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The German Colonial Empire was an overseas area formed in the late 19th Century as part of the Hohenzollern dynasty's German Empire . There had also been some short lived attempts at colonisation before this. HISTORY There was an attempt to colonise the area which is part of Venezuela in the sixteenth century by the Augsburg banking families of Anton and Bartholomeus Welser. Between 1528 and 1556 Germans had some rights to Venezuelan territory, see German Colonization Of The Americas . There had been some other attempts at colonisation, such as Arguin Island off Mauritania's Alantic coast (5 October 1685 aquired by Brandenburg (from 1701, Prussian) - 7 March 1721 lost to France. Short-lived colonies had been established by individual German states in the 17th Century . Brandenburg , which became the Kingdom Of Prussia , established colonies at Arguin in Mauritania and along the Prussian Gold Coast (later integrated as part of the Dutch Gold Coast ) in present-day Ghana . The Baltic German -led Duchy of Courland also Colonized Tobago . However, none of the German states was strong enough to contend with the Atlantic maritime powers. Owing to its delayed unification by land-oriented Prussia in 1871 , Germany came late to the Imperialist scramble for remote Colonial territory (their so-called " Place In The Sun "). The German states prior to 1870 had retained separate political structures and goals, and German foreign policy up to and including the age of Otto Von Bismarck concentrated on resolving the "German question" in Europe and securing German interests on that same continent. On the other hand, Germans had traditions of foreign sea-borne Trade dating back to the Hanseatic League ; a tradition existed of German emigration (eastward in the direction of Russia and Romania and westward to North America ); and North German merchants and missionaries showed lively interest in overseas lands. Many Germans in the late 19th century viewed colonial acquisitions as a true indication of having achieved nationhood, and the demand for prestigious colonies went hand-in-hand with dreams of a Navy , which would become reality and seriously challenge Britain's maritime supremacy. Natives rising up in rebellion, for example the Herero 's Uprising in German South-West Africa (now Namibia ) in 1904 , were bloodily put down by German troops leading to events such as the extermination of local people in Herero Genocide . Because Germany was so late to join the race for colonial territories, most of the world had already been carved up by the other European powers; in some regions the trend was already towards decolonisation, especially in the continental Americas, encouraged by the American Revolution , French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte . The victorious Allied Power s dissolved and re-assigned this Empire in the course of the First World War ( 1914 - 1918 ) and its subsequent peace treaties, such as the Treaty Of Versailles . In the treaties Japan gained the Carolines and Marianas , France gained Togo and Cameroons , Belgium gained parts of German East Africa , and the United Kingdom gained German New Guinea , Namibia , parts of German East Africa , and Samoa . Most of these territories acquired by the British were attached to its various Commonwealth realms overseas and were transferred to them upon their independence. GERMAN COLONIES Formal German Sovereignty existed in ( German names in ''italics''):
Imperial Germany also maintained interests in areas of China :
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