In his memoirs, published in 1919, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the former Secretary of the Navy and architect of the Wilhelmine battle fleet, claimed that it had been his great “fortune” in 1896 to receive a naval command abroad. Deployed to East Asia, he had been able to “take yet another look at the overseas interests of Germandom” right before the “takeover of the Imperial Naval Office and the inception of the naval buildup.” Appointed in late March 1896, Tirpitz commanded the East Asian Cruiser Division until he was summoned back to Berlin twelve months later, on March 31, 1897. He had returned home “with the impression that England sought to block as much as possible our future development,” as he characterized the main lesson he claimed to have learned during the months he spent away from Germany.Footnote ¹

In what follows, I explore the ways in which Tirpitz's tour of service in the Far East, as well as his journeys across the United States on his way to and from China, helped to shape his view of the world and his subsequent pursuit of maritime force and global power as Navy Secretary. In particular, I will suggest that Tirpitz's thinking about the direction of global politics, the pursuits of other large empires, and his own country's future as a world power in the twentieth century was profoundly influenced by his firsthand exposure to the competitive politics of empire on the ground and his direct observations of other great powers overseas. Far from offering a mere validation of ideas that already existed, overseas travel and encounters, I claim, proved intellectually productive. This was the case even as Tirpitz's thinking in 1896–97 (and beyond) directly built on previously held views and ideas, which, by mid-decade, had already congealed into a larger universe of military-operational, geostrategic, and national-imperial thought.

I present my analysis of the intellectual impact of Tirpitz's overseas command, his first trip beyond European waters, in pursuit of two broader historiographic goals. Bringing in what Tirpitz himself called an “East Asian perspective” in a letter he wrote in January 1897, I offer a fresh look at the expansionist thought that drove Wilhelmine naval expansion after 1897, in contrast to its underlying military-operational paradigm, which in the case of Tirpitz had taken its definite formulation well in advance of his transoceanic sojourn.Footnote ² I will broaden the frame of historical analysis by drawing attention to overseas spaces, the Far East as well as North America, and the inter-imperial conversations and global perspectives they fostered, as one crucible among several in which Tirpitz's ideas about large empires and German world power were made.

Strikingly, the vast scholarship on the Wilhelmine navy has paid remarkably little attention to the period of time Tirpitz spent overseas in 1896–97, except in literature treating the run-up to the seizure of Kiaochow (pinyin: Jiaozhou) as a German colony.Footnote ³ From Volker R. Berghahn to Rolf Hobson, Michael Epkenhans, and, most recently, Patrick Kelly, historians of Tirpitz and Wilhelmine battleship building have treated the future Secretary of the Navy's travel overseas as a brief and inconsequential interlude.Footnote ⁴ Such neglect is indicative of existing metro-centric interpretations of the origins and rationales of the German naval buildup. It suits those analyses that emphasize the primacy of domestic origins, casting Tirpitz as either a social imperialist or a bureaucratic empire builder. But the same neglect has also cast a long shadow on the work of scholars who have taken the navy's expansionist ideology more seriously. Adopting a strictly metropolitan point of view, they locate this set of beliefs in broad national or international ideological formations by emphasizing the influence on Tirpitz's thought of individual thinkers, such as the German Heinrich von Treitschke or the American Alfred Thayer Mahan, or of broader currents such as Social Darwinism. In the case of Mahan or Darwinism, authors have emphasized books in motion, without considering Tirpitz's own travels abroad and their significance.

By offering a case study of a key figure of the Wilhelmine elite that adds another layer to previous metro-centric narratives of his thought, I then contribute to the writing of new imperial and global histories of modern Germany that explore how particular historical actors have “constructed, analyzed, and contested the links that the flow of images, goods, and people forged between Germany and the world,” in historian Uta Poiger's words.Footnote ⁵ Here I present an analysis of the relationship between imperial centers and peripheries in a globalizing world, which connects a metropolitan policy maker (who lent meaning to, and acted on, the expansionist efforts and global entanglements of his nation-state) to his actual overseas experience of global empire and the opportunity it provided him to observe and compare other great powers on a global scale.

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Rear Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz received orders to take command of the East Asian Cruiser Division on March 31, 1896. He left Hamburg on May 2. About six weeks later, on June 13, he assumed actual command of his force in Far Eastern waters off the Chinese coast, having crossed the Atlantic; traversed the United States via New York, Chicago, and San Francisco; and journeyed across the Pacific via Hawaii and Japan. In subsequent months, the admiral cruised the Chinese Seas and visited numerous locations on and off the coast, including Bejing, the imperial capital. He also went on a special trip to Vladivostok, the center of the Russian Far Eastern position; made an extended visit of Japan; and undertook a brief end-of-year excursion to the Philippines. Tirpitz then spent most of January, February, and March in Hong Kong, which he had already visited the previous fall. Called back to Germany on March 31, 1897, Tirpitz relinquished his command in mid-April off the Japanese coast. He then took his time returning to Germany via North America. He arrived back in Berlin on June 8, 1897, to become Secretary of the Navy seven days later.Footnote ⁶

As the commanding officer of the East Asian Cruiser Division, Tirpitz took the front seat in German gun boat diplomacy in the Far East, a diplomacy that traced its lineage back at least as far as the Prussian Far East Asian expedition of 1859–62.Footnote ⁷ While tasked with the representation of German interests in the region and the operational readiness of his squadron, Tirpitz was also assigned a specific mission that moved to center stage: finally to resolve the East Asian Stützpunktfrage, the issue of a German naval base on the Chinese coast. “From Berlin I took with me the task,” Tirpitz explained in his memoirs, “to choose a place on the Chinese Coast where Germany could establish an economic-military base.”Footnote ⁸

The issue of a Far Eastern naval base had occupied the minds of the German Empire and the leadership of the Foreign Office and Navy ever since the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, the geopolitical event that served as a catalyst for a highly activist German quest for empire in China.Footnote ⁹ Without reaching any agreement among themselves or with the Foreign Office on the exact location, navy leaders had stated a clear interest in providing Germany with a territorial foothold in China in the form of one or two military colonies, ideally one in northern China and one further south. Their purpose was to anchor the German pursuit of economic interest and imperial influence in a disintegrating Chinese empire, and, more specifically, to provide an infrastructure for the operations of German naval forces in the region, which otherwise depended entirely on foreign logistical support and dockyard facilities.Footnote ¹⁰

In pursuing military empire in the Far East in the mid-1890s, all involved navy leaders imagined Germany as a full-fledged global empire in the making. They wanted their country to pursue a forceful “world policy that rested on the proper appreciation of the future life requirements of the German people” and to “secure, in time, its claims to a part of China and establish its sphere of interest like the other powers,” as one memorandum authored by a navy captain put it in spring 1896.Footnote ¹¹ They also agreed that mercantile considerations should play an important role in the selection of a proper locale for a naval base. They envisioned this base as a military colony that would itself become a key center of economic activity and had immediate value for the extension of German commerce and trade in the region.Footnote ¹²

Tirpitz's role in the selection and subsequent seizure of a German military colony is an oft-told story. Yet it is also not fully understood. According to the standard narrative, which echoes the Navy Secretary's own account in his memoirs, a dynamic Tirpitz rose to the challenge of selecting the proper location of a German naval colony in China. He forcefully identified Kiaochow and asserted its superior qualities against its detractors, thus paving the way toward its seizure in late 1897 when Tirpitz served as Navy Secretary in Berlin.Footnote ¹³ Such a view is misleading. While Tirpitz initially made the case for Kiaochow, he wavered in his support of it and eventually suggested a different solution, as his personal correspondence and official reports clearly show. In fact, by December 1896, Tirpitz's search for a proper imperial position had reached an impasse, with the admiral expressing great concern about the prospects of any German colonial schemes in the Far East in general. This development, in turn, was a direct product of Tirpitz's encounters with and fast-developing views on other large powers and the politics of empire in China. To appreciate the shift in Tirpitz's thinking about Kiaochow and Germany's imperial options in China is to begin to understand what Tirpitz learned during his overseas command and the lessons he took home from it.

