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German Samoa and the Partition of the Pacific. German Samoa (1900-1914) was Germany's colony in the Samoan islands, born of a scramble that nearly brought three great powers to blows. In the late nineteenth century Britain, Germany, and the United States all traded and intrigued in Samoa, backing rival candidates for the Samoan kingship. Tension peaked in 1889, when warships of all three nations crowded into Apia harbor, until a great hurricane sank or wrecked most of them, a catastrophe remembered as a providential escape from war.
A decade later the powers settled the matter by diplomacy. The Tripartite Convention of 1899, sealed in 1900, divided the islands: Germany took the western islands, including Upolu with the port of Apia and Savaii, the United States took Tutuila and the Manua islands with the harbor of Pago Pago, and Britain withdrew in exchange for compensation elsewhere. The Samoans themselves were not consulted, and the last independent Samoan king was exiled.
German rule was brief but efficient. Governor Wilhelm Solf governed with a mixture of firmness and respect for Samoan custom, building roads, plantations, and the famous clock-towered government house at Apia, while the trading company profited from copra and cocoa. The German era ended with the First World War: in August 1914 New Zealand troops seized the colony without a fight, beginning nearly half a century of New Zealand administration.
The partition of 1900 still divides Samoa. The western islands became independent as Samoa in 1962, while American Samoa remains a United States territory, two halves of one people separated by a line drawn in Europe. The story of the colony captures the way the Pacific was carved up among the powers in the age of empire, and how its peoples eventually reclaimed their independence.
New Zealand History: Samoa: Background
Wikipedia: German Samoa
Wikipedia: Tripartite Convention, 1899
Amsterdam University Press: The Partition of Samoa