Secret Wars and Secret Policies in the Americas, 1842-1929

Introduction

German navy leaders faced a deeply troubling decision. Under what circumstance should the Berlin government allow agents in San Francisco to commit sabotage against Allied ships? When should they spread anthrax viruses among horses and mules waiting in New York’s harbor, ready to be shipped to Allied battlefields in Europe?

It was fall 1935, Hitler’s third year in power. Several months before the Nazi government had revealed that it was building an army for world conquest. Now, in Berlin, leaders of the naval supply and intelligence service discussed whether, during the next world war, agents working undercover in U.S. cities should again be allowed to poison, dynamite, or incite racial violence. These actions would weaken the Allied ability to fight for democracy. Should the acts of World War I be repeated?

On October 31, 1935, one navy planner wrote to a colleague, pleading emphatically to revise proposed printed instructions for future German agents operating in the United States. He urged caution. Planners should not commit to paper that German soldiers might also work as saboteurs. After all, they were individuals of a seemingly civilized country, where Bach and Beethoven had created pure beauty for the world. True, if a war required them to explode a bomb in the middle of San Francisco harbor, they would do it. They would also dynamite innocent dock workers in New Orleans, if that promised to keep Allied military supplies from being loaded on a ship. But this fact should not be admitted on paper.

At a second office in the German Foreign Ministry, diplomats worked on a related issue, not knowing that navy planners were updating secret warfare instructions across town. In a court battle now more than a decade long, the Foreign Ministry’s Mr. Schmidhuber was defending the German government against claims by U.S. and Canadian factory owners who demanded damages for explosions that occurred during World War I government-ordered sabotage. For years, the best Foreign Ministry lawyers had tried to disprove that the German government had ordered sabotage against U.S. and British factories. Schmidhuber insisted that whoever had caused explosions that wreaked havoc in ammunition plants or whoever had operated an anthrax laboratory in New Jersey in 1915 had acted on his own initiative. Categorically German diplomats denied any responsibility as they looked U.S. lawyers and diplomats straight in the eye. Indeed, in the 1930s, U.S. lawyers never succeeded at producing a single piece of original paper tying German officials to a precise order of sabotage. Years of legal sophistry had debated apart claims until the most flagrant violation of U.S. territory by Germans between 1914 and 1918, twenty years before Hitler, appeared doubtful.

These lawyers did what many historians of German–American and Japanese–U.S. relations, on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific, continue to do today. Excellent rhetoric and brilliant writing exploit the fact that orders were given verbally and most paper trails have been destroyed. They continue to obfuscate historical proof that German and Japanese soldiers could be a danger to the Americas and operate on U.S. soil.

According to Schmidhuber and his legal team, Germans in the United States during World War I spread only propaganda. But never did they distribute anthrax among horses or sabotage U.S. and Canadian factories.

Unknown to today’s apologists the leaders of the German Navy Ministry did make sabotage plans among themselves and allowed for the preparation of such activities during World War II. As the Berlin admirals accommodated themselves to serve Fascism and joined Hitler’s war of world conquest, they hesitated nevertheless to commit secret warfare instructions in manuals.

An unknown navy leader of section All clarified that sabotage would be allowed, if necessary. But planners should be smart and omit it from agent handbooks. Leaders wanted to preserve the cultural smokescreen of German high culture and wonderful castles, which could be used again on the international scene during the next war. The idealized images of high culture would again manipulate the perceptions of naive U.S. citizens and protect most German Americans from asking deeper questions about ethnic longing and national loyalty. The navy planner explained:

To begin with it is suggested . . . to strike the words: . . . . if appropriate also through sabotage; still today, 15 years after the peace treaty with the United States, the U.S. sabotage claims have not been cleared up, as the case of von Rintelen teaches us. Looking back it should be stated that the acts of sabotage in the U.S. during the period of neutrality have created far more damage than benefit. Afterwards every German official office has denied to have issued the order to sabotage. On page 14 to 16 [of the manual] it has been pointed out correctly how important general public mood will be in a neutral country for the future flow of supplies. Thus, should an unfortunate coincidence reveal that committing sabotage is listed in an official job manual, unforeseeable damage could be the result.¹

It took until 2008 to find this first written admission by high-level German bureaucrats in a German archive. German World War I policy had included a wide variety of secret warfare attacks inside the United States. They had not been the acts of just a few patriotic German Americans, drunken with too much love for Emperor Wilhelm II. A small number had worked as Berlin’s handmaidens.

This book identifies and analyzes the roots of the mind-set that made possible the sabotage orders, previously described. The fascist fight against democracy and the United States did not start in 1933. Rather, events once Hitler came to power were a continuation of practices and the culmination of processes that had developed since before 1900. It is important to identify and analyze the complex foundations of authoritarian foreign policy that the German Third Reich, Italy’s Mussolini, the Japanese emperor, and Franco’s Spain rested on. These leaders were not the inventors of secret warfare against the Western Hemisphere. They just brought it to new extremes. This book shines a first bright light on these men and women and their secret practices before 1930. It compares them across nations and continents.

Their victim was not only the United States but also the naive worldview and rich immigrant cultures of German Americans, Japanese Americans, Italian Americans, Spanish Americans, and Latin Americans. Most of them had nothing to do with the imperial activities explained in the following pages. Hopefully their great-grandchildren may learn how antidemocratic governments in Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires used the lives of their immigrant ancestors to weaken the United States in its fight for democracy. There is historically justified reason for appropriate vigilance. Sentimental ethnic confusion inside the United States will always remain a challenge.

I

Imperial Powers

Turn Ethnic People

into a Security Threat

(1860–1914)

1Before European and Japanese Governments Manipulated Immigrants in the Americas

Before the 1870s, Germans left their small states in the millions and emigrated to the Americas.¹ Their reasons were obvious. Even though the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had destroyed the old Europe, aristocrats and reinstated royalty refused to build a modern state legitimized by citizens and popular votes. Aristocrats doubled their efforts to fight ideals proclaimed by U.S. and French revolutionaries. If possible, German elites would preserve monarchic government and enforce a rigidly divided, hierarchical society.

Also the French and British lessons of industrialization were rejected by German princes. One attractive alternative to such sociopolitical pressure was the emigration of peasants. Their Atlantic crossing would be organized through commercial companies, licensed by the government. But once their ships had spit out the third-class travelers onto the docks of New York, these companies and governments would lose sight of their ethnic cargo. These impoverished Germans traveled west, but there was no prince or king who wanted to hold onto them. Only family members left behind in Europe tried to stay in touch with the help of mostly unpredictable mail services, assuming that people could read and write. Often it was good-bye forever.

