Why weren’t Germany and Italy as aggressive in overseas colonization compared to countries like Britain, France, Portugal and Spain?
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Aside from their political differences, geographically they are not positioned well for overseas conquering. Germany has a sliver of eastern facing shoreline. Italy has to squeeze through the Gibraltar straight, and that’s assuming the ships get that far. The Mediterranean Sea is surprisingly unforgiving.
Well because Germany and Italy are relatively young nations only forming in the later part of the 19th century. At that point most colonization was already done by others.
Well the main problem was that germany and italy didn’t exist at the time, they weren’t united countries. But there were smaller powers within what we now call ‘germany’ and ‘italy’. The venetians for example controlled a small maritime empire in the Mediterranean – why didn’t they sail out and grab some of the Carribean? Well, most of their money was coming from the spice trade out of Alexandria and across the Mediterranean, so they just weren’t interested. And there were Germans who were part of the early rush of colonization – in 1526 the Holy Roman Emperor (who was also the King of Spain) invited south German merchants to colonize parts of Venezuela. It just didn’t end up going very well.
But that last note kind of points to a bigger reason why some countries colonized the new world and some didn’t – it was an extremely risky prospect that frequently failed. The countries that succeeded had the resources to throw at it (and no more sure prospects to send those resources to instead.) For example the Duchy of Tuscany attempted to create a colony in present-day French Guiana, but it failed, and the Knights Hospitaller of Malta attempted to colonize the Antilles. The Danish also had a colony that was moderately successful in the Virgin Islands, but wasn’t successful enough, apparently, to lead to more colonies. And famously the independent Kingdom of Scotland invested hugely in a scheme to establish New Caledonia in Panama, which went very poorly indeed
“Italy” was once *Empire of Rome*. The very dictionary defintion of “colonization”. By Exploration Age, both countries were busy actually forming a proper nationstate from their quadrillion citystates and feudal subjects, so adding more migration problems weren’t as high on their list. Late 19th century was also quite busy with new wave of industrialization, building infrastructure – electric lines, railways and telegraph poles, schooling workforce and inventing technology ate all sorts of budgets.
When they did start to show interest in overseas riches, it was a bit too late already; most of the stuff was claimed.
Which they responded to about 50 years later with massive World Wars.
Both Germany and Italy only became nations during in the 19th century. Both actually had their unification in 1871.
They both tried to get in on the colonization game, but at that point all the “good stuff” was already taken.
They both did manage to commit some crimes against humanity and stole some land while they were at it, but it was hard to catch up the great powers with their head start.
There were also some sane people like Bismarck in Germany who didn’t oppose colonization on moral grounds but though that it would not be worth the cost and effort to exploit them and that much of it was just useless vanity.
Germany famously traded Zanzibar for Heligoland with the British because they felt that the smaller island close to Germany’s shores was worth more than the bigger far away African island.
Unfortunately sanity did not prevail and the German Kaiser eventually decided that he needed his place in the sun (i.e. colonies) and that was one of the major contributing factors that led to WWI.
Germany as a unified nation didn’t exist until after 1871. Up until then t was a bunch of smaller, mostly independent nations. That only changed after Prussia conquered the northern half of what would become Germany. Then France invaded Prussia and the south German States joined in to thoroughly curbstomp Napoleon III
International trade. The colonization wasn’t the objective, instead it was a by-product of securing international trade routes ports and other assets. Britain was in India via the East India company who took over the various small states in India and merged them into a large colony and put in place an army to keep it all in order, it was only later that it was added to the empire.
In addition to the comments already stated, in Italy’s case, they were, for lack of a better way to describe it, really bad at invading. It took them two wars to colonize Ethiopia, with the first one taking them nearly two years and they still lost. Ethiopia managed to keep their independence until 1935, and even then occupation only lasted almost as long as WWII before they got the boot as the war neared it’s end.
Ummm… Why is everyone ignoring that Germany perpetrated a genocide in Tanzania and another one in Namibia?
It’s objectively not true that they weren’t as aggressive.
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