Introduction

On January 18, 1942, Germany, Japan and Italy divided up the world.¹ They did so along the 70th meridian east. As far as the expansive Eurasian landmass was concerned, the two Axis powers Japan and Germany set up what they envisioned to become two large imperial blocs.

This chapter discusses how Germany and Japan reached this point by focusing on the shared imperial history of the two powers. To be sure, Italy was the third party of the Axis alliance, with far-reaching imperial aims in the Mediterranean and Africa.² While its important role in the history of the alliance is far too often neglected, the framing and the limited scope of this chapter, however, did not allow a systematic treatment of the Italian dimension, even if occasional references are made to it. A more fully developed trans-imperial and entangled history of all three Axis powers is required in the future.³

But even for the Japanese and German cases alone, neither a connected history of their empires nor a systematic comparison between them exists, even though the literature occasionally points to the similarities of their projects of empire­building.⁴ Yet, from a comparative perspective, a set of striking similarities and parallels emerge: seen from the year 1942, both the German and Japanese empires were as megalomaniacal as they were short-lived. As both were wartime bubbles, it is difficult to assess their ultimate goals and the shape they would have taken. However, despite all their inconsistency and ephemerality, one thing is certain—in

¹ The research for this work was generously supported by the Center for Advanced Studies, LMU Munich, the GHI Rome and the Leibniz Price Research Group on Global Processes, Konstanz.

² Mallett 2003; Kallis 2003; Gooch 2007; Martin 2016.

³ Hedinger 2017.

⁴ Geyer 2004, 82-83. One exception is the comparative chapter on the Japanese and German wartime empires, by Gann 1996.

Daniel Hedinger and Moritz von Brescius, The German and Japanese Empires In: The Oxford World History of Empire.

Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0041.

the long history of empire-building and colonial exploitation, these two count among the most brutal ones.

This chapter shows how both powers redefined the shapes and limitations of im­perialism and colonialism during the twentieth century. Japan's attempt to achieve hegemony over China was unique in the thousand-year history of East Asia and was buttressed by using pan-Asian ideas. For its part, National Socialist Germany did this by bringing home the realities of colonialism to central and eastern Europe.^{[2516] [2517]} Thus, in order to realize their dreams of a new imperial world order, both countries broke with what had come before. In the end, it was their wars for empire and brutal legacies that not only profoundly shaped their respective national histories, but also undermined the legitimacy of imperialism after 1945.6

This chapter highlights two points. First, it stresses that by their emergence as co­lonial powers, Japan and Germany first fundamentally challenged and later changed the very rules of the “imperial game” and the existing global order. Both projects of empire-building will be discussed in the context of great power competition and the world wars.^[2518] We will argue that they aspired for empires of a new type, autarkic and contiguous in form, based on explicit racism and the conscious rejection of former colonial policies, and thereby different from maritime colonial empires, as exemplified by the British. In this sense, Germany and Japan were more than mere latecomers only imitating the colonialisms of the others.

Second, however, it is just as important not to dismiss the two nations as exceptions or absurdities in the colonial history of the twentieth century. For far too long, the history of Japan's and Germany's way into modernity has been described as a “special path.” This holds true not only for the nations but also their respec­tive empires. The Japanese Empire has been labeled an “anomaly in the history of modern imperialism” that “stood apart from its European counterparts.”^[2519] In the German case, a colonial “Sonderweg”-thesis has been explicitly claimed; however, the supposed continuities between the Kaiserreich and the Nazi Empire have been fiercely discussed, yet most often in an exclusively national context.^[2520] This chapter underscores that from a trans-imperial perspective, the idea of colonial special paths does not hold true.

While the colonial experience of Japan and Germany was too often labeled pe­culiar or special and thus pushed to the periphery of twentieth-century history, something has changed over the last few years. There is now widespread agreement that it is essential to consider colonial ambitions and imperial imaginations in order to understand the dynamics of the nation-states, and hence the colonial pasts of the two countries have been re-examined.^[2521] However, until now works have been mainly concerned with the complex interplay between imperial peripheries and cores and, paradoxically, thereby remain limited primarily to national historical perspectives. In this context, an international or even trans-imperial perspective has been repeatedly called for, but only a few works exist today.^[2522] This is espe­cially true for the years 1919-1945. There is still a lack of transnational approaches that critically examine the interactions and kinship between the Axis empires.

For this exercise, we analyze a sequence of specific imperial moments.^[2523] The first section (I) begins with the Boxer War and the global imperial competition around 1900. The second section (II) looks at the situation at the moment of the Versailles Peace of1919. The third section (III) examines the multiple crises of 1932- 1933 (the effects of the Great Depression, the establishment of Manchukuo, and Nazi rise to power) and the new imperial projects resulting from them, while the fourth section (IV) focuses on the appearance of the imperial Axis around 1938. Germany's rapid victories in 1940 and the resulting Tripartite pact, addressed in the fifth section (V), finally laid the basis for the fleeting realization for a new world order around 1942 (section VI), described in the beginning and discussed in the final section (VII).

I.