3 - World Economy

Summary

In the 1890s, British imperial rivalry with France and Russia led to a naval arms race and growing international maritime insecurity, while wars, civil strife and trade frictions threatened German commercial interests in China, South America, and the Transvaal. Coinciding with the Transvaal and Venezuela Crises, American protectionism and Panamerican ambitions, long with a British backlash against German industrial exports emerged as threats for the first time. This chapter explores these developments by following the travels of Hermann Schumacher to East Asia in 1897 as part of a German commercial delegation and those of Ernst von Halle to the Caribbean and Venezuela in 1896 to inspect the recently completed Great Venezuela Railway, the largest German overseas investment at the time. Their observations, like those of Rathgen a decade earlier, heightened perceptions of German commercial, trade, and maritime vulnerability to American, British, and Russian "imperilaism," views that were disseminated in Germany in many publications that gained a wide readership.