After a series of brutal and costly colonial wars in German Africa and legislative impasses in the Reichstag, Chancellor Bülow called new elections in 1906 to forge a stable legislative bloc of liberal and conservative parties. This chapter analyzes how Schmoller, Sering, and the other fleet professors mobilized for this election campaign to support the colonial reform program of the new Colonial Director Bernhard Dernburg as a new prong of “World Policy.” This campaign generated much new imperialist propaganda that would have a lasting impact in Germany. As the colonial crisis subsided, the Baghdad railroad faced new financial and political challenges that Karl Helfferich was called to surmount. Formal professor exchanges between the United States and Germany were initiated to help improve deteriorating relations with the United States, with Hermann Schumacher serving as the first Kaiser Wilhelm Professor to Columbia University from 1906 to 1907. The United States was now an imperial power, and Schumacher’s extensive travel through the country and to Cuba revealed its vast potential but also its challenges to Germany. Strong parallels were suggested with Russia, reinforcing more Eurasian aspirations for German “World Policy.”

This chapter analyzes the colonial reforms of Bernhard Dernburg that culminated in the founding of the Hamburg Colonial Institute in 1908, to which Karl Rathgen was appointed. It also explores the disappointments with tropical colonies drawn from the surveys spearheaded by Max Sering, the observations of Hermann Schumacher in Southeast Asia in 1911, and Karl Rathgen’s travels in the American south and Caribbean in 1913. Dernburg successfully pushed investments in railways to better connect the German colonies to the German and world economy, and he set strict limits on white settlers. Even so, ambitions for a German temperate zone settler colony never quite died, even as it would prove elusive. The German colonial gaze did shift eastward to the Russian Empire in these years, which Sering and Schumacher visited in 1912 to inspect “inner colonization” in the Ukraine. They returned impressed with what they saw and committed to improving Russo-German relations, but better relations were increasingly hostage to Foreign Office prejudices and the Balkan rivalries of Austria and Russia.