From Commonwealth to Colony? Poland under Prussia

Abstract

Prussia’s Polish provinces are a particularly promising site for an investigation of colonial connections in that their acquisition predated that of Germany’s overseas colonies from 1884 by over a century, far longer than was the case in Alsace or Schleswig. This makes it possible to examine the impact of Germany’s colonial empire in Africa and Asia on established patterns of Prussian rule in the east. The province of Royal Prussia, renamed West Prussia, came to the Hohenzollern monarchy in the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in 1772, and the province of Poznania in the second partition, in 1793. Prussia extended its territory southward after the last partition, in 1795, which dissolved the rump Polish state entirely, but soon lost the territory to Napoleon’s Duchy of Warsaw in 1807. Apart from some small territorial adjustments, the Congress of Vienna confirmed Prussian rule over West Prussia and Poznania in 1815. While these became part of the new German Empire created in 1871 as a result of the process of unification, they remained constitutionally under Prussian rather than federal control. As the largest of the constituent states, Prussia also provided many of the personnel responsible for the acquisition and governance of overseas territories, which lay under federal control. These territories, known as protectorates, which were acquired from 1884, comprised South-West Africa, East Africa, Cameroon, Togo in Africa, Samoa and New Guinea in the Pacific and, finally, Kiaochow in China.