German trade with former African colonies, 2001-2018: A comparative analysis with China

A well-established body of literature has convincingly argued that former colonies generally, to a disproportionate degree, tend to continue to be economically entangled with their former colonial metropoles. However, what happens in instances wherein there have been successive colonial metropoles? Such a theoretical and empirical puzzle is posed by Germany's former colonies in Africa. These colonies (the present republics of Burundi, Cameroon, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Togo) were transferred as mandate territories following the First World War as part of the punitive measures against imperial Germany after it was deemed the principal cause behind that conflict. This chapter traces Germany's trade ties with all six of its former colonies in Africa between 2001 and 2018. These are in turn compared with those between the African countries and China over the same period. Findings indicate that, on the main, exports to Germany were replaced by exports to successive colonial metropoles, which were in turn partially outweighed by exports to China in exactly 50% of the cases subsequent to the Great Recession. We find Germany's ties with the continent to be limited by a combination of factors, including strong competition from China and the successor colonial metropoles, as well as Berlin's generalist, reformist and ahistorical foreign policy approach towards Africa.