In Brazil the first German immigrants arrived in 1824. From the very beginning they settled in one region, founding the settlement of Sao Leopoldo in the province Rio Grande do Sul. Already in 1826 the Hanseatic merchant Gildemeister advocated the fantastic idea of a New Germany in South America. In the decades thereafter it remained nothing more than a thrilling political aphrodisiac among merchants in Hamburg and Bremen.

Six thousand immigrants followed over the next decades, establishing a close- knit distinct ethnic community. It was not, however, a German colony.

Ironically it was the Brazilian emperor who wanted to instrumentalize the Germans. Dom Pedro I insisted on their presence in southern Brazil. German immigrants were expected to build a new agricultural way of life in southern Brazil. The emperor saw them as an ethnic settlement belt that fortified Brazil’s border region against territorial designs by the rivaling republics of Spanish America. Before 1850 only the Portuguese American elite instrumentalized the ethnic residents of Sao Leopoldo.

In reality German emigrants in North and South America sidestepped such Latin American elite expectations and pursued a deeply personal but also confusing metamorphosis toward Americanization. Some simply refused to assimilate. The emotional and psychological consequences of emigration were not yet exploited by governments in Germany.

Inside the expanding United States, German emigrants developed hundreds of thousands of individual answers to the question of what it meant to be a peasant from Lower Saxony half your life and to finish the other half as a farmer in Minnesota. They worked the prairie that until only recently had belonged to the Lakota. In Latin America many quickly idealized their ethnic German cultural origin, afraid to mix with Afro-Brazilians, Brazilian Native Americans, or natives in Spanish American republics. On the other hand, a few enjoyed mixing more than German culture in Europe would have allowed. Then in 1850, Brazilian immigration law changed. The monarchy stopped gifting land. Germans were expected to purchase it.

In Prussia, other significant changes took place, as far as emigration was concerned. Nationalistic aristocrats debated whether their country had an obligation to protect emigrants. Some argued that the king of Prussia should intervene in South America in case of crisis. Prince Adalbert proposed the construction of a Prussian navy that could operate overseas. But his proposal was rejected.

Prussian elites increasingly demanded to redirect the flow of migrants from the Americas to Eastern Europe. As Prussia strengthened vis-à-vis Russia and Austria, leading politicians desired to redirect emigrants into conquered Polish territory. Now these Germans wanted to build a military settler belt to stop Russian expansion.

By the end of the 1850s the policy debate showed success. On November 3, 1859, the Prussian minister of interior, Heydt, prohibited state grants for new settlement concessions in Brazil. Emigration to Brazil could continue only as individual, private journeys. In spite of the restriction, twenty-eight thousand Germans crossed the Atlantic in the following year. As before, they came only to have a better life—but not to build a New Germany in South America.

In Europe, Prussia, France, and Austria already practiced secret warfare through the manipulation of ethnic groups. Napoleon III in 1859 incited ethnic minorities in Austria-Hungary to put pressure on Emperor Joseph.² Once Otto von Bismarck became Prussian chancellor, he too used ethnic issues and people to subvert the political stability of European monarchies. The U.S. historian Donald McKale shows how in 1866, Prussian military leaders incited Hungarians and Slavs living inside Austria-Hungary to shake Austria’s political stability through ethnic revolt. The German army high command deployed the same tactic against Russia along its border regions.³

In Poland, Bismarck went further. There he deployed settlements to claim Polish territory on behalf of Prussia. He financed a Prussian Settlement Commission that relocated ethnic Germans into occupied Polish territory. Bismarck countered Polish groups nurturing their own ethnic settlement belt.⁴

But when it came to the Americas, Bismarck took a strong stance against using the ethnic card in North and South America. There the lives of ethnic Germans in the Americas were to remain untouched by German manipulations. Bismarck made a wise tactical choice. But it was not a principled moral stance that protected Germans in Minnesota or Rio Grande do Sul from being pulled into secret ethnic warfare plans.

Bismarck remained adamant and prevented the creation of an overseas fleet. Navy enthusiasts won only a compromise. The German navy was allowed to establish overseas stations for German ships abroad. They would allow ships to resupply and offer a moderate form of protection during the next round of imperial war. Indeed, the first overseas stations for the small existing navy were opened in the Mediterranean, East Asia, and the West Indies.⁵ The West Indies station functioned in 1867, two years before the April Revolution of Venezuela. Bismarck’s personal political standing was strong enough to prevent the creation of a larger overseas fleet.⁶

As before, the recasting of how German settlers in South America were seen did not come from German imperialism but from the consequences of French–German enmity. It resulted from how Brazilian elites saw the French–German wars in Europe.

After the 1870s the French–German conflict colored Brazilian elite perceptions against ethnic Germans. In 1870, Dom Pedro II sided with Napoleon III. Right away Brazil’s press fell into line. Journalists in the largest cities published critical ideas about German social and cultural practices in South America. No longer were German immigrants appreciated for helping Brazil against Argentine and Paraguayan land claims or how they modernized the monarchy’s agriculture.

German naval warfare intensified the debate about potential German activities in Latin America. In 1869, Hans Eduard Knorr was twenty-nine years old and commandeered the Prussian SMS Meteor. His orders were to sail to the West Indies and to show the Prussian flag near French, British, and Spanish navy ships. The frigate came to show a German presence in the Venezuelan Civil War.⁷

By the time the SMS Meteor reached the Caribbean islands, France and Germany were at war, and Captain Knorr took it upon himself to do more than show the flag. In the name of Emperor Wilhelm I he waged war wherever he sighted a French ship.

First Knorr attempted to damage the flow of French supplies by waging cruiser warfare. He attempted to exploit U.S. disgust against Napoleon III, whose soldiers had been stationed across El Paso only the previous year. On August 13, 1870, Knorr met Captain Irving, the commander of the USS Intake. Knorr asked him to make available his resources and to make it easier to assemble an ad hoc Prussian auxiliary cruiser fleet. The German wanted to telegraph Berlin for approval using the U.S. Key West Naval Station. But in Washington, D.C., German Ambassador von Gerolt rejected Knorr’s request, fearing violation of U.S. neutrality law.⁸ Thereafter Knorr pursued his very own singular cruiser war.

On November 9, 1870, in front of the Spanish Port of Havana, Knorr discharged a broadside into the French aviso Bouvet. The Bouvet responded in kind and damaged the Meteor badly. As Knorr’s fortunes turned, his men steered the wounded ship into Havana’s port, triggering a miniature French naval blockade. Then Napoleon III was defeated in Europe, and the French captain ended the blockade. Even though Knorr was saved by luck, he was received in Germany as a hero. He was promoted to admiral of the newly merged Prussian and north German merchant marine.