No doubt, Tirpitz did help to redirect the navy's attention toward Kiaochow as a possible site for a German military colony when it had previously been eliminated from further consideration. Originally, Tirpitz had been expected to make his choice among three other possible sites: the island of Amoy in Fukien, the Chusan Islands, and Samsah Bay, each of which had found different champions among navy leaders.Footnote ¹⁴ But the first official report on the entire Stützpunktfrage that Tirpitz submitted in September 1896 made the case for Kiaochow and proved instrumental in shaping successive decisions in November and early December by the Naval High Command and the Emperor to focus attention on this site (even as Wilhelm II proved his erratic self and, at the end of November, briefly ordered the seizure of a different location, Amoy, to Tirpitz's great annoyance).Footnote ¹⁵ Combining economic, strategic, and geographic considerations, Tirpitz's report had presented Kiaochow as an ideal Stützpunktkolonie in northern China. This presentation had heavily leaned on the writings of German geographer and geologist Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen, a participant in the aforementioned Prussian Far Eastern Expedition who, in 1882, had offered an extensive analysis of the economic potential of the Shantung province and the developmental promise of a first-rate harbor in Kiaochow.Footnote ¹⁶

In the summer and fall of 1896, Tirpitz pursued the Kiaochow option with great energy. He insisted on its promise in the face of the repeated objections of Baron von Heyking, the top German diplomatic representative in China. In mid-September the admiral took the initiative to visit Vladivostok with the express purpose of finding out for himself whether Imperial Russian policy makers considered Kiaochow part of their sphere of influence and would object to any German scheme of acquisition.Footnote ¹⁷ The notion of a prior Russian claim and interest, as other navy leaders had previously stated and then again Heyking in 1896, had been central to the case against Kiaochow.Footnote ¹⁸ In his report from early September Tirpitz had already done away with the other main objection by suggesting that, contrary to prior assessments, Kiaochow Bay remained ice free throughout the winter.Footnote ¹⁹

Yet Tirpitz did not offer unequivocal support for the seizure of Kiaochow. In his September report, he emphasized the need to investigate other places and stressed the preliminary quality of his findings and suggested further investigation.Footnote ²⁰ In his second (and final) formal report on the base issue, from early December 1896, the admiral simply wrote off Kiaochow as a possible site for a military colony. He did so by referencing press reports that the Russian Empire had struck a deal with China concerning the bay. According to Tirpitz, it did not matter whether these particular reports were actually true; either way, the Russians considered Kiaochow and its surroundings part of their sphere of interest. Instead, he now suggested that the German Empire ought to consider the port of Wusung near Shanghai (or, as a second choice, a location on the Chusan islands) as a colonial holding. This choice was meant to be part of a larger strategy that focused on the broadest possible promotion of German economic interests in the Yangzi River Valley, the region he defined as the core area of German imperial interest in China: “If we really want something big here, we have to steer all of our efforts in that direction,” summarized Tirpitz.Footnote ²¹ In fact, from the beginning, Tirpitz had identified this valley as the ultimate area of German interest and emphasized that its openness, its “neutrality” in terms of inter-imperial competition, would be essential for any German imperial action in Kiaochow.Footnote ²²

Tirpitz did not subsequently change his mind on Kiaochow even as the navy's top policy makers at home began to view this location as their top choice for a military colony and were not swayed by the conclusions of Tirpitz's December report.Footnote ²³ In late December, for example, Tirpitz no longer mentioned Kiaochow as a serious possibility to consider when he discussed German options in a letter to Heyking.Footnote ²⁴ In mid-January 1897, Tirpitz explicitly distanced himself from the conclusions of his September report and reinterpreted its support of Kiaochow. He expressed his “surprise” that Admiral Gustav von Senden-Bibran considered him an ardent supporter of Kiaochow when, in fact, he, Tirpitz, had merely suggested back in September that the navy not cross it off the list of possible locations and ask him to conduct further investigations. Tirpitz also intimated that it had been the catastrophic loss of the ship initially dispatched by him to survey the Kiaochow Bay that had prompted him to send a first premature report and emphasize the potential suitability of Kiaochow.Footnote ²⁵

In fact, by the winter of 1896–97, Tirpitz's entire outlook had grown pessimistic. Going well beyond his change of opinion concerning the locale of a German colony, the admiral voiced considerable skepticism concerning the possibility that Germany could seize any colony in the present or (near) future. Germany, he claimed, stood too much on the margins of the geopolitics of war and empire in the Far East. In his December report, he openly acknowledged that the establishment of a settlement in Wusung or the seizure of a place on the Chusan Islands was probably not feasible as it could prompt the British Empire to seize the Yangzi Valley and thus put an end to any meaningful German aspirations in China.Footnote ²⁶ In late December, the rear admiral offered the same pessimistic analysis in this regard and signaled his acceptance of the idea of a naval colony on Amoy as the only remaining option. Significantly, this was an option he had previously consistently advised against taking; it had little economic value, he had insisted, and its seizure was bound to serve as a dead end to any more far-reaching German expansionist dreams in China.Footnote ²⁷ In mid-January Tirpitz counseled that Germany needed to claim influence aggressively anywhere in China eventually to gain something in return, even if it was an unattractive location.Footnote ²⁸

This shift in thinking took place as the German search for a naval base stalled. By the end of December, negotiations with China over the possible acceptance of a German seizure of a colony in Kiaochow (or, for that matter, elsewhere) had faltered. German diplomats had also failed to ascertain how the Russian government would respond to German action in the Shantung province. By January the entire Stützpunktfrage was put on hold in Berlin after navy leaders had previously developed a concrete plan for the occupation of Kiaochow, drawing on the scheme outlined in Tirpitz's September report. The Emperor and navy leaders decided to await the results of further diplomatic negotiations and another survey of possible sites, to be conducted by noted naval engineer Georg Franzius, who arrived in China in mid-February and who eventually confirmed Tirpitz's initial favorable assessment of Kiaochow in a final report submitted in summer 1897.Footnote ²⁹ Tirpitz, in turn, happily accepted the decision temporarily to halt the search for a naval base; in January, he informed his superiors that he was not pursuing the base issue any further without new instructions from his superiors in Berlin.Footnote ³⁰

Strikingly, Tirpitz stuck to his guns after his departure from East Asia. In fall 1897, the newly ensconced Secretary of the Navy took a backseat in the seizure of Kiaochow. In fact, Tirpitz repeatedly went on record as a critic of any direct military action in China and suggested that the German Empire back off. He did so in early October when Rear Admiral Otto von Diederichs, his successor as commander of the East Asian Cruiser Division, suggested sending ships to Kiaochow Bay for gunnery practice and leaving at least one ship there over the winter to lay the groundwork for a subsequent seizure. In the following weeks, Tirpitz spoke out against Diederichs's proposals to use assaults on German officers in Wuchang and then the murder of German missionaries in the Shantung province as pretexts for the conquest of Kiaochow and its hinterland as a colony. In early November, the Navy Secretary tried, in vain, to put a stop to the occupation of Kiaochow Bay and forestall any proclamation of its formal takeover, before officially agreeing to it on November 15. And well into December, Tirpitz raised the possibility that the Germans might have to leave Kiaochow eventually and fully accepted.Footnote ³¹

