Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

Hanseatic Networks in Tropical Markets
ership role came in 1859, when it dispatched three warships to East
Asia to secure trade treaties with Japan and China on behalf of the
German Customs Union. Unwilling to be left out of the new commercial
opportunities, the governments of all three Hanseatic cities
delegated to the Prussian envoy, Count Eulenberg, the authority to
negotiate on their behalf. 80
In the years that followed the establishment of the North German
Confederation in 1867, a small but influential group of merchants
began to speak out in favour of a Prussian-led national navy capable
of defending German commercial interests overseas. Hanseatic merchants
operating in West Africa and the Pacific stressed the need for
a more permanent government presence in parts of the world that
lacked a basic sense of Western law and order or respect for international
treaties. In September 1872, the Hamburg Senate petitioned
Bismarck for additional naval patrols along the West African coast in
support of the their citizens’ commercial investments. Because of the
lack of a central political authority in the Cameroon River basin, the
petitioners wrote, ‘German trade and security of German property is
fully dependent on the good graces of the native kings and their
power to restrain the thieving lusts of their subjects’. 81 At least one
German ship that had been beached to repair a serious leak had been
plundered by natives, despite the friendly relationship that the merchants
enjoyed with the local king. The only long-term solution, the
Senate argued, was to follow the model of other European states and
dispatch warships to the area to punish local communities for attacks
on their citizens’ lives and property:
80 Bradley Naranch, ‘Made in China: Austro-Prussian Overseas Rivalry and
the Global Unification of the German Nation’, Australian Journal of Politics and
History, 56/3 (2010), 366–80; Anton Berg (ed.), Die Preussische Expedition nach
Ost-Asien: Nach Amtlichen Quellen, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1864–73); Bernd Martin,
Japan and Germany in the Modern World (Providence, RI, 1995), 3–16; Michael
Salewski, ‘Die Preu ssi sche Expedition nach Japan 1859–1861’, Revue Inter -
nationale D’histoire Mili taire, 70 (1988), 39–58; Frank Suffa-Friedel, ‘Die
Preussische Expedition nach Ost asien: Verhandlungen, Verzögerungen und
Ver trags abschluss’, in Kuo Heng-Yü (ed.), Berlin und China: Dreihundert Jahre
wechselvolle Beziehungen (Berlin, 1987), 57–70; Stoecker, Deutschland und China,
49–61; Holmer Stahncke, Die diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland
und Japan 1854–1868 (Stuttgart, 1987).
81 Senate of the Free City of Hamburg to Bismarck, 30 Sept. 1872, Bun des -
archiv Freiburg (hereafter BAF) RM 1/2403, 3–4.
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