This French–German naval exchange off Havana was more than a curious historical footnote. It represents the opening salvo of a fifty-year-long German–French clash on many levels. Naval insiders now saw German ships in a more complex strategic light.

Knorr’s experience encouraged a growing number of German planners to include Latin American and North American coastlines in their soon-to-be-drawn-up naval contingency plans. Knorr himself employed his status to move newly installed emperor Wilhelm II toward favoring the construction of a German overseas fleet.

The German 1871 victory suggested that they permanently target French colonial commerce and its maritime connections with the West Indies. As Germany still had no fleet, navy planners circumvented the refusal of politicians by building auxiliary cruisers.

The private German shipping agencies German Lloyd and the Hamburg America Line also accommodated the government’s wishes for the design and outfitting of express steamers. When France, Austria-Hungary, Japan, and the United States joined this trend by 1890, an increasing number of private ships were built as if, one day, they would serve as warships in an imperial war fought far from home.⁹ The U.S.–Spanish war proved the underappreciated power of auxiliary ships in the Caribbean. The ethnic loyalty of private shipowners was enlisted to help, an imperial power far away from Europe.¹⁰

The French navy counted four hundred warships at that time. It was logical to attack and sink them wherever and however Germany could. Ethnic merchant ships could perform a considerable war function supported by supply stations. The context for the activities of ethnic merchants, therefore, changed. Such fear was based on fact, not cultural prejudice.

Also, other powers showed few qualms in using the same strategy. In 1877, Russia began to consider the use of merchant ships as auxiliary cruisers. Eventually, the tsar took the next step and built a state-owned merchant marine that could serve him in times of peace and war. Boundaries between trade ships, warships, and state-licensed pirate ships were blurred.

Contrary to popular belief, Japan and Latin America had experienced selective contact since the 1500s.¹¹ After 1845, along the Peruvian coast, a handful of Japanese traders lived a self-determined life. They earned a living as labor organizers for Chinese coolies and transported them across the Pacific to Callao, Peru.

In 1866, the Japanese crown gave Japanese commoners the legal right to leave their homeland. A tiny number of men took advantage of the opportunity. First, Japanese peasants left Japan in 1869, trying a life as settlers in California on the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony. The colony leaders experimented with imported mulberry trees, silk cocoons, tea plants, and bamboo roots. But the experiment failed.

The 1870 U.S. Census registered fifty-five Japanese. Ten years later, the number had doubled to 148.¹² These men lived private lives in a mixed ethnic context in the Americas and were not manipulated by the Japanese government.¹³

In 1877, nineteen-year-old sailor Manzo Nagano arrived in British Columbia and refused to sail home. Instead, he remained in the British colony and, for more than a decade, lived as the only individual Japanese on record in this northern part of the American continent. He made a living salmon fishing and longshoring. None of these independent lives were connected to international relations.

The imperial court in Tokyo, at that time, continued to brush aside all arguments in favor of a greater-Pacific design and insisted on a focus on gaining power in Korea on the Asian mainland. In 1874, Japanese gunboats were dispatched to Korean coastal waters. Six warships, in the ensuing Kangwah incident, forced the Korean emperor to agree to extraterritorial Japanese rights in Korea. This event marked the beginning of a century-long confrontation among Japan, China, and Russia over eastern Asia.

Unlike in Germany or Great Britain, there existed neither large numbers of Japanese merchants who traded globally nor a powerful Japanese navy that could help in the creation of a global Japanese imperial presence. In Tokyo, the emperor and his aristocratic clans remained content with building a great Pacific power. This meant confronting imperial Korea, China, and Russia. Aristocratic clans and bureaucratic advisers, however, did notice and study the lessons of European colonialism.

A few thinkers begged to differ and advocated a wider expansion across the Pacific. In 1876, Enemoto Takeaki suggested that Japan buy from imperial Spain the islands of the Marianas, Carolines, and Palau. A second idea was the creation of outposts for trade on newly acquired islands. A third one was to use islands to house convicts. Their prison labor would build bases and supply stations for a future navy and trading companies. In these visions, Japanese Pacific expansion was an effort to find space for those who should be cleansed from Japanese society. The creation of foreign markets for domestic industrial production and the establishment of outposts for the navy remained secondary.

These were precious years, when immigrants and immigrant communities pursued their own paths, inventing myriad ideas of what it meant to be ethnic in the Americas. All of them had come for personal reasons, not to serve as pawns in the international power plays of any colonial empire. Certainly, they were no security threat.

Before 1880, ethnic immigrants in the Americas defined their identity to a surprising degree without the involvement of the government of their country of origin. The imperial monarchies of Spain and Portugal were becoming too weak and the rising imperial monarchies of Germany, Japan, and Russia were not yet strong enough to reach across the oceans and define the lives and identities of ethnic communities.

Foreign elites invited Japan to expand farther than the Asian mainland into the western Pacific. In 1881, Hawaiian royalty invited a Japanese presence onto their islands to counter U.S. groups that wanted to annex the Hawaiian islands. The royal dynasty even proposed a Hawaiian–Japanese alliance based on marriage between Princess Kaiulan and the Japanese crown prince. Such a union was to create the base for a Japanese–Hawaiian Empire spanning from the middle of the Pacific to the Asian mainland. Together, Hawaii and Japan would reject Western annexation and its humiliating tools of unequal treaties and extraterritoriality.¹⁴

The Japanese court rejected it. Emigration had to remain limited to contract labor. Temporary emigration remained under state control. As long as laborers had to return to Japan, foreign governments could not argue that their presence was part of a hidden aggressive design to acquire colonies.

In the words of the U.S. historian Alan Takeo Moriyama, an ideal and unique form of government-sponsored emigration emerged: an orderly closely regulated system with protection, even interference from both governments involved. . . . [T]his form not only protected the emigrants but also maintained in international circles Japan’s image as a modern nation.¹⁵ It took until the early 1880s for the Japanese cabinet to link itself with ethnic movements toward the Americas. In this decade it warmed up to the idea of organizing Japanese citizens going abroad, but still only for a limited time.

Domestic social issues still drove this policy change, not desires for national territorial expansion. Nevertheless politicians assigned a new national purpose to the emigration of individuals. First, sending abroad single men as contract laborers offered a social safety valve, as well as the earnings of foreign currency incomes. Perhaps it would also alleviate domestic economic depression and relieve pressure coming from population growth.

