German protectorate over northeastern New Guinea (Kaiser-Wilhelmsland) and the Bismarck Archipelago from 1884, later administering most of Germany's Western Pacific island claims — the Carolines, Palau, and the Marianas (bought from Spain in 1899) and the Marshall Islands and Nauru (annexed 1906) — as the Imperial German Pacific Protectorates.
Fell to Australian and Japanese forces within weeks of the outbreak of World War I in September 1914; Germany formally ceded the territory at the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919). The mainland and Bismarck Archipelago became the Australian-administered Territory of New Guinea (1920); the Micronesian islands passed to Japan as the South Seas Mandate.
The standard scholarly history of German colonial rule in New Guinea, covering administration, labor, and the Pacific protectorates.
Single-volume regional history situating German New Guinea within the broader colonial partition of the Pacific.