lived of all modern ‘colonialisms’. Consequently, it has not occupied centre-stage in most accounts and overviews of German history. The colonial experience was deemed marginal and insignificant, compared both to the long histories of the British and French empires, and also to the towering impact, on German history and beyond, of subsequent events: the First World War, the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In recent years, however, interest in Germany’s colonial past has made a remarkable comeback, both in academia and in the wider public sphere, and this mainly for three reasons.

Firstly, Germany’s colonial project may have lasted only three decades, but it was a significant and integral part of the period of high imperialism before the First World War. For anyone interested in a comparative and global perspective on modern empires, the German example is in many ways an instructive and illuminating case. Germany was a colonial late-comer. Only after unification in 1871, which replaced the thirty-eight sovereign German states with a unified nation-state under the leadership of Prussia and Chancellor Bismarck, did the acquisition of colonies emerge as a realistic political project. Powerful pressure groups as well as reckless colonial pioneers in Africa forced Bismarck, to some extent against his will, into government support for the occupation of the first colonial territories in 1884. In the autumn of that year, Bismarck invited the European powers to the Berlin Conference: this in many ways formalized the scramble for African possessions. In 1884/85, Germany acquired large territories in Africa in today’s Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanzania. In the late 1890s, smaller possessions in East Asia (Shandong province in China) and the Pacific (Samoa, New Guinea, and a number of Pacific Islands) were added. After those of Britain, France, and the Netherlands, this was the fourth largest colonial empire at the time.