What if no German colonies?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 1487
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I've heard conflicting things about the German colonies, specifically about Bismarck's role. Some say he was opposed, but Wikipedia suggests it was his idea to begin with.

That would probably be your best POD; if Bismarck isn't so eager to plant Germany's flag in Africa...
 
No colonies means a much reduced German navy. There'd probably be some kind of navy for prestige, but in terms of size not to threaten British naval supremacy. Probably just enough to dominate the Baltic and allow the Kaiser to show the flag if needed.

German Pacific colonies either go to Japan, British Empire (New Guinea, Bismarck, Solomons), or United States (Samoa). Spain will sell the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas to someone. That could be Japan, Britain, or the US. Perhaps all three.

Most of the African colonies will go to Britain, especially Namibia and Tanzania. The West African ones likely go to France.

Without diversion to overseas colonies, German investment likely increases in Balkans and Ottoman Empire. As a major European power without colonial interests of its own, we could see a combined American-German support for the Open Door in China. In fact, we might see a lot of American-German cooperation. Both are strong industrial powers needing open markets, hostile to Russian Tsarism, and who would have interests against the European colonial empires. Combined with large numbers of German immigrants, the two countries could become very friendly.

Still, Kaiser Bill is in charge, so who knows what he'll do.

Britain likely never joins the Entente which makes Russia very vulnerable.
 
I'd dispute the idea of this seriously reducing the size of the Kaiserliche Marine. The Fleet Acts were passed largely because of the extreme arrogance and threat of Britain in the Second Boer War. When the world's greatest naval power happily annexes your ally (an internationally recognised sovereign state), you timidly propose that they should consider your commercial interests doing so and they respond by threatening to blockade you, bombard your coasts, strangle your economy and utterly defeat your country… you surely draw the conclusion that you need to be able to defend yourself. Imperial Germany's small and insignificant colonial empire was a sideshow. Perhaps the KM might be smaller but I think the main impetus for its enlargement would still be there.

Most interesting are the potential effects on the Moroccan crises, which are probably capable of changing WW1 as we know it.

If nothing else, hundreds of thousands of more Hereros are alive today. :)

This. Definitely this.

…well, unless someone like the Belgians takes over (perhaps as a compromise between greater colonial powers), but let's not get too dystopian.

{edit} AussieHawker, you ninja.
 

Redhand

Banned
Well in 1913 the US cut tariffs, so without WW1 its very likely that German-US trade would have picked up; it was the war and the GOP raising of tariffs in the 1920s that really prevented it from having a major effect.

Tariffs were cut because of the income tax that also came about with the Wilsonian economic policies. This was a radical step at the time. US trade went to whoever gave it the best reason to trade with them. Britain filled this role for a long time and I doubt the US shipping interests would want to go against the Royal Navy. Why trade with Germany when you can trade with Britain, who has an extensive worldwide empire and access to Asian markets?
 

LordKalvert

Banned
Germany is likely to build its Navy even without a thirst for colonies which, honestly, under the last Kaiser she doesn't show much inclination for anyway. Other than a few little pickups in the Pacific (Tsingtao and the purchase of some from Spain) she picks up very little.

The Navy however allowed Germany to have some leverage in world affairs. Without it, all foreign matters would be solved without Germany's interests respected. She would have become nothing more than Britain's sword on the continent and promote British expansion everywhere. A pawn to be used in her chess games against the French and the Russians.

The Entente was never designed from Britain's view as an alliance but a means of ending quarrels with France and then Russia. It is likely to have formed on that basis anyway.

In return, the British are likely to offer Germany nothing- like she always did to the Triple Alliance members who backed her. GB fears Germany for more than her Navy- namely that a German victory in WWI would have made her the master of the continent- something that the British would never allow.

When the final struggle broke out, Germany would still be blockaded (this time by France and Russia) and at most have British neutrality. Not very much when the Germans are expecting a relatively short war with the British unable to contribute much of anything
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The army it turns out was over expanded by 1914, as they really didn't have any extra horses to field any more divisions, let alone corps after their move to a 25 corps structure that was not yet completely equipped in 1914. They really couldn't have taken on any more men to expand the army until they bought lots of trucks and then needed a stable source of oil to make that feasible and the A-H sources are drying up, while Romania is not friendly by 1914 and Russia is becoming Germany's main rival. Access to imported US oil was not guaranteed in wartime if Britain was to get involved. So restricting the size of the military wasn't just to do with Junkers not wanting to modernize or having a conservative rural political character, as the health of the more liberal urban population wasn't that great at the time, but one of practical realities of logistics.