The seizure of Kiaochow was the work of others. Its key promoters in Berlin were Wilhelm II; Senden; and Admiral Eduard von Knorr, the chief of the Naval High Command. But it was the navy's new man on the ground, Diederichs, who played a pivotal role, as historian Terrell Gottschall has superbly demonstrated.Footnote ³² It was Diederichs who collaborated with Franzius and conclusively made the case for Kiaochow, thus discarding the conclusions his predecessor had reached in the previous December. It was this admiral who prodded his superiors into action in November and then commanded the occupation of Kiaochow and the initial establishment of German rule, during which he enjoyed a great deal of independence from any outside control.Footnote ³³

Overruled by the Emperor and his fellow admirals, the Navy Secretary acquiesced in the occupation of Kiaochow in mid-November. Subsequently, a savvy Tirpitz did not let his initial opposition prevent him from claiming control (and credit). In January 1898, he ensured that the entire new colony would fall under the direct supervision of his ministry, at the expense of both the Foreign Office and the High Naval Command.Footnote ³⁴ Over the next two years, the Navy Secretary also expressed great interest in bolstering the German position in Kiaochow by securing a string of coaling stations and bases on the route to Kiaochow from Germany, such as Pulo Langkawi in the Malaysian Seas.Footnote ³⁵

Still, Tirpitz remained ambivalent about Kiaochow. While praising its great promise in public and presenting it as a model colony of exemplary importance for the cause of Germany as a world power, he continued to consider the Yangzi River Valley as the primary area of German interest in China. In March 1898, for example, when the issue of further colonial seizures came up in the context of the upcoming Spanish-American war, he stated his interest in creating a German settlement in that region, preferably at Wusung, thus reiterating the position he had staked out in his report from December 1896.Footnote ³⁶ Moreover, Tirpitz also continued to express second thoughts about the entire Kiaochow enterprise. In November 1897 Prince Eulenburg had referred to Tirpitz's aversion to the idea that his empire should “place itself” with Kiaochow “as a louse in the East Asian pelt.”Footnote ³⁷ Nearly seven years later, in spring 1904, Tirpitz told a fellow officer that he wished Germany had never seized the colony.Footnote ³⁸

All in all, Tirpitz's tour of overseas service in 1896–97 was not a success. Despite his initial ambition and energetic leadership, Tirpitz had not accomplished his major task, which was to resolve the issue of a German military colony in China. Far from being a consistent champion of Kiaochow, Tirpitz changed his positions on the entire issue. The admiral's revised suggestions in December were not taken up by his superiors in Berlin, while Tirpitz ended up ruminating darkly about the very promise of German empire building in the Far East in the present or near future.Footnote ³⁹

In fact, continuous adversity plagued Tirpitz's entire command experience and severely tested Tirpitz's determination. Early on, disaster struck when one of his cruisers sank in a typhoon, a loss of ship and men that attracted an enormous amount of attention in Germany. Heyking proved himself to be an unreliable partner in the search for a base, disregarding the script for collaboration that the admiral and he had originally agreed upon (it was he who had prompted the Emperor's orders to take Amoy in late November by knowingly misrepresenting Tirpitz's views). Poor communications with command centers in Germany provided a further source of constant irritation as did the admiral's inability to control their decision making. At the same time, the poor material condition of the ships (which required constant repairs) conspired with short-term exigencies (such as the upheavals in the Philippines that led the community of overseas Germans in Manila to lobby successfully for a dispatch of German warships to Manila) to stretch the capabilities of the Cruiser Division to its limits, at the expense of its schedules for both combat exercise and site inspection. On top of this, a hapless Tirpitz contracted a lung infection and was on sick leave for more than six weeks in early 1897.Footnote ⁴⁰

Such troubles may have contributed to Tirpitz's gloom in the winter of 1896–97, but they in themselves do not explain it.Footnote ⁴¹ Tirpitz's pessimism was much more profound: a product of observations and assessments, it was integral to a comprehensive view of global affairs, German world power, and the politics of empire in China that Tirpitz developed during his entire overseas travel and that, in turn, became central to his subsequent thinking about the world.

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Upon his return to Germany in June 1897 to take office as Secretary of the Navy, Tirpitz expressed clear and coherent ideas about the direction of global politics, the pantheon of competing large empires, and the making of Germany as a world power in control of its destiny. These ideas anchored his entire subsequent agenda as a policy maker: his pursuit of maritime force and global power. They expanded on views and definitions Tirpitz had come to express by the mid-1890s, yet, to an important degree, they were also heavily inflected by Tirpitz's “look” at Germany's overseas interests on the ground (to use the admiral's term from his memoirs) and his first-hand encounters with other large powers, which prompted acts of observation and comparison on a global scale.

Well before spring 1896, Tirpitz had begun to express ideas about maritime interests, naval power, and Germany's place in the world that would prove fundamental for his entire subsequent thinking. Most notably, he had developed the basic parameters of his “sea power ideology” in direct engagement with the writings of the American Alfred Thayer Mahan.Footnote ⁴² He had followed the gathering talk about the formation of a few world empires and the challenges it posed to Germany, with the writings of Alexander von Peez, a key proponent of the so-called Weltreichslehre, leaving a particularly strong impression.Footnote ⁴³ He had had many a conversation with Gustav Schmoller on German industry, colonialism, trade policy, power politics, and the British Empire.Footnote ⁴⁴ And he had his own encounters as both reader and listener with Heinrich von Treitschke, an advocate of German global power and critic of British naval supremacy.Footnote ⁴⁵

In the famous Service Memorandum IX, written in 1894, when he was chief of staff of the Naval High Command, Tirpitz had outlined his fundamental belief in the nexus between global interests and a first-rate navy in a paradigmatic fashion and thus set an agenda for a Germany aspiring to become a world power. A “state that has sea interests or—what is equivalent—world interests,” he postulated in an authoritative fashion, “must be able to represent them and to make its power felt beyond territorial waters. National world trade, world industry, and to a certain extent high-seas fisheries, world transportation, and colonies are impossible without a fleet capable of taking the offensive.”Footnote ⁴⁶

By winter 1895–96, on the eve of his departure to East Asia, the British Empire had also started to play a key role in Tirpitz's thinking. As the crisis in Anglo-German relations over South Africa triggered the first discussions of military operations against Britain among Tirpitz and his peers, Tirpitz identified the British Empire as a power with which Germany was bound to come into conflict as it “was venturing into the world und gaining economic strength through the use of the sea.” A Germany intent on pursuing transatlantic interests, argued Tirpitz on several occasions, needed to muster enough maritime force to be able to engage in threat and deterrence also vis-à-vis Britain. So convinced was Tirpitz that he planned to highlight the possibility of a future confrontation with the British Empire in his inaugural speech before the Reichstag if he had been made Secretary of the Navy in spring 1896.Footnote ⁴⁷

Still, in the mid-1890s, Tirpitz's thinking about Germany as a global power, or, for that matter, about a possible Anglo-German conflict in the future, operated on the level of abstract propositions. In particular, Tirpitz had not articulated clear ideas about the shape of an emerging new world order, about the other large powers a Germany with global aspiration would encounter, or about the actual predicaments his country would face on overseas sites themselves. Tirpitz's overseas trip in 1896–97 propelled his thinking forward, giving his vision of inter-imperial competition new specificity and urgency. Far from only validating or legitimizing earlier views (which it also did), Tirpitz's experience overseas also injected new meanings into his geopolitical and national-imperial thinking. It also eventually became a source of subsequent intellectual rigidity, as it provided this key member of the policy-making elite with a sense that the insights he had newly gained in 1896–97 were grounded in “real,” first-hand knowledge of the world and were thus not in need of further revision.