The first military function of ethnic settlement emerged in one region. In Japan’s north, members of the samurai group colonized the northern islands of Hokkaido. Nationalists, in this move northward, were organized into a first settlement belt. Their presence was seen as a physical bulwark against southward imperial Russian expansion.

In 1885, the administrative chief of the Tokyo police, Yoko Tosaku, revived the idea to send Japanese convicts southward. Japanese prisoners could establish core settlements on Palau, Mindanao, the Carolines, and the Marshall Islands. Later these first settlements could develop into future trading outposts and navy refueling stations.¹⁶

In sum, the thinking about using ethnic settlements among Japanese political and bureaucratic elites was undergoing a major shift. Emigration now not only solved private hardship but also promised to be beneficial to the growing navy, traders, and domestic social policy makers. Japanese emigrants could no longer simply leave their country as workers. Japanese government policy increasingly tried its best to make their presence abroad serve the nation at home.

Lower-ranking Japanese politicians were the first to go one step further. They suggested that the presence of emigrants gave special rights to Japan. For example, in 1884, Suzuki Tsunenori took things into his own hands and acted as if he had political authority outside Japan. His government sent him to the Marshall Island Lae only to investigate the murder of a Japanese sailor. But once he arrived he went further and claimed the island for the emperor. Raising the Japanese flag on Lae, from Tokyo’s elite vantage point, endangered Japan’s official policy priorities of treaty revision and the removal of discriminating tariff rules.¹⁷ Not surprisingly, after Suzuki returned to Japan, the foreign minister sent him to Lae for a second time. This time his instruction was to pull down the flag, return to Tokyo, and resign from the foreign service.

The public face of Japan’s foreign policy had been preserved. Treaty revision and economic tariffs were more important than the acquisition of a small island. But superficial appearances hid a more complex reality.

Officially, Tokyo’s cabinet had distanced itself from Suzuki’s annexation. Privately, however, the foreign minister rewarded Suzuki by giving him a ship for the sole purpose of continuing his explorations of the southern Pacific. No further instructions were needed. Suzuki sailed back to the southern Pacific and lived as imperial explorer and travel writer, intensifying his advocacy of island annexation by the national government. Japanese navy leaders particularly appreciated his reports from the Southern Sea identifying first targets for future acquisitions. According to the German historian Wieland Wagner, the same texts would fuel expansionist southern fever in the 1920s.¹⁸

In the second half of the 1880s, the torch of expansion into the Pacific passed from individuals to traders, companies, and private organizations. Some of them were partially funded by the government, stopping short of political annexation. In 1885, the idea of a South Sea Society that would colonize the southern region of the mid-Pacific reemerged. In 1886, after imperial Spanish bureaucrats asked Tokyo for closer economic relations, Foreign Minister Inoue dispatched the Japanese consul of Hong Kong to explore the Spanish colonial business in the Philippines. He returned with reports of positive opportunities and the availability of land for peasants from the Kyushu region.¹⁹

In 1890, Taguchi Ukichi, Japan’s Adam Smith, encouraged politicians to occupy Pacific islands that were not yet controlled by Europeans through trade companies.²⁰ The U.S. historian John J. Stephan reminds us that a number of intellectuals, influenced by Social Darwinism and impressed by the European colonization of the Americas, Australia and Siberia played on paper with how Japan could expand overseas through emigration.²¹ These men interconnected emigration, trade, and imperial expansion.

In the end, Taguchi Ukichi moved from journalistic advocacy to action. The compensation funds for aging samurai financed the trading company Nanto Shokai from May 1890 on. This company dispatched schooners with goods to the area between Guam, Palau, and Ponape to build Japanese trade outposts. Now the presence of ethnic Japanese trade was to make permanent territorial acquisitions. Emigration was no longer just about temporary relief from domestic population pressure or the earning of national income through remittances. By 1880 ethnic Japanese emigration and the associated trade were two tools of imperial expansion in the Pacific. Japan had begun to rival Great Britain, Germany, France, and the United States.²²

Should Japanese imperialism expand only on the Asian Pacific side, or should it continue along the Pacific coasts of the Americas? And should ethnic Japanese settlers be used again to take over land? In 1889, as imperial Spain looked increasingly unable to hold on to the Philippines, Fukumoto Nichinan and Suganuma Teifu conducted a Japanese intelligence mission into the Spanish colony. Afterward they advocated annexation and the placement of emigrants to assure Japanese conquest.²³ In 1891, Oishi Masami went further and advocated crossing the Pacific. In 1893, Setzu Nagasawa pointed at the islands of Hawaii as a springboard for peaceful expansion.²⁴

But also foreign governments encouraged the contracting of Japanese laborers beyond Hawaii, to the United States, Australia, and Mexico. By then six hundred Japanese workers worked in the mines of French New Caledonia. After 1892, employers in Peru, India, Hong Kong, New Caledonia, Canada, and Brazil requested Japanese contract labor.²⁵

Suddenly Tokyo’s royal court reversed its stance and discouraged southern expansion. The zeal of independent expansionists was curbed, and the Asian mainland was reasserted as the priority expansion target. In May 1891 Enemoto Takeaki, a leading advocate of expansion through emigration, found his zeal curtailed as he was put in charge of an office inside the ministry.

Takeaki bucked the attempt to constrain him as a government official. He created an emigration office inside his ministry. His office insisted that emigration had to be aggressively useful to the nation while still prohibiting open territorial annexation. The U.S. historian Todd A. Henry explains this evolving type of overseas expansion:

In contrast to passive, North American–bound dekasegi emigration and aggressive colonial expansion aimed at the Asian continent, Enomoto Takeaki favored emigrant-led colonization, an assertive, yet peaceful method of overseas expansion. In the case of his 1890’s project to Mexico, this involved the acquisition of an informal colony on which to relocate Japanese settlers who would provide Japan with raw materials in exchange for its manufactured goods.²⁶

Takeaki prepared the ground for a more acquisitive Japanese presence in the Americas. He began by sending scouts to investigate living conditions and locations in the Philippines, Malaysia, New Hebrides, and Fiji. From there he ventured further to allow Japanese exploration of Latin America’s coastal territory.²⁷ In 1891, for 175 days, he accompanied four government surveyors to Mexico.²⁸ The men reported that Mexico offered positive living conditions. Soon thereafter, Mexico became an accepted location for future Japanese settlements.

Closer to Japan, Takeaki acted openly aggressive. In 1891, he annexed the island of Iwo Jima for the empire. In early 1892, he sent two navy ships to Manila, the Philippines. While the crews investigated settlement conditions, they also gathered intelligence about Spanish colonial fortifications.²⁹

Then, abruptly, in 1892, Takeaki’s service as foreign minister was terminated. Still, during his years in office he had demonstrated that emigration and territorial aggression could be two sides of one Japanese policy.

