Too late when matter anyway, besides India and China( south Africa too) all colonies were a money waste
Larger German Overseas Empire
- Thread starter Hvalrossen
- Start date
Indonesia maybe?
Yeah for Germany Togo and Samoa only were supposedly profitable on a cash flow basis by 1914 (not counting sunk costs), otherwise its just about prestige, or military basing in war (Kamina wireless station in Togo), or strategic minerals, (Katanga copper mines, Sumatra oil).
If Germany was to retain it's colonies for longer, maybe they will be able to make them more profitable?
Also i thought that Malaya was profitable.
There isn't actually a straightforward "cash in, cash out" expression that you can use to describe the profitability of a colony. Although defense/administration was the responsibility of the metropole, most wealth and economic activity was generated by trading of private companies with the colonies, such as mineral extraction, shipping lines, and dumping finished goods. As a result the question of who is profiting from said colony and by how much becomes much more difficult to answer, especially because a lot of these 19th century companies were rather unscrupulous about record keeping. In the long run though these colonies were generally profitable for the ruling class, who got all the benefits of monopolistic trade while the state fronted the associated costs of administration, defense, etc. So in the expression "State investment into colony ~ Wealth generated from colony" the left side is pretty easy to get given some constraints, but the right side isn't so easy.
TL;DR the whole "X colony was profitable" and "Y wasn't" isn't that simple of a statement
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Aphrodite
Banned
If the Germans wanted an overseas Empire, then anything not taken by a European power would be available.
France got Indochina and Madagascar, Italy Somalia and Eritrea and Japan Taiwan. All could have been German
As mentioned, the French could have been forced to give up any possessions outside of the Western Hemisphere in 1870. The US would object to any transfers in the Western Hemisphere
But that still leaves the state holding the bag, and unless it gets some money back then its eventually going to get rid of the colony especially after major wars are draining all of the states resources.
I agree with this, mostly. The whole idea is that the state holds the bag so that the wealthy can profit with minimal loss, which is all good and well in peacetime. This is especially not that problematic in 19th-early 20th century europe, where places like Tsarist Russia made state-subsidies to the wealthy look egalitarian in comparison. But it is harder to justify basically diverting the national budget to the wealthy during or post-wartime given much more pressing expenses, which I’d argue contributed to decolonization post WWII. Decolonization at this point was a winning compromise between the state and said corporations, as the metropole could leave most expenses to a poorly constructed decolonized state while using its soft power* to enforce favorable trade terms for metropolitan business interests (aka neocolonialism). So your analysis that the state will eventually get rid of a system that effectively makes the rich richer but drains overall resources is correct.
My only two quibbles refer to when you said “the state” will get rid of it unless it gets money back. First, the state isn’t an abstract entity but a representation of societal interests/national priorities. If it so happens that corporations that benefit from colonialism are disproportionately influencing said priorities, then as far as “the state” goes it has got its money back regardless of what the average peasant may think.
The second thing is that there are many other ways that governments can extract revenue from colonial corporations aside from direct taxation of colonized subjects. Corporations themselves generate economic activity, which still holds true in the modern day; just look at the Amazon HQ2 bidding war that happened after all.
*: Sort of a generalization as there were instances of metropoles employing hard power on colonies too
Multiple edits are because I’m on my phone and have fat fingers
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