Indeed, Tirpitz's distinctive outlook on the developing world order cohered in 1896–97 in the context of his overseas experience. Central to it was the notion of the multiplicity of world powers, that is, the emergence of a small number of global empires: Britain, Russia, the United States, and, Tirpitz hoped, Germany, within the context of an ongoing, conflict-ridden subdivision of the world. While Tirpitz certainly read some of the Weltreichslehre literature before his departure for East Asia, he did not elaborate upon its insights. It was only in 1896–97 that he came to articulate this notion as he made a case for German global power. He had just “been able to observe the ruthless advance of Pan-Americanism, the tremendous success of Russia, and the entirely astonishing growth in strength of the British Empire idea from close proximity with alarm,” he wrote in July 1897 upon his return to Germany.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the same month he also wrote about the “amassing of the giant nations,” of “Pan America,” “Greater Britain,” and the “Slavdom,” which could easily destroy Germany in the next century if it were to fail to become a world power in its own right.Footnote ⁴⁹ “Four world powers. Russia, England, America, and Germany. Because two of these world powers are reachable only over the sea, maritime state power should be in the foreground,” Tirpitz explained in September 1899. “Salisbury's saying the large states become larger and stronger, the small ones smaller and weaker, [is] my opinion as well.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Tirpitz had gained this deep appreciation for Russia and the United States as formidable world powers on the move in East Asia and during his travels across the North American continent. In the case of Russia, it was a personal visit to Vladivostok, the key Russian seat of power in the Far East, that played a pivotal role in shaping Tirpitz's assessment of that empire. In his official reports and personal correspondence, he offered an admiring portrayal of Imperial Russia as a large empire, spanning the entire Eurasian continent and acting on its expansionist needs.Footnote ⁵¹ “I understand that the Russians are proud of their giant empire, of the gigantic future that lies before them in a tangible manner. Whether history proves them right, we poor mortals will not be able to tell,” observed an awe-struck Tirpitz.Footnote ⁵² In fact, Tirpitz was so impressed, that in subsequent years he never abandoned the respect for the reality of Russian might he had gained in 1896–97, regardless of any of the empire's military weaknesses and political instabilities that became apparent in 1904–07.Footnote ⁵³

In particular, Tirpitz was impressed by the Russian imperial presence in the Far East. Russia had made itself into a formidable power that had become the key player, alongside Britain, in the contest over empire in that region of the world. Imperial Russia had staked out a huge sphere of interest in Manchuria and northern China in general. In the case of the full partition of China, all of northern China would fall to the Russian Empire, an admiring Tirpitz noted in the fall.Footnote ⁵⁴ By December, he reported back home that the empire had extended its sphere of interest to cover all of China north of the Yangzi River delta (an extension that, in his view, took Kiaochow off the table as an object of German colonial desire!).Footnote ⁵⁵ In his view, Russia's expansionist appetite even extended beyond its ability for full-scale imperial absorption and development in the present. “While so in need of further expansion, Russia will have enough on its plate for a long time in East Asia with Manchuria and Korea” before it could turn its full attention to regions farther south, he had noted early on.Footnote ⁵⁶ It had been for that reason that Tirpitz had originally located Kiaochow and the entire Shantung province outside the Russian primary area of interest.Footnote ⁵⁷

In Tirpitz's views, here, then, was an empire whose leaders had recognized the close nexus between military force and global dominion. The recent enormous success of Russian empire building had been a natural product of the decision to “increase its East Asian Squadron to a level of strength on par with English sea power in the region yet clearly superior to that of Japan.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Tirpitz took special notice of the rapid development of Vladivostok as a key bastion of empire, which left a deep impression on him. In fact, he cast this city, with its large naval base, as a “Russian Wilhelmshaven,” “only the resources of Germany stood directly behind the latter, whereas in this case all depends on maritime traffic from the other side of the world.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The ongoing construction of the Siberian railroad, with either Port Arthur or Talienwan as the projected Russian-controlled ice-free terminal, also attracted Tirpitz's attention. The Russians, he observed, were forcefully developing the economic infrastructure to sustain and promote their imperial interests. Tirpitz attached so much importance to this particular imperial-developmental project, which, in fact, lent shape to Russia's peculiar branch of “railway imperialism,” that he arranged for a special excursion to its tracks during his visit to Vladivostok.Footnote ⁶⁰

Tirpitz came to view the Russian Empire as a formidable empire that was marshalling the military and economic resources to succeed in the Far East. It was also an empire that could count on competent state officials, both military and civilian. Tirpitz offered highly favorable descriptions of the Russian officials he encountered in Vladivostok. In their bearings they reminded him of “our Prussian character type and being,” he wrote to his wife.Footnote ⁶¹ Tirpitz also emphasized that the Russian Empire profited directly from the service and presence of ethnic Germans. As everywhere in the Empire, the “strongly represented Germandom here” acted as a site of “true cultivation,” as the “salt of Russiandom.”Footnote ⁶²

Such assessment was, in turn, part of a larger admiring portrayal of a distinctive politics of Russian nationalization. This politics created and harnessed a cohesive nation in service of empire by forcing its residents, such as ethnic Germans, to abandon their nationality to become Russian. The “practical success” of this nationalizing policy of absorption would be highly “visible” in a Russian imperial outpost such as Vladivostok, where Germans-turned-Russians played prominent roles in the local business and trading community.Footnote ⁶³ Struck by Russification as a strategy of empire, Tirpitz also highlighted the role of the Orthodox Church. While noting, with considerable irritation, how much the Church “meddled in all aspects of civil life,” and associating the ubiquitousness of pictures of saints in public spaces with “servitude of the spirit,” he nonetheless viewed the Church as a “enormous power tool of Russification,” and thus as a source of great imperial strength.Footnote ⁶⁴

But Imperial Russia was not the only empire that came to occupy a key role in Tirpitz's imagination in 1896–97. Tirpitz's view of the United States as a dynamic world power that “moved forward forcefully” and kept abreast of the overall “development toward a few gigantic empires” shaped his thinking around (and after) the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁶⁵ An avid reader of Mahan, Tirpitz had already singled out “mercantile” North America's determined accumulation of sea power in Service Memorandum IX.Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet it was his travel through the United States on the way to and from East Asia that made an indelible impression on Tirpitz (which was then reinforced by a third and final trip to the country in 1902 when Tirpitz, on his own initiative, accompanied Prince Henry of Prussia on his official state visit).Footnote ⁶⁷ On his transit travels in 1896 and 1897, the future Navy Secretary experienced the United States as a vast, profoundly modern, fast-developing, outward-looking industrial nation with aspirations for greatness. So struck was Tirpitz by the United States that he complained to his wife that his superiors had not allowed him to spend more time in the country.Footnote ⁶⁸

Here was a country consumed by an “enormous societal movement” unfolding with a speed unknown in Europe, allegedly representing the “future,” especially in relation to “social questions,” and thus providing useful instruction for the nations “in the old world with its more solidly grounded institutions.” “Different standards” applied in the U.S. than in Europe; “everything here trends toward the gigantic,” Tirpitz noted with great admiration. “One ought not to look out in the United States for what one holds dear and values in Germany,” he explained. But one could “learn here what is true and good about this [societal] movement” and then “modify” and “reform life” in Germany accordingly.Footnote ⁶⁹

Traveling through the United States, Tirpitz was struck by the flourishing of a belligerent nationalism, which, in his view, would propel the country to seek war and global empire. The Americans would “yearn for history and fame” and share “a general desire to take action abroad,” even beyond the conflict with Spain over Cuba.Footnote ⁷⁰ Strikingly, by fall 1896, Tirpitz had already identified the East Asian community of Americans (the Amerikanertum) as an important “element” in the contest over empire in China and an obstacle to the German national cause in the region.Footnote ⁷¹

The United States impressed Tirpitz as a vibrant nation of exemplary cohesion. Its vitality was evident in its capacity for turning immigrants of diverse background into Americans. Traveling through Chicago, the rear admiral marveled at how it had emerged within a few decades as a big city “with a population of many nations,” all of which “eventually melted into a new nation.” With both admiration and regret, Tirpitz noted the strength of the new national allegiance of the large community of German-Americans that bounded any remaining loyalties to the German nation.Footnote ⁷² This, then, was a nation that pushed aside any obstacles in its inexorable path of forward development and now had entered a meeting ground with peoples of Asia on the west coast. Most importantly, the Americans had displaced and brought about the disappearance of an entire people. “There is something tragic and grandiose about the fact that the population of a big continent became extinct over a period of about 150 years. They did not even infuse the American nation with blood,” observed Tirpitz as he traversed the western United States en route to San Francisco and encountered Native Americans.Footnote ⁷³