Even though the aggressive expansionist Enemoto Takeaki was out of office, the new government continued to fuse individual emigration with national interest. In 1894, Foreign Minister Munmitsus sent a secret mission to Australia to examine settlement locations and potential markets. The mission report encouraged trade expansion. In the same year workers were sent to Fiji to build a Japanese city far away from Japan.³⁰ Two years later trade with the Philippines was strengthened with the opening of a consulate. The presence of Japanese trade and ethnic settlers created dominance at a time when imperial Japan did not yet possess a navy strong enough to conquer Spanish colonial land through force.

Even Enemoto Takeaki reemerged in a semiofficial role. In February 1893, he founded the semiofficial immigration society Shokumin Kyokia. He explained its task: Emigration is urgent and must truly be a national policy of Japan. . . . This society is not satisfied with desk arguments only, it plans to carry the policy out by considering ways and means.³¹

The era when Japanese emigrants were merely poor individuals trying to eke out a living abroad was coming to a close. The action of Tokyo’s leaders destroyed the innocence of Japanese individuals living abroad. Takeaki sponsored a new, second expedition to Mexico. For 133 days its team investigated the southern states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas.³²

Mexican president Porfirio Díaz provided unexpected help, inviting emigrants to live in a settlement belt in a contested region with Guatemala. In 1894 the Japanese imperial diet officially declared Mexico as an approved emigrant destination. A first Japanese settlement was to open in the southwestern region of Soconusco, Mexico.

Finally, a third expedition brought the agricultural specialist Bunzo Hashiguchi to Mexico. His investigations included the strategic Tehuantepec Railroad.³³ Obviously these semiofficial explorations were never just curious adventurism but, in fact, the careful planning of ethnic settlements with special consideration to key strategic locations and access to navy and railroad connections. During times of peace this was only skillful development planning. In times of war, in an instant, such planning offered real strategic advantages.

A watershed in Japanese government behavior took place in 1894. The geographical focus of Japanese emigration changed after the Japanese navy defeated the larger Chinese imperial fleet.³⁴ Overnight China’s defeat allowed Japanese expansion into Taiwan, the Liaotung Peninsula of southern Manchuria, and the Pescadores Islands. The Chinese monarchy was humiliated through forced payments of significant indemnities and the imposition of an unequal commercial treaty.

For the first time, the Japanese monarchy controlled land in mainland Asia, making it possible to join in the similar colonial imperialism by British, Russian, French, German, and U.S. rivals. Once again, the potential settlement of areas in the southern Pacific and Mexico was less interesting. Future activities and the priority of Japan’s army, navy, and Foreign Ministry became absorbed with Asia.

Emigration to other continents received less government attention and was handed to private companies operating under a new 1894 emigration law. Now the government only set the parameters for these emigration companies and, in times of national crisis, reserved for itself the right to intervene.³⁵ From now on southward and cross-Pacific expansion was limited to the goals of emigration, trade, and indirect colonial acquisition.

Japanese emigration into North and South America became a business venture, which shuttled individuals across the Pacific with hardly any consideration for their personal welfare. Thirty emigration companies operated in Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and Sendai cities.³⁶ The first Japanese expansionary fever toward the western Pacific had receded.

Nevertheless, on the eastern realm of the Pacific, Japanese naval observers and Japanese military representatives stationed on Taiwan, closer to the Philippines, took a first step toward seeking permanent contact with anti-imperialist revolutionaries. Spanish queen regent Maria Christina’s position in the Philippines was undermined by Japanese soldiers. In Tokyo, between 1896 and 1898, low-level Japanese diplomats and intelligence agents of the army eagerly advocated in favor of support for anti-Spanish rebels. Japanese diplomats were in favor of expanding their activities from protecting trade and ethnic settlements to maintaining contact with revolutionaries.

Now, in 1896, it became feasible to think that in the not-too-distant future, this huge Spanish island archipelago could be divided among imperial competitors including Japan.³⁷ Already a few individuals took matters into their own hands.

First, Japanese nationalists Suganuma Teifu, Fukumoto Nichinan, Takatsu Goro, and Sugino Sotaro visited the islands to learn about the evolving situation. Second, the Japanese consul in Manila interacted with Andres Bonifacio of the Katipunan rebel group. Tagawa Moritaro, according to Saniel the oldest Japanese living in the Philippines, functioned as volunteer interpreter. Also the Japanese navy ship Kongo stopped in Manila in 1896, and Moritaro again worked as translator when officers talked with rebels.³⁸

Japanese interest was reciprocated. Soon thereafter Filipinos requested military support from Tokyo. One month before revolutionary fighting began in the Philippines, Bonifacio turned to Tagawa Moritaro, asking him to purchase Murata guns. In order to support the rebels with money, a civilian front organization was to be set up. Pretending to work for profit, this outfit would, in reality, earn money to buy arms for revolutionaries.

Now also, Japanese intelligence observed Philippine revolutionary activity. The Japanese General Staff in Taiwan processed incoming intelligence.³⁹

From Tokyo, the Imperial Household Agency sent Fukuba Itsuto to investigate the Spanish. More importantly, he performed his intelligence work in the archipelago while serving as president of the Japanese Citizen Association.⁴⁰ To say it differently, by 1897 diplomats, spies, and ethnic community coexisted in this geographic theater.

Philippine rebels, between 1896 and 1898, continued to do their utmost to secure official support from Tokyo. By 1897, Consul Sakamoto introduced a new reason for potential Japanese expansion in the Pacific, urging Tokyo to give in to rebel overtures. He favored support because, he thought, both sides shared a racial Philippine Japanese background against imperial Spain.

The chief of the general staff of the Taiwan military, Major General Tatsumi Naobumi, agreed and considered sending a military detachment to occupy Manila, at the same time as U.S. admiral Dewey was blockading the bay. In Tokyo’s military offices, cooler heads prevailed. Japan’s military leadership instructed the general in Taiwan: The control of the South Sea is an idea [to be achieved] in Japan’s national policy but today is an inopportune time. You must positively not meddle in war. While you maintain neutrality you must continue protecting the lives and property of the Japanese in Manila.⁴¹

The 1898 defeat of the Spanish fleet only intensified their efforts. The rebels wanted support from Tokyo, not just from some individuals and diplomats stationed in the local community. Saniel followed the story based on rebel biographies.

In August 1898, rebels requested to buy 600,000 yen worth of weapons from Tokyo. Jose Alejandrino, Faustino Lichauco, and Mariano Ponce negotiated in Tokyo.⁴² A Tokyo military department offered secret training to Filipino rebels. And yet the imperial government never backed the rebel movement in a decisive way.