Yes, what you list is true. And I still believe the extra money saved is most likely to go into non-military items, but you could improve expand the army some. From memory, the Army budget was near 2,000 million marks, the navy was 400 million marks. So a Corp is costing 80 million marks, and with square structure, this means a division is 20 million marks. So we are talking about fielding an extra brigade. If there was a will, Germany can easily find a way. Anything from mountain regiment to a trucking unit to garrison unit to marines.

I looked at the items voted out of a couple of army bills, and you end up losing mostly equipment. Things like adding an extra company of trucks to each battalion for a logistical regiment. Extra funding means a few more trucks, a TOE with a few more machine guns, maybe some extra artillery, maybe some extra supplies. To me the colonial budget is still a drop in the budget to the overall German army budget much less social budget. The changes would be so small, that I doubt most historians could tell that I substituted an ATL TOE for OTL TOE in August 1914. Again from memory, but the changes if I simply changed the last or next to last army bill would be something like.

In the handful of logistical regiments with trucks, we have 3 extra companies of trucks. Probably less than 100 extra trucks. Some small selection of units were to get extra machine guns or artillery. The scale is something like 4 extra machine guns per battalion for maybe a corp and extra artillery pieces on the scale of a battery per division for maybe a couple of corps. Probably something simple like bringing an a few reserve corps closer to the active corps TOE. And add maybe a half dozen small items like this.
 

Deleted member 1487

Tariffs were cut because of the income tax that also came about with the Wilsonian economic policies. This was a radical step at the time. US trade went to whoever gave it the best reason to trade with them. Britain filled this role for a long time and I doubt the US shipping interests would want to go against the Royal Navy. Why trade with Germany when you can trade with Britain, who has an extensive worldwide empire and access to Asian markets?

Cheaper and higher quality goods.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Could Germany still have purchased Helgioland from Britain? My understanding is that they wanted it due to it strategic position in front of the German coast which would make defending the coast easier.
Would Britain have sold it for a good price? Perhaps that is were some of the saved money ends up.


It is possible. A lot of the UK logic was that in a war with Germany, Helgioland would be hard/impossible to defend. Germany having it lowered tensions with Germany. Not hard to see a deal where the UK sells it to Germany for cash and maybe some face saving concessions or support on some other issue.
 

raharris1973

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Measuring the cost-benefit is tricky.

During WWI, although all Germany's colonies were doomed, and none were a platform for victory, the provided a net return to Germany's war effort by soaking up Allied efforts (British Commonwealth, French, Belgian, possibly Japanese) that could otherwise have been applied to the European or Ottoman fronts.

British Commonwealth, Belgian and Portuguese troops were stuck chasing around Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa until after the armistice in Europe.

The German colonies could not be by themselves serve as any stepping stone to victory in WWI because of Germany's naval inferiority and susceptibility to blockade.

However, the fact that they were cut off as soon as the war began, meant that metropolitan Germany was not spending any resources on them and instead committed all its resources to the vital European and Ottoman fronts.

So question # 1 is, did the Entente spend more reducing and conquering the German overseas empire in the years 1914-1918 than the German Empire spend investing in building its colonial empire from 1871 to 1914?

Question # 2, to judge whether Germany would have been better off without any colonies, you need to estimate that whatever the Germans would have done instead with funds spent on colonies (build up Navy more, build up Army more, industrial base, private investment, diplomatic resources/bribes expendable in Europe) would have been a greater net benefit to the German WWI effort than what the Entente would have saved for use in the European and Ottoman theaters earlier if they did not have the German overseas possessions to deal with.

As others have pointed out, a Germany that abstains from colonies does not guarantee itself against Entente or even British hostility, at least not directly. It is only when coupling a non-colonial policy with a reduced naval build-up and lack of a power-balance upsetting invasion of Western Europe that you begin to guarantee British neutrality.

A non-colonial Germany could gain some sentimental sympathy in the non-colonized, non-European world from abstaining from colonialism. It could possibly have better with relations with all non-European states that it could leverage for peacetime trade and diplomatic influence, as well as educational and cultural influence (For instance, well-to-do princelings from the African and Asian colonies of other European states, particularly those most offended by colonialism, may spend more of their tuition money at German schools, providing German academia with a small extra subsidy).
 
Maybe not they might get Belgium instead :eek:
Technically it was the Congo Free State, not Belgium, who were responsible for the atrocities in the Congo.