Yet perhaps most significantly, his year in East Asia helped to shape Tirpitz's view of Great Britain as a global empire and as the one world power that almost single-handedly held the key to Germany's future. In his first policy statements as Secretary of the Navy in summer 1897, Tirpitz defined England as Germany's “most dangerous enemy” against which as many battleships as possible were needed, and cast “the increase of our political power and position toward England” as his overarching goal.Footnote ⁷⁴

While Tirpitz had participated in the navy's short-lived anti-British war scare in the context of the Transvaal Crisis, had certainly read his Treitschke, and had invoked the specter of possible conflict with the British Empire in winter 1895–96, he had not articulated a more comprehensive sense of an inevitable Anglo-German antagonism as the overarching predicament of German global power before he went overseas.Footnote ⁷⁵ His relentless fixation on the British Empire and Anglo-German enmity dated from 1896–97 when he observed Anglo-German relations on the ground in China. On more than one occasion, he defined the relationship to England as the key to Germany's future as a global power. “As far as I can judge from my East Asian perspective, the main difficulty, which directly affects Europe, is our relationship to England,” Tirpitz explained in January 1897.Footnote ⁷⁶

Tirpitz's turn against England unfolded in a two-step process. While the initial turn took place before he sailed off to East Asia, it took its final form in 1896–97. Its second step was “made in China,” to borrow historian Bradley Naranch's phrase.Footnote ⁷⁷ When Tirpitz argued in and after 1897 that “the economic conflict of interest with England will become bigger and bigger, that we need to be prepared for everything” and that it would be the British Empire “with which we will come, undoubtedly, into conflict in the next century at some place on the earth, either because of economic rivalry or as result of colonial tensions,” this assessment drew directly from the analysis of the direction of Anglo-German relations in China he had developed in 1896–97.Footnote ⁷⁸ Surveying the landscape of imperial competition in the Far East on the spot, Tirpitz had predicted a future British turn against a fast-developing German rival. The British Empire and the entire English community in East Asia ultimately stood in the way of Germany's quest for economic opportunity, regardless of its present-day tolerance toward German economic activities. Such toleration, he argued firmly, was bound to come to an abrupt halt and give way to discrimination and exclusion once the German share of the Chinese trade rose from ten to thirty percent of the respective British share.Footnote ⁷⁹

This particular prediction loomed large in Tirpitz's imagination. Back home he repeatedly returned to it. In spring 1898, for example, he told a foreign service official in the run-up to the Spanish-American War that Germany needed to create its own imperial settlements in the Yangzi River Valley because the time would come for certain “when under the condition of increased Anglo-German trade competition the German companies will no longer find shelter in English settlements and will be forced to resettle onto German soil.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Ten years later, Tirpitz explicitly invoked this earlier prediction when he made sense of the open Anglo-German rift in the present and suggested that the British were relentlessly working “against German interests” across the globe.Footnote ⁸¹

From Tirpitz's point of view, future British hostility toward Germany was a foregone conclusion not the least so because both the British and Germans considered the Yangzi River Valley a core area of interest. England's “biggest real interests” lay in Hong Kong and the Yangzi River, Tirpitz concluded early on, an assessment he stuck to throughout his entire stay in the Far East.Footnote ⁸² While he also followed British efforts to extend its “Hong Kong area” through the “development of the West River,” Tirpitz was so convinced of the British fixation on the Yangzi River Valley that he suggested that the British were already scheming to gain control over it in the present. They were simply waiting for some sort of pretext “to make a grab for the Yangzi Valley.”Footnote ⁸³

According to Tirpitz's assessment, British hostility toward Germany was more than just a proposition for the future; it was already becoming a reality in the present. An avid reader, the rear admiral emphasized the anti-German tenor of much of the British Far Eastern press that, in his view, reflected a growing realization of the fast-developing German economic threat. The British were also already making their moves to contain the flourishing of German trade and industry in China. “The East Asian English community [Engländertum] pushes resolutely for an agreement with Russia and France concerning China,” Tirpitz insisted in December, having identified a wide-spread sentiment in favor of regulating the boundaries between Russian and English spheres of interests as one current of British public opinion a few months earlier. The carving up of China into clearly demarcated imperial spheres was to take place at the expense of Germany, which would be granted special interests in a region of China, Fukien, with limited commercial value. According to Tirpitz's assessment, the British were already doing their best to steer the Germans in that direction and, thus, away from the Yangzi River Valley (while also encouraging the Germans to seek their fortunes farther up north, where they would thus rub elbows with the Russians and serve as a convenient buffer).Footnote ⁸⁴

In presenting this analysis, Tirpitz broke with the assessments of Anglo-German relations in China prevalent among most other navy leaders. In May 1896, for example, Admiral Knorr, the head of the Navy High Command, and Rear Admiral Paul Hoffmann, Tirpitz's predecessor as commanding officer of the East Asian Cruiser Division, both concurred in an analysis offered by Hoffmann's former chief of staff that Germany's future in China lay in cooperation with the British. The British and German Empires had “parallel interests” in the region and needed to make common cause against an expansionist Russian Empire.Footnote ⁸⁵

Tirpitz's entire assessment of Anglo-German enmity, in turn, was related to a larger analysis of the British Empire as a model empire. It was built around glowing depictions of the workings of that empire on the ground, the mind-set of its officials, and a shared sense of collective national-imperial interest among all English people. The British in the Far East, an enraptured Tirpitz recognized, would be “very clever” and always act in unison to “extend” and “preserve” British “trade supremacy in China.”Footnote ⁸⁶ With awe, he described the competence and clairvoyance of the many high-ranking British imperial agents he encountered in Chinese cities, which he traced back to the way in which the Empire acted as a primary field of activity for the scions of the British elite, the “flower of the British youth.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The British press in China had put itself in the service of the British nation and promoted the cause of its collective imperial-economic interest in the Far East with great determination. Traveling in China, Tirpitz was simply struck by the workings of British informal empire on the ground. He marveled, for example, at the British control of the International Customs Office, with its far-reaching prerogatives. He also emphasized that across China, outside the areas of direct Russian, French, or Japanese dominion, the British were in the front seat. They dominated the European settlements in China that, in fact, were all “primarily English settlements.”Footnote ⁸⁸

It was Hong Kong that most attracted Tirpitz's admiration as the bastion of the British Empire in China. “The English are such devilish bastards [höllische Kerle], to create something like Hong Kong.” Fifty years before simply a “barren rock,” they had transformed it into a “trade emporium of the first degree” and a city with “parks, magnificent lanes, model order, and tidiness everywhere,” a mesmerized rear admiral summarized in December 1896.Footnote ⁸⁹ So impressed was Tirpitz by Hong Kong as a seat of empire that he expressed his hope that one day the port of Wusung, upon which he had settled as the most desirable German base to seize in December 1896, could become known as a German Hong Kong.Footnote ⁹⁰

Time and again, Tirpitz emphasized the vastness and sheer power of the British position in China. He had no doubt about its many sources of strength. Among them was its ability to pull in other Europeans through its policy of free trade and open toleration, which, in the case of many ethnic Germans, had resulted in their conversion to the British national cause.Footnote ⁹¹ But Tirpitz also directly linked its strength, and very existence, to British naval mastery in the past and present and a willingness to use force. The “political importance and ubiquity of the English fleet” and “England's century-long preeminence in all transatlantic questions” had made British empire building in China possible, he had no doubt.Footnote ⁹² The British, he wrote his wife from Hong Kong, had created their empire “not without blood;” they were not likely to surrender it or accept its diminishment without any further bloodshed, concluded Tirpitz, thus identifying what he came to see as a predicament of German global power in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹³

No doubt, the British Empire in the Far East commanded Tirpitz's utmost respect and admiration. Strikingly, his own immediate experience of the empire was as an open and welcoming place. After all, Hong Kong was the main base of operation for Tirpitz's naval squadron, which depended on British supplies and repair facilities. He himself spent more time in Hong Kong than in any other landed location, including a long six-week sick leave in February and March during which he recovered from a serious lung infection. Throughout, his many personal encounters with British officials and fellow officers were marked by great cordiality and mutual respect.Footnote ⁹⁴ Tirpitz's forebodings about future enmity were not the product of any ill-treatment he received on the part of British officials. They stemmed rather from a more general analysis of the British Empire's interests and long-term intentions, supported as it was by a highly selective reading of its imperial press and utterances by members of its business community.

