The “colonial era” is something that few people have much awareness of anymore. But, from 1700-1950, most of the world’s land mass was administered as colonies by four main European countries—Great Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain. At one point or another in the last three hundred years these four countries had geopolitical control of all of North America, all of South America, nearly all of Africa, Australia, India, and a good chunk of Asia. WWII ended the colonial era for two reasons—first, for the duration of the war, the various colonies had been semi-independent and weren’t willing to go back to a dependent political and economic status. And second, France and Great Britain were economically devastated by the war and didn’t have the resources to reassert control.
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Germany came late to the colonial party. What we call Germany today was, until 1870, a loose confederation of ten or fifteen mostly independent states that were more concerned with the politics of their next door neighbors than with territories thousands of miles away. By 1900, Germany was projecting overseas military power, and in this era that meant that you needed colonies to have naval bases and supply routes. Germany created more than ten colonies and “offices abroad” (German postal service that operated independently within countries over which Germany had no formal military control). The German colonial period was short. Most German colonies were set up by 1890 and all were lost by the end of the first world war (1918). There are several hundred issues overall, and a reasonably complete collection of these stamps can be made for a relatively reasonable amount of money. They are considered by serious philatelists to be among the most attractive stamps in all the hobby, and they have continued to be very popular for over one hundred years.