As for Germany not having colonies during the Age of Imperialism, it's borderline ASB. Germany was a great power and to not have colonies would have been economic suicide (atleast according to the schools of economic thought that were prevalent at the time). Even lesser nations like Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States had colonies. If anything, Germany's biggest blunder was waiting until the 1880's to acquire colonies. If they'd gotten in on the colonial game earlier, perhaps Germany's colonial empire could've amounted to something.
 
germany is still building a big navy.

why? to not get starved into submission, which actually happened in 1916-1920. as an export dependant country with a population to large to feed itself keeping the trade flowing is the number 1 priority. IOTL their failure were 1 too few ships and 2 too small guns.
 
germany is still building a big navy.

why? to not get starved into submission, which actually happened in 1916-1920. as an export dependant country with a population to large to feed itself keeping the trade flowing is the number 1 priority. IOTL their failure were 1 too few ships and 2 too small guns.

I'm not sure they will. Neither Russia nor Austria-Hungary were into navies all that much, despite the fact that they would face similar problems in a possible conflict with Britain or France. Of course Germany would eventually need a navy whether it had colonies or not, simply because it was something a great power had to have. But they could easily have decided to limit themselves to a coast defense force designed to prevent a close blockade (the idea of 'far-blockading' Germany from the Atlantic did not occur to naval strategists in Berlin OTL until the Royal Navy did it).

It would probably make little difference for public opinion in the UK. If you can have a Russian naval scare, certainly you can have a German one. But it would have changed the calculations of the Admiralty, and the expectations of the Generalstab of what a two-front war would look like.
 
I'm not sure they will. Neither Russia nor Austria-Hungary were into navies all that much, despite the fact that they would face similar problems in a possible conflict with Britain or France. Of course Germany would eventually need a navy whether it had colonies or not, simply because it was something a great power had to have. But they could easily have decided to limit themselves to a coast defense force designed to prevent a close blockade (the idea of 'far-blockading' Germany from the Atlantic did not occur to naval strategists in Berlin OTL until the Royal Navy did it).

It would probably make little difference for public opinion in the UK. If you can have a Russian naval scare, certainly you can have a German one. But it would have changed the calculations of the Admiralty, and the expectations of the Generalstab of what a two-front war would look like.

russia had ambitious navy plans but lost its navy to japan, and austria-hungary was importing/exporting through northern germany.
 
germany is still building a big navy.

why? to not get starved into submission, which actually happened in 1916-1920. as an export dependant country with a population to large to feed itself keeping the trade flowing is the number 1 priority. IOTL their failure were 1 too few ships and 2 too small guns.

For the most part absolutely correct. However, their failure was not because of too few ships or too small guns. The German produced very effective guns for their caliber size. They lacked more a strategy to engage the British, once the British abandoned the close blockade idea, than had too few ships.
 
For the most part absolutely correct. However, their failure was not because of too few ships or too small guns. The German produced very effective guns for their caliber size. They lacked more a strategy to engage the British, once the British abandoned the close blockade idea, than had too few ships.

the only real sea battle was at jutland, and that was a draw despite having worse planing and being outnumbered. bigger german guns could have scored an actual win there. it would have caused real panic in great britain - they've been fed french/german/russian invasion stories the past 30 years and now one of them was coming!!! or so.
 

raharris1973

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ObWI (obligatory what-if):

WI Bismarck sells German colonies to Italy? His remark to this effect must have been in the later 1880s, after Germany had acquired 4 African colonies (Togoland, Kamerun, SW Afrika & East Africa), plus northeast New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, Nauru (I think), & had a claim on the Marshalls.

So, sometime between 1885 and his 1890 dismissal, Bismarck moves to sell. Can Italy afford to buy? What political groupings will support, oppose or be indifferent to this liquidation?

If Italy does purchase the lot, Italy will have South Pacific colonies in addition to African colonies. Would this sate Italy's appetite for African colonies, with the knock-on effect of having Rome avoid war with Abyssinia and later the Ottoman Empire over Tripoli?

In East Asian waters, Italy was always a weak enough power that the Chinese felt secure in refusing them treaty ports until the Boxer protocol. Would that still be the case?

Grand strategically, will the enlarged Italian empire tilt Italy more in a Triple Alliance direction or Triple Entente direction? On the one hand, it keeps Italy busy and needing to cooperate with Germany during the transition. On the other hand, the desire for Austrian-held Italia Irredenta will never go away, and Italy will have even more territories, that they sunk more money into, highly vulnerable to British and French action, making fighting on Germany's side even riskier.

Meanwhile, in Germany, is there any German colonial enterprise after Bismarck's dismissal? In OTL, post-Bismarck, the only German acquisitions were Qingdao and the the purchase of Micronesia from Spain. Would these happen anyway, or be skipped? Would Germany have been more insistent on a share of Morrocco? If post-Bismarck governments want to get back into colonial ventures, there are many fewer places to go in the 1890s compared with the 1880s. If not seeking re-entry into the colonial field, how would Germany explain its choice?
 
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