Tirpitz returned from East Asia with a clear sense of Britain, Russia, and the United States as world powers that were shaping the world's destiny in the twentieth century and setting standards for an aspiring global empire such as Germany. But there was another empire that caught Tirpitz's admiring eye in the Far East, even if it was not a world power. Japan made a deep and long-lasting impression on the rear admiral, who visited it for several weeks in September and October 1896. It impressed him greatly as a modern nation-state harnessing corporate industry and military force and acting as a major Far Eastern power in its own right; as such it was another thriving empire that provided an example for Germany through its imperial determination and national cohesiveness.

Indeed, Tirpitz simply marveled at “the rise of a nation” that “only thirty ago years needed to be considered uncivilized and that certainly stood not as high as Europe in the Middle Ages” to a “great power almost on par politically with the European nations.” The “systematic nature of the reformation, the energy, the talent, and especially the glowing patriotism with which everything was accomplished” would be admirable. From this moment on, with the Japanese taking pride in their achievement, the “Europeans” would “no longer be able to obtain much here.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Here was a formidable imperial nation on the move. Tirpitz reported home that the Empire was clearly interested in further expansion, probably in a southward continental direction, that it was both a “dangerous opponent” and an “uncomfortable competitor” of Russia in the shared spaces of imperial rivalry in Manchuria and Korea, and that it might also support the insurgency against Spanish rule in the Philippines.Footnote ⁹⁶ Generally speaking, Japan would continue in its determined efforts to “emancipate itself from Europe” in every regard, in politics and economics but also extending to technological and scientific matters. Further frictions with Europe lay ahead as soon as the current trade treaties expired. Tirpitz attached such importance to Japanese military power (of which he saw glimpses here and there) that he suggested to his superiors in Berlin to create the position of a naval attaché in Japan. “It seems to me of great importance to know what kind of a factor the Japanese fleet represents,” for the “main decision” of any future war in the Far East would be reached “on water,” he summarized. Stationed in Yokohama, the attaché would be seated right at a key node of inter-imperial diplomacy in the Far East.Footnote ⁹⁷

Tirpitz experienced Japan as a mesmerizing, if not enchanting, place. His letters were full of admiration for all things Japanese, from food, culture, and architecture to landscape and nature. His time in Japan had been most valuable, he wrote to his wife. He had attained insight into a “very different culture,” “shed a bit European arrogance,” and “learned to know a country, which, except Europe, is the most beautiful on earth.” Every “newcomer” would “fall in love” with Japan. Its inhabitants were “a pleasant, friendly, neat people, bristling with energy and health.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Such admiration circumscribed the sense he also articulated that in some regards the Japanese were currently still lagging in terms of technical expertise or “true power of judgment,” and were exhibiting an exalted sense of self as a result of the recent victory against China, or so Tirpitz summarized the opinion of other Europeans.Footnote ⁹⁹

Tirpitz's appreciation of the Japanese as a model empire of formidable strength ran deep. He even believed it to be possible that one day that empire could become a world power. When in the summer of 1897 he conjured up the specter of the “amassing of the giant nations” that would determine the course of the twentieth century, he went as far as to raise the possibility that Japan as the leader of the “Mongolian race” could be among them.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Still, Tirpitz primarily cast Japan as a dynamic regional power that operated on a different scale than global empires such as the British or the Russian. In his assessments of the conflict over empire in China as it directly affected German interests in the present, Japan also played a more limited role as a smaller interested party that was not an equal to Russia and Britain, which Tirpitz defined as the two primary players. Neither was Japan Germany's direct adversary in the region. Strikingly, in the winter of 1897–98, Tirpitz did not share in the panic among the leading officers of the Naval High Command about a possible war with Japan over the seizure of the Kiaochow colony (a panic that led to fantastical war plans that envisioned a transoceanic cruise of the entire German fleet).Footnote ¹⁰¹

While Tirpitz offered glowing descriptions of Japan as a modern imperial nation that demanded recognition and provided instruction, France, an active imperial power in the Far East, was not central to Tirpitz's gaze and encounters in 1896–97. While he had many direct encounters with French imperial agents and activities in China, from fellow naval men to female missionaries, and collected information about the movements of French naval forces in the region, the rear admiral did not visit any French imperial holdings, which lay to the south of the core areas of German imperial interest in China. This is not to say that Tirpitz did not take notice of French empire building in the Far East. In fact, he emphasized its very success. France had “gained a firm hold in China's south”; it was in the process of expanding and consolidating its dominion across the entire region, thus precluding any attempt on the German part to seize any territory down there without “direct conflict,” he summarized in December 1897.Footnote ¹⁰² But ultimately, France played only a secondary role in Tirpitz's analysis of the contest over empire in China on the ground. Accordingly, it did not come to play a significant or independent role in his emerging pantheon of global empires destined to rule the world of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰³

* * *

His trip to the Far East, and especially his encounters with other large powers, taught Tirpitz important lessons about the requirements that German global power had to meet and the enormous challenges it confronted. In 1896–97, the future Secretary of the Navy gained new insight into the scale and scope of German global interests; he developed for the first time a full appreciation for the pressures of competition that the German Empire was facing as one aspiring global power among many; and he became deeply aware of the profound dangers and vulnerabilities that his imperial nation faced as it moved within overseas spaces of war and empire. Most directly, Tirpitz reached two conclusions from his encounters overseas and his observations of other large powers: first, Germany had reached a pivotal moment of existential importance in its development as a great nation with worldwide aspirations; second, the German imperial state needed to wield decisive leadership to ensure global expansion through the relentless mobilization of industry, peoples, and power and the harnessing of an integral nation in overseas spaces of inter-imperial competition. In reaching these conclusions, Tirpitz, in turn, both drew on and filled with fresh meanings a set of emphases and definitions concerning the fundamental ingredients of German global power and maritime interests that he had already formulated in the mid-1890s.