To really appreciate the extent to which Japanese elites felt comfortable manipulating the longings of ethnic people, we need to close with a quick look at the official Japanese–Spanish relationship at that time. Japanese sympathy was not as clear-cut pro-Filipino as diplomats made rebels believe. The archives reveal that imperial Japan also assisted imperial Spain against the rebels. When the Spanish legation requested police surveillance of the Filipinos meeting in the Japanese capital, the government happily provided the requested support.⁴³ The Ministry of Interior observed Filipino rebels in Tokyo, and the Ministry of Finance inspected ships to stop possible weapons exports.

Eventually, Filipino rebels learned painfully about the manipulative extent of Japanese elite decision makers sympathy. On August 31, 1898, Teodoro Sand-iko had hand-carried a copy of a declaration of independence to the Japanese consul. But elites in Tokyo looked the other way and refused to recognize it.⁴⁴

In the end, in Paris, France, the imperial powers negotiated a diplomatic settlement about the Philippines’ future. In December 1898, the entire archipelago went to the United States. Right away, imperial Japan acquiesced to the conference’s decision, and remaining support for the rebels stopped.

Still, the Filipino revolution proved that by 1896 members of the Japanese army and navy had encouraged national liberation movements against other colonial powers in Asia. Japanese help could mean at least limited arms supplies and selective diplomatic encouragement but also the manipulation of themes of Asian racial brotherhood. Even worse, all these violations of sovereignty had been managed using the cover of ethnic Japanese communities.

2Becoming Useful

The First Japanese and German Experiments with Ethnic Manipulations in the West

Ethnic emigrants and their outlook on life did not change after 1880. However, waves of imperial rivalries changed the global political context of their presence abroad.

Policy makers in Berlin and Tokyo looked at ethnic communities in a new way. As Germany and Japan considered expansion, imperial rivalry suggested that they also consider using ethnic communities in the Americas as pawns in anticipation of potential acquisition moves. At first in Berlin there was merely debate over whether and how potential acquisitions could be brought about. An opportunity for territorial acquisition was not quite there yet.

In 1884, Bismarck reversed his categorical opposition to German colonialism overseas. In November 1884, he hosted in the German capital an international conference to lay the ground rules for the future of colonialism in Africa. Some German politicians looked already further, to Asia and the weak Spanish colony of the Philippines.

The British historian Sebastian Balfour proves that already in 1885, only a few months after the conference in Berlin and four years before the Spanish defeat in 1889 in Cuba, Germany above all had cast acquisitive eyes at Spanish possessions.¹ Bismarck even allowed a brief contest over ownership of the island of Yap in the Carolines archipelago. For true change, however, German imperialists had to wait until Bismarck left the German chancellery.

In 1888, Wilhelm II ascended to the German throne. Soon he clashed with Bismarck. The new emperor wanted to acquire colonies not just where Bismarck desired them, in Eastern Europe and Africa, but also in Asia and Latin America. Germany should be a world colonial power. As the months progressed the German emperor increasingly asserted himself and sided with the political faction pushing for a large German navy with global reach. Only such a fleet would guarantee a global German Empire.

By early 1890 the young emperor and the old chancellor could no longer work together constructively. On March 30, 1890, Bismarck resigned and was replaced by Leo von Caprivi as new German chancellor.²

Chancellor Caprivi, together with Prussian minister of trade Freiherr von Berlepsch, Marshall von Bieberstein, and Prussian minister of finance Miquel, immediately introduced a more differentiated stance as far as emigration and empire were concerned. In their view settlements in Latin America and Asia could at least offer an attractive alternative to the saturated German domestic market, even if German settlers would not yet be used as Trojan horses of imperialism. Furthermore, sending German exports to ethnic settlements abroad promised an effective way to circumvent growing tariff walls around the preferred U.S. market. For these men the German government should definitely reconnect with emigrants and, thereafter, maintain a permanent bond at the very least for the sake of the German economy.

Right away important government ministries and Hanseatic trade houses demanded an even stronger policy reorientation. The government should also lift its 1850s prohibition of company-organized emigration to Brazil. Against them argued diplomats from the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Interior, and associated Prussian ministries. A bureaucratic tug-of-war over emigration unfolded between supporters of overseas emigration and groups keen to affirm the exclusive emigration focus toward Eastern Europe. Wilhelm II favored the first group.

Wilhelm II proved himself to be politically erratic, untrustworthy, and dangerously irrational. Suddenly in November 1897, he ordered the seizure of the Chinese Kiachow region. Apparently, the order was based on his whim, given against the objections of German economic, military, and diplomatic circles. Decision making in this German Empire promised to be confused. Now that Bismarck was not centering policy, the emperor, the armed forces, diplomats, and even merchants might act for their particular interest but try to argue that it was the policy of an entire people.

Even worse, Wilhelm II rapidly resorted to secret treaties. For example, he guaranteed the tsar control over the Chinese city of Port Arthur. One year later, the German monarchy established its own formal, ninety-nine-year lease on the Shantung Peninsula.³ Against the background of these examples in Asia, who could rule out that one day something similar might occur in a failing Latin American republic or monarchy? Wilhelm II deserved to be treated with suspicion. German colonial policy stopped coming from a clear, rational decision-making process according to familiar imperial rules and, therefore, became dangerous.

In 1894, the head of the North German Lloyd Company, Adolph Woermann, had decided to travel to South America to further the interests of his global shipping business. He wanted to identify growing passenger routes. This partisan of emigration to Brazil returned to Germany in November 1895 with the news that southern Brazil was an ideal territory that could offer Wilhelm II’s monarchy an overflow territory for its increasing population pressures.

The details Woermann provided reassured skeptical Germans that a distinct colony could thrive in Brazil. In particular it required support to maintain their German language and culture. He emphatically advocated a change in emigration policy, plus state subsidies for shipping companies traveling to the Americas. Of course his shipping company would be a major benefactor of the renewed flow of emigrants to Brazil.

Next merchant Woermann joined navy enthusiasts and pushed for additional permanent German naval stations in Latin America. In the end, the emperor’s imperial adventurism, Woermann’s Hanseatic business drive, and rivaling bureaucratic policy priorities mustered enough joint pressure to bring about a reevaluation of the official prohibition of company-organized emigration to Brazil. The 1850 Heydtsche Reskript prohibition was about to be weakened.

