The German Military Participation in European Colonialism

The expedition of the Hanoverian regiments to India was not an isolated event in German history, for although the beginning of German colonialism is usually dated to 1884, with the declaration of several territories in Africa as German protectorates by Otto von Bismarck, Germans had been involved in European colonialism since the sixteenth century. Defining who was German in the early modern era is not simple, but for our purposes they should include all German speakers rather than be limited to the subjects of the Holy Roman Empire. Contemporary sources sometimes distinguished between Germans and Swiss, but the distinction often refers to the corps rather than to the origin of soldiers. French military sources defined German speakers from Alsace and Lorrain as Germans and did not distinguish between them and those recruited from within the Holy Roman Empire.

Germans participated in almost every aspect of early modern European colonialism as soldiers, administrators, merchants, bankers, settlers, missionaries, scientists, etc. They provided what Bouda Etemad called ‘the tools of empire’, namely, the manpower essential for controlling colonial territories. German military participation in early modern European colonialism begins with the Iberian conquest of America, but its scope there was very small.