Tirpitz returned home from his Far Eastern command with the firm conviction that the German Empire was approaching a critical crossroads. It could either advance “forward” as a fast-developing industrial nation with global aspirations, or move downhill as older, allegedly “dying” empires such as Spain, the imperial decline of which Tirpitz had seen firsthand and commented on during a brief visit to Manila from December 31, 1897, to January 3, 1898.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Germany, Tirpitz insisted time and again, needed to make itself a global empire among others; it was to become a world power, with a first-rate navy, a global sphere of influence, superior national industry, and a cohesive nation that could stand on its own against the other world powers, that is, Britain, Russia, and the United States.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The “signature of the twentieth century” would “culminate in the question” of whether Germany could muster enough strength for that purpose or else face “ruin” as a nation and “decline” rapidly.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

This analysis expanded on and lent new meaning to the language that Tirpitz had already used prior to his stay in East Asia. In the mid-1890s, Tirpitz had wanted Germany to develop its “maritime interests” forcefully, that is, “energetically, without further loss of time, and systematically,” in order to remain a major power and viable nation in a global age.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ But at this earlier point, Tirpitz had framed that argument differently. He had lacked a more elaborate sense of the competitive milieu of world power built around a handful of vast empires. He had assumed that Germany was hardly present in global spaces of industry and commerce and thus presented the rapid development of Germany's “maritime interests” as a general proposition for the future, rather than a powerful, unfolding reality in the present, already causing ever-increasing concern on the part of inter-imperial contenders and therefore requiring constant protection. If his “look” at Germany's “overseas interests” on the ground convinced Tirpitz of anything, then it was that Germany had already become an industrial nation with a global reach and that it had long passed a point of no return in its ongoing transformation into a full-fledged “world industrial and trading state.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In this view, then, the German Empire needed to wield decisive leadership to ensure a proper future for the German nation and its industry in an age of global empire and worldwide economic competition. “Over the last year in Asia,” Tirpitz explained in the summer of 1897, he had seen “what influence [the] ‘agency’ of the German Empire is in the preservation of Germandom abroad and in the assertion of our economic interests.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ “The present-day Germany will need to keep together its entire strength in the world of the coming century in order not to perish,” Tirpitz had said in setting the general agenda for the German Empire in the previous fall.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The exposure to the politics of empire in the Far Eastern arena and the comparative look at other Imperial nations charged Tirpitz's already existing imperial statism with new urgency. Upon his return from East Asia, Tirpitz made another attempt at the creation of a larger ministry—with him at the top—in charge of all maritime interests (i.e., shipping, fishing, export industries, colonies, and Germans living abroad). This was an idea that the rear-admiral had already proposed, without any success, to the Emperor and Admiral Senden in the winter prior to his departure for China, and that resonated with the views of Admiral Albrecht von Stosch, a mentor of Tirpitz, who had been the chief of the German Admiralty before 1883. In 1895–96, however, Tirpitz had premised his plea on the notion, which he no longer shared in 1897, that Germany's “maritime interests” were underdeveloped and for that reason in dire need of state cultivation.Footnote ¹¹¹

Upon his return from the Far East, Tirpitz left no doubt about the importance he attached to the relentless promotion of national industry. Fueled by his sense of pressing necessity, the new Secretary of the Navy explicitly and repeatedly distanced himself from any pro-agrarian economic politics, at a considerable political risk. He spoke out in favor of the overriding importance of industrial export interests in all matters of commercial policy, including any high protectionist grain tariffs that were bound to hinder German foreign trade and global economic expansion. He explicitly opposed any attempt to make the passage of any naval bill dependent on the introduction of high grain tariffs in the new tariff law that was in the making. “If it were really the intention of the ministries in charge to inaugurate a commercial policy that is likely to diminish our trade and export industries to a substantial degree,” Tirpitz wrote in August 1897, “this Naval Bill and for that matter any other one would constitute a contradiction to this policy. Any success would appear to be impossible because the fleet is after all a function of our maritime interests.”Footnote ¹¹²

Fusing previous intellectual preoccupations with new firsthand impressions, Tirpitz advanced a comprehensive view of Germany as an overseas empire within the context of his Far Eastern experience, that is, his look at the pursuits and sources of strength of other large empires. He came to cast the “Greater Germany” emphatically as a site of a globally dispersed people and identified the community of overseas Germans as an essential part of any self-sustaining German global empire, regardless of whether they lived under direct German dominion. Direct encounters with Auslandsdeutsche in 1896–97 served as a pressure cooker for already existing emigrationist anxieties about overpopulation and the alleged “loss” of entire emigrant populations that Tirpitz had articulated previously (and which, in turn, had their long-standing history in German expansionist discourse).Footnote ¹¹³ Tirpitz had taken to East Asia his particular branch of a settler imperialism, defined by a conviction that in order not to be stifled by its “surplus population,” Germany needed to create “natural outlets” for its “excess population,” as he told Elisabeth von Heyking, the wife of Germany's top diplomatic representative in China, in early August 1896.Footnote ¹¹⁴

During his entire Far Eastern trip, the idea that Germans abroad were renouncing their “Germandom” in favor of new national loyalties and thus strengthening Germany's rivals in an age of intense competition then came to weigh heavily on Tirpitz's mind. On transit in the United States, Tirpitz noted with anguish that the large community of German-Americans had mostly cut their ties to their original fatherland and owed their allegiance to the American nation.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Traveling around in East Asia, he then repeatedly complained bitterly about the many “blood losses” incurred by Germans shedding their ties to the fatherland and entering either the English or Russian “camp,” whether they were compelled to do so in the Russian Far Eastern Empire or did so on their own initiative in Hong Kong and the larger informal British imperial zone.Footnote ¹¹⁶ “Lost for us,” the community of overseas Germans “enriches our enemies or our competitors for sure,” was his summary of the situation on his visit to Vladivostok.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The loss of the “emigrating German element” directly hampered the cause of German national industry, thus “at the same time ruling out for good a major economic (industrial) presence of Old Germany [Altdeutschland] in these areas,” Tirpitz suggested in relation to the fate of ethnic Germans in the territories under British imperial control in China.Footnote ¹¹⁸

By the same token, Tirpitz was now convinced more than ever that Germany needed colonies or spheres of imperial interest. Invoking the lessons he had learned in East Asia, the new Secretary of the Navy insisted that “in the future” the “further extension of colonial possessions” would be of particular importance.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Colonies were to serve both as sites of settlement and economic activity and as crucial links between the Empire at home and abroad. The German Empire needed to pursue “colonial policy,” Tirpitz wrote home in September 1896, under the impression of his encounter with British and Russian imperial holdings. “The colonies are not directly profitable,” he admitted, “yet it provides an opportunity for people to become rich and to return to Germany. Enormous wealth flows back to England in that way each year.”Footnote ¹²⁰

In the crucible of his East Asian experience, Tirpitz developed elaborate ideas about a Stützpunktkolonie as an organizing center of a larger German presence and informal empire in the Far East. From the beginning, Tirpitz emphasized the importance of mercantile considerations when he discussed the larger promise of a naval colony. When he made the case for Kiaochow in September, for example, Tirpitz argued that it could become an important site of trade and commerce and the launching pad for German-controlled economic development across and beyond China's Shantung province.Footnote ¹²¹ A few months later, and now with the example of British Hong Kong on his mind, Tirpitz imagined a German colonial settlement in the Yangzi River delta that would become a “trade emporium” of global importance and eventually anchor the German economic expansion across the entire region.Footnote ¹²²

But over time, his new sensitivity to the importance and fate of overseas Germans made Tirpitz broaden his economic reasoning and stress the nexus between the colony and the community of overseas Germans. By the fall, Tirpitz presented the idea of a colony as a seat of economic empire, yet he now also cast an envisioned military colony as a “personal and material basis” and “assembly area” for the entire “national and political Germandom” in East Asia. It was to serve as a “state-protected refuge” in times of both war and peace while also offering “opportunities for economic development.” A colony could become an “international link for East Asia's Germandom,” a space of German dominion, culture, and business, that was bound to draw Auslandsdeutsche into its orbit and strengthen their allegiance to the German Empire.Footnote ¹²³

The Far Eastern tour of service reinforced Tirpitz's already existing belief in the centrality of maritime force as a key ingredient of global power, which he had enshrined in Service Memorandum IX. From his actual experience with overseas gunboat diplomacy, the rear admiral took away a clear lesson: a forceful quest for colonies and spheres of influence could only be a proposition for the future, once Germany had created a powerful fleet that could bolster its claims for empire vis-à-vis other large powers. Only the relentless accumulation of maritime force as Germany's “non-European power bolster” could provide the tools for a muscular diplomacy that could safeguard the future of the German nation-state in an age of global empire. “Gaining of time” and “fleet upbuilding” held the key to Germany's future, or so Tirpitz argued by the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹²⁴