The Brazil of the 1890s was very different from that of the 1850s. In November 1889 the Brazilian monarchy collapsed. Financial insiders of imperial politics understood that Dom Pedro had stumbled as much over the weak financing of his nation as over political questions. One voice encouraged scheming imperialists that the collapse had been un crise tant politique que financiere.⁴ Weak financing of a Portuguese American nation could become an Achilles heel, triggering a further disintegration of Brazil that could be manipulated for European imperial acquisitions with great ease.

Then the new, temporary Brazilian transition government called for renewed immigration from Germany. General Fonseca abolished the Brazilian monarchy and signed a provisional government decree on June 28, 1890, in favor of a more active immigration policy. Now that slavery had been prohibited, Brazilian politicians needed Europeans to work as plantation wage laborers, and they wanted European workers to staff a yet-to-be-created new industry. For that purpose the weak republic issued land concessions for 31 million hectares, to house 1.4 million people! It also offered funds for European shipping agencies able to carry large numbers of immigrants to Brazil. In 1891, a first republican constitution affirmed unrestrained, continued enthusiasm for immigration.

In 1896, Brazilian decision making about emigration moved from the central government to regional capitals. European imperialists understood that this could translate into a weakening of Brazil’s ability to resist future separatist fantasies. Thus the country became the priority target to explore what a distinct ethnic group of Germans could accomplish politically. This was normal thinking for the period, and protagonists could not imagine that World War I would soon wipe such paradigms away.

Local German voices from Brazil nurtured fantasies about an exclusive ethnic enclave. The new German diplomat, stationed in Petropolis, reported that Germans had developed a strong position in the states of Santa Catharina and Para. He insisted that they dominated the social and political processes of their states. For example, the city of Joinville was almost entirely in German hands.

Wilhelm II and other Germans wanted to see it as a possibility for domination. Wilhelm requested as soon as possible a report about the arrangements of immigration and other means for the strengthening of Germandom.⁵ Publicly, he continued to act the more restrained monarch.

Wilhelm’s blessing was sufficient to allow a new German government commission to constitute itself in 1896. It studied the resumption of government-supported emigration to Brazil. The surviving protocol of one of its session from April 4, 1896, offers a rare, authentic look at the thoughts and positions of the different factions.

Secretary of State von Buelow and Admiral Tirpitz emerged as strong and skilled supporters of the resumption of state-endorsed emigration. Unlike Japanese elite politicians in the 1880s, these German leaders wanted a deliberate social-political strategy attached to state-sponsored emigration to Brazil. Still, they had to make concessions.

Showing respect for Germans favoring the continued exclusivity of colonization of the stolen Polish areas, they agreed to limit emigration to Brazil to five hundred to one thousand emigrants per year. In case of national crisis they agreed that emigration to Brazil should stop altogether.

On the other hand, settlements in Brazil should be equipped with an institutional network that challenged assimilation. Operating a German church and a school was expected to reinforce cultural core assumptions and social identitybuilding rituals. They would maintain sufficient foundations for later political plans. Ethnic distinctiveness would be preserved until diplomatic or economic treaties, even a small marine landing, could force open imperial political boundaries into existence.

State Minister von Buelow confirmed a German position that wanted to see the glass half full: We have great interests in southern Brazil, if we can bring about such a settlement of modest proportions. With the necessary reservations then we would assure us a future without endangering our interests at home. Also his Majesty and the German chancellor are in favor of granting the concession.⁶ Next, Director Reichardt of the Foreign Ministry stated that supporters might soon build political hopes on local infrastructure projects in Brazil that seemed to move toward project initiation:

His Majesty had expressed general sympathy for the endeavor, plus reinforced his interest by committing this company to the projected figures. Recently he has inquired about the matter. In essence the society is nothing else than a further development of the old Hamburg Colonization Club. A refusal of the concession would mean not only the ruin of this colonization company, but also future German interests. In Hamburg a railroad enterprise for Southern Brazil was in the planning phase, and, in Southern Germany, Count Furstenberg and other magnates had raised a capital of RM 15,000,000 in order to support railroads and other enterprises in southern Brazil. These efforts undertaken by strong capital interests were very encouraging in order to counter English influence and in order to further interest circles in Germany.

Another participant revealed details about deeper German motivations in Brazil. Brazilian leaders had been presented with demands for an informal colony: We wanted to have a terrain where German peasants were already settled and the climate would help German workers. For this purpose the provinces of Santa Catharina, Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná appeared suitable. At that time the general Postmaster of Brazil had come [to Germany] in order to negotiate. It is critical to realize that already Germans had demanded extraterritorial rights from the Brazilians. Extraterritoriality was the essence of an informal colony. Here is a summary of past demands:

The [Brazilian] General Postmaster stated that he personally was . . . quite open to the matter but he could not give the right [to Germany] to have its own legal system [Gerichtsbarkeit] and colonial security system. This was the reason why negotiations failed previously. Today such a guarantee still has not been offered. The Brazilians are half wild and the Germans are threatened with losses.

Now, in 1896, pro-imperial factions wanted to ask for guarantees for the independence of evolving German communities for a second time. This also included the use of a potential German fleet to conduct gunboat diplomacy if only to prevent mismanagement by the Brazilians. State Minister von Buelow interrupted and agreed that

it was . . . . necessary to assure guarantees for the Germans in Brazil. However, the best guarantee would remain first a strong navy and, second, that the German element in Brazil would live as compact as possible. Then the Brazilian government would not dare to move too close to the Germans. Already during the last civil war, they [Germans] had formed their own regiments and brigades, it is in our interest not to stop the movement of Germans.

Buelow knew that the Brazilian central government was weak. Therefore his advocacy of a strong ethnic German block in the state of Santa Catharina was justified publicly merely as a defensive measure against indigenous people. The German element was to face the indigenous people as compact as possible.

The German navy included southern Brazil in its contingency planning. In 1897, plans outlined the mobilization of a small naval force to threaten gunboat diplomacy against the Brazilian nation or a smaller Brazilian state. Such action was not as farfetched as it might sound. Already in 1871, on the first leg of its world cruise, the German Nymph put in at Rio de Janeiro to support a German merchant and to protest the Brazilian government’s behavior toward a local German consul. The plan in 1897 went further and considered a temporary occupation of parts of southern Brazil. What Brazilian navy could confront such a group of German ships? Would U.S., British, or French boats seriously have traveled to the area to repel a small German group of ships at the Brazil coastline? It is highly doubtful.

