THE GERMAN EMPIRE OF CENTRAL AFRICA*
1 .—Position as a World-Power.
I N the thirty years before the war it was given to us to rise to the admitted rank of an economic world-power. Our success was great ; we used to ascribe it to our policy of Protection. The essential character of our Protective system can be described shortly as consisting in the systematic transference of the work of producing raw materials for our industries to cheap soils overseas. Let us give an instance. The area under cultivation in the case of rape seed diminished from 179,000 hectars in 1878 to 31,000 hectars in 1913, and in the case of flax in the same period from 134,000 hectars to barely 15,000. Our oil and fibre industries drew their raw material from lands more favourable, climatically, where production was cheaper. It became the basis of our economic policy to acquire the raw material necessary for our industries as cheaply as possible ; on the other hand, our frontiers were barred as far as possible by high tariffs against the importation of any article of human food. The supplying of food to the growing population, at high prices was reserved for German agriculture.
By 1907, roughly 2,400,000 people were employed in our textile and clothing industries ; our exports of cotton and woollen goods, clothes and millinery, worsted, cotton-yarn and thread were to the value of, roughly, 1,000,000,000 marks in 1913. If our own agricultural efforts had had to produce wool and fibre, the rise of our textile and clothing trades would have been impossible. We should have had changes
* Das deutsche Kaiserreich Mittelafrika als Grundlage einer neuen deutschen Weltfoliiik . Von Emil Zimmermann. Verlag der Europäischen Staats- und Wirtschafts-Zeitung G.m.b.H. Berlin 1917.
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