Resources and Racism: Justifying the German Colonial Empire

Abstract

From any practical perspective, the German colonial empire looks like a complete disaster. For the sake a disparate collection of distant and generally unproductive swathes of land, the German government sacrificed hundreds of millions of marks and a good portion of its international reputation. How can such a self-injurious course be explained? Many scholars have attempted to answer this question, but few have examined the justifications that imperial Germans themselves gave for their pursuit of world empire. Such an examination is carried out in this paper. Through such an examination, we find that the dominant arguments in favor of colonial expansion fall into two categories: economic arguments and völkisch arguments. The Economic arguments asserted that colonial possession would result in a variety of economic benefits for Germany, including independence from foreign imports and markets for manufactured goods. The völkisch arguments based themselves on a hyper-nationalist and racist worldview that saw human history as an endless conflict, in which a race had only two options, expansion or annihilation. A number of the most puzzling aspects of German colonialism can be clarified through an examination of these arguments.