Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

BRADLEY D. NARANCH
Only those nations that dispatch warships along the coast, like
the English or French, or that have permanent naval stations,
like the Dutch and Spanish, enjoy sufficient protection, while
Germans go without. Moreover, they are mocked by the other
Europeans, who derisively inquire about the protective powers
of the ‘mighty German Empire’, which in turn has an effect
on the attitude of the natives. 82
A similar combination of national vulnerability and racial anxiety
characterized requests by the Godeffroy trading company operating
in the South Pacific for the dispatch of German warships to the
region. 83 Only the permanent presence of naval power would establish
a credible threat of retribution amongst the natives, the company
wrote in 1873, ‘to afford the German flag the necessary attention, not
momentarily but for the long run’. 84 Less than a decade after these
petitions were filed, Hanseatic merchants with personal investments
in tropical markets formed a coalition. A key member of this coalition
was the merchant and shipping magnate, Adolf Woermann.
Woermann became the head of his family’s business in 1880, the
same year that he entered the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce. As
a young man, he had travelled widely in East Asia, the United States,
and West Africa, but he also displayed a pronounced inclination to -
wards national politics, later serving as a National Liberal Reichstag
deputy from 1884 to 1890, when he was defeated by a Social Demo -
cratic challenger. 85 Woermann soon gained Bismarck’s confidence as
a leading expert on German commercial influence in the region.
With the support of H. H. Meier, the Bremen director of the North
German Lloyd, Woermann and his allies helped to shift the balance
of power among the various factions of the colonial movement
towards limited government intervention in selected tropical locations
and away from the ambitious colonial settlement schemes of
empire-building favoured by many members, but which had long
82 Ibid. 4.
83 Schramm, Deutschland und Übersee, 81–6.
84 Godeffroy & Son to the Imperial Admiralty, 1 Aug. 1873, BAF RM 1/2403,
7–8.
85 Washausen, Hamburg und die Kolonialpolitk, 69, 164.
128