Such analysis directly echoed the prescription for German empire building in China that the rear admiral had come to offer his superiors from China in the winter of 1896–97. On Far Eastern grounds, Tirpitz developed a strong sense of the fragility of the German position in China and the maritime-imperial weaknesses that haunted any German empire building in that region. Tirpitz had sailed to China with a firm belief in the possibility of viable German empire in China, and especially the practicability of the creation of a valuable military colony. But by December 1896, he felt compelled to sound a different note. His country, he suggested, stood on the margins of the competition over empire in China. It might, in fact, not be able to seize the colonial position in the present he deemed necessary if one wanted to be serious about empire. Declaring himself incapable of “judging” whether the seizure of Wusung or parts of the Chusan Islands was “attainable politically” yet suggesting that it was probably not, Tirpitz advised that Germany needed to be resourceful to make up for its limited options in the present. For the time being, it should concentrate all its state-sponsored efforts, including “concessions, dockyards, railways, banks, industrial enterprises,” to expand informally in the Yangzi Valley, to prepare the ground for more in the future. The goal was to “secure a larger real claim of ownership to this land through a growth of our interests as exists today. In the meantime, we also would buy time,” he added, “to increase our non-European power bolster, the fleet.”Footnote ¹²⁵

Tirpitz had grown concerned about the viability of a German empire in China in the context of his developing analysis of competition with other large powers over empire in that country. The Chinese Empire was being carved up into imperial zones by Russia and England, and, to a lesser but still significant extent, by France and Japan. As an imperial latecomer, the German Empire confronted already well-ensconced and ever-expanding empires that had laid claim to various spheres of influence and expressed little willingness to accommodate German aspirations in any more meaningful way. While he had originally believed that the pursuits of other powers would ultimately not prove detrimental, Tirpitz concluded, by fall 1897, that his country was hemmed in to an alarming degree. The admiral developed second thoughts about Kiaochow as a possible military colony precisely because he had reconsidered his earlier assessment that the Russians considered Kiaochow Bay and all of Shantung as being outside their sphere of influence. Even more alarmingly from Tirpitz's perspective, the German Empire directly confronted another large power, the British Empire, when it came to the Yangzi River Valley, the region Tirpitz had come to define as the natural “final goal of our efforts in China” and which had not yet been formally claimed by an imperial power. To his great chagrin, the rear admiral reached the conclusion that British policy makers were bent on controlling the region as well and thus were bound to counter any unilateral German action that could pose a threat to its interests.Footnote ¹²⁶

In Tirpitz's fast-developing view, the advances of other empires in China restricted Germany's imperial opportunities. Yet what ultimately undermined Germany's entire position was the absence of a powerful fleet at home and on location in the Far East to press its case in opposition to other imperial states. As a “smaller naval power,” according to Tirpitz's analysis in fall 1896, the German Empire was simply not a power that could hope to throw its weight around in important Far Eastern matters, as Russia or Britain did.Footnote ¹²⁷ This was the case even as Germany could hope to use its landed power in Europe “in the case of great decisive issue” that involved “decisions made by European states alone.”Footnote ¹²⁸ It was for this reason that Tirpitz emphasized time and again in his Far Eastern correspondence that the German Empire ought to abandon its quest for a military colony and imperial expansion unless its policy makers were willing to build a first-rate fleet rapidly. The “disadvantageous conditions in East Asia” could “only be improved in a decisive manner” if “our fleet” could be made “without delay and loss of time” into “a factor of power in transatlantic questions,” observed Tirpitz.Footnote ¹²⁹ It was with this (and the examples of the naval buildups of the other powers he admired) in mind that Tirpitz responded to reports about the naval policy of the current Secretary of the Navy, Admiral Friedrich Hollmann, whom he had come close to replacing in the previous winter. The current naval legislation, Tirpitz informed Admiral Senden in January 1897, had filled him “with great concern,” for it lacked any clear understanding of the real requirements of German global power.Footnote ¹³⁰

Tirpitz's sense of German military-imperial vulnerability became so deep and profound that it eventually extended to China, the empire he otherwise viewed as the weak, if not defenseless, object of the imperial desires of others. Originally, Tirpitz had been most dismissive of Chinese military power as a possible obstacle to his own country's quest for dominion and influence. China did not figure as a force to reckon with in the two official reports on the base issue. When he discussed the defense of Kiaochow against an attacking force in the September report he considered the troops of the other European empires and Japan as likely adversaries. China would not present a military problem. That empire would “need perhaps a century,” he suggested, “to pose, on its own, a real offensive threat to the base.” He also pointed out that in the unlikely event of a war with China, command of the sea fell to Germany, which thus would be in a position to carry the war to other places along the Chinese coast.Footnote ¹³¹

In fact, Tirpitz expressed little respect for the self-strengthening efforts of the Chinese Empire in the wake of the war against Japan in 1894–95. “Cultural conditions” militated against the creation of a professional military, Tirpitz concluded in July 1896 as he reported on Chinese army reforms and the work of German military advisors in the Nanking province and pinpointed a widespread Chinese desire “to get rid of foreigners by all means.”Footnote ¹³² Such a view, in turn, was part of a larger dismissal of the Chinese as a people, found in Tirpitz's correspondence. They allegedly lacked the national militancy, industriousness, and cohesion that characterized the Japanese (or, for that matter, the British, the Russians, and the Americans). Indeed, Tirpitz expressed open contempt for the Chinese in highly racialized language as he referred to them as “Asia's vermin” and denounced them as an “abominable people.”Footnote ¹³³

Tirpitz nonetheless came to fear that Germany might even lack the military capability to acquire a colony and then maintain it in the face of opposition by the Chinese Empire itself. The “enforceability of claims, which mostly unfold at the expense of China, depends primarily on the real power on the ground,” Tirpitz had explained in October when he still exuded confidence in German military capabilities vis-à-vis China.Footnote ¹³⁴ By December he started to lack this confidence. By mid-month he expressed his explicit concern that it should not come to a war with China over the seizure of a base.Footnote ¹³⁵ At that time, he had grown immensely frustrated with the smallness of the force under his command, as the Cruiser Division was stretched to a breaking point due to the need for constant repairs, a multitude of assignments, and dependency on foreign logistical support. When, at the end of November, he was briefly ordered to prepare for the seizure of the island of Amoy, the rear admiral had exactly one cruiser at his disposal. He believed the seizure possible from a military point of view only because he expected no armed resistance from the Chinese force in situ.Footnote ¹³⁶

All in all, Tirpitz returned to Germany with a profound sense of the fragility of the German position in China. It was his fear of a war with China and of direct Russian counteractions in the Far East that made him object to the actions that resulted in the seizure of Kiaochow.Footnote ¹³⁷ His hesitation earned him the scorn of the promoters of the takeover, such as Diederichs, who complained about his timidity. As Admiral Knorr, Diederichs's direct superior in Berlin, noted correctly in summer 1898, Kiaochow would have not been seized if Tirpitz had made the ultimate decision or been in operational command of the German naval force in the Far East.Footnote ¹³⁸

Ultimately, Tirpitz's alarmist sense of military-imperial vulnerability transcended the realm of Far Eastern imperial politics or German gunboat diplomacy in China. It focused on Germany's overall competitiveness as a budding global empire that confronted other world powers, especially Britain, a power seen as fiercely determined, in the present and future, to protect its current position of preeminence. The utter lack of any maritime threat and deterrence against the world's largest naval power marked Germany's biggest and most immediate vulnerability, as an Anglo-German confrontation over industry and empire loomed on the horizon. The successful projection of maritime force against Britain, Tirpitz concluded in 1896–97, held the key to Germany's destiny in the twentieth century.