One month later the government commission agreed to find a compromise solution that placated supporters of emigration to the Polish territories. The resumption of emigration to Brazil was opened only in principle and would depend on case-by-case approval. On June 4, 1896, the Royal State Ministry adopted the commission’s suggestion and signed a decree on July 30. From 1897 on, the German chancellor had the right to grant new concessions in Brazil, tied to the approval of the national council.⁷

1. As German government members reengaged with Brazilian German communities in 1897 they hoped that they could connect with independent regional immigrant economies and cultures (Ibero Amerikanisches Institut, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Bildarchiv, Berlin).

As soon as company emigration was allowed again the Hansa colonization company invested 1,500,000 RM in 1896. This amount included payments to the Brazilian government and territorial rights over 650,000 hectares of jungle in Santa Catharina. In the future this land could be divided into twenty thousand lots, with 25 hectares for each farmer and 1.5 family members. To say it differently, in theory fifty thousand German settlers could try not to assimilate on preplanned agricultural plots in southern Brazil. The initial projection for first-year emigration to cross the Atlantic was one thousand individuals. In the years thereafter the number was expected to increase. In the end this process would have an altogether unexpected end, brought about by average German people. However, German aristocratic and business elites proceeded to keep the door open for a future opportunity to acquire parts of Brazil. That commoners might not play along never occurred to them.

Von Buelow moved up in the German government in 1897 and became the German secretary of foreign affairs. Whereas Wilhelm II was impulsive in exploiting opportunities, von Buelow was highly intelligent and had his impulses under control. He preferred to wait until realistic opportunities offered themselves for exploitation. He had worked as secretary at the 1884 Africa conference in Berlin. There he witnessed firsthand how imperial powers could add and subtract continents and peoples, disregarding entirely the fates of individuals.

One lesson he observed was that, under the right circumstances, British politicians would be willing to engage in secret temporary alliances with Germany. The exploitation of such opportunities could translate into territorial gain for German imperialism anywhere in the world.

Case in point were secret negotiations between Great Britain and Germany in the very same year of 1897. Germans talked about Brazil while the wrecking and future division of Portugal’s colonies were preplanned in much greater detail. Namibia and Angola were separated from Brazil only by a short moderate ocean passage. Until today these British–German agreements about Portuguese Africa remain out of most history books, and therefore a key case of the dangerous secret opportunistic policy that German leaders were willing to engage in, in 1897, continues to be unmentioned.

The Portuguese colonial empire was expected to collapse in the very near future. Experts of its financial health had learned that Portugal, if it wanted to remain a colonial power, needed drastic financial reform of its national budget. Otherwise immediate bankruptcy would endanger the government in Lisbon. This meant that Portugal and its colonies would fall under international receivership. Until today historians of this period miss the significance of the Portuguese case as inspiration of what could happen in Portuguese America. Buelow’s world political knowledge was excellent, and he understood the analogy between Portugal and Brazil. As Great Britain and Germany proceeded to divide Portugal’s African colonies, the national security context of ethnic settlement in Brazil was obvious.

In 1898, while the future of Spanish possessions in Asia and the Caribbean was decided by the new force of modern naval power, the future of Portuguese colonies was supposed to be changed using loan guarantees. First the British alone were using finance diplomacy to force concessions from the Portuguese. From May to June 1898, while the U.S. navy fought the Spanish, Portugal’s diplomat Soveral negotiated with British diplomat Chamberlain. The talks failed to establish a loan agreement that would bail out Portugal. Great Britain, Portugal’s traditional political protector but also manipulator, was not willing to offer an easy way out. Portuguese leaders were not receiving relief, and Portuguese colonies might be up for redistribution earlier than assumed.⁸ And what repercussions would a collapse of Portugal have for Brazil?

2. Under the right international political circumstances, Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Buelow would have attempted to impose German imperialism over Brazil. They failed to materialize during his tenure (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

In 1898, most of Spain’s colonial territory was taken away. The ensuing imperial distribution demonstrated that Germany would insist on and gain at least minor territory, even as part of a diplomatic settlement.

This process, unfolding between 1898 and 1910, offered select ethnic communities located across the globe as a less perfect but workable base for a new role. Now that imperial planners had to make the move from grandiose royal expansion toward creating pragmatic support organizations for twentieth-century navies, the needs of modern naval technology urged the use of ethnic communities as a minor war support organization.

More precisely, dramatic geopolitical shifts during 1898 were creating a new understanding of national security. The esteemed U.S. historian Akira Iriye defines the paradigm shift:

What characterized the decades after the 1880s was a new conception of national security. Colonies overseas, naval-based spheres of influence and particularistic concessions began to play vital roles in a country’s defense system. They, as well as rapid industrialization and armament at home, were indexes of power, their retention and extension were considered to contribute to the security and strengthening of the mother country. It was no accident that during this period foreign policy was strongly determined by, if not identical with, military policy.⁹

New possibilities for how global naval battles could be fought forced honor-bound aristocrats to conceive of imperial rivalries in a new way. First, the conversion of navies from wind to steam power made the construction of larger battleships possible. More importantly, coal-producing steam power allowed for the first time naval battles at any location in the world, relatively unimpeded by weather conditions. Naval battles could be fought wherever admirals chose.

There remained only one, critical limitation; coal-fueled navies required coaling stations across the world. Without dependable refueling capacities, imperial navies could neither engage their rivals nor defend their colonies. Suddenly, in the 1880s only empires with colonies enjoyed an unquestioned right to maintain a coaling station. Imperial Great Britain and France, owning colonies stretching from Europe to Asia, were simply lucky. In contrast, Germany and Japan lacked colonies at the right geopolitical locations to be helpful to their navies. They still had to acquire them or become dependent on the conditional tolerance of imperial rivals. What if a sympathetic ethnic community was located just off major naval shipping lanes?

Then there were colonial empires that had colonies for refueling but lacked access to modern naval technology. Planners in Madrid and Lisbon might fix their budgets, but they wondered how they could create a convincing global military presence as their agricultural empires failed to provide the funds to pay for modern naval technology. Also naval planners in Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo found their national territory poorly positioned as they projected their desires for more global power into the twentieth century.

These global naval environment changes were a simple fact, unalterable by monarchic family connections, religious convictions, or secret European diplomacy. Technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century were giving birth to a new aristocracy of technocrats whose demands required attention. Imperialists who discounted the new demands of technology could be swiftly pushed out of continents, literally within months.

On the very same day that the Spanish–American War ended, on August 31, 1898, the British diplomat Balfour informed the Portuguese diplomat Soveral about the possibility of a loan for Portugal’s southern African colonies. Most importantly, it included British openness to enter into a German–English agreement about the future of Portuguese colonies, in case Portugal would collapse. A joint British–German loan extended to a bankrupt Portugal would end its financial sovereignty in Africa. In this joint imperial move the power of finance would be the tool to open