This was outright extortion! Wilhelmina looked at the shameless man before her with a complicated expression. Sure enough, now that the Great British Empire and France were tied up and unable to break free, even clowns like East Africa dared to run wild with impunity?
As Wilhelmina agonized endlessly, Dutch Prime Minister Kaper could no longer bear to watch.
Kaper was, in fact, pro-Central Powers, which had caused the Netherlands in the previous life to remain neutral during World War I while actually leaning toward Germany.
This had also meant that, despite its neutrality, the Netherlands still suffered the troubles of war.
On one hand, because of the war, supplies from nearly all over the world had poured into Europe in massive quantities, driving the prices of goods such as tea, sugar, and rubber in Europe extremely low.
These goods were almost the primary products of the Dutch colonies. The Dutch colonies were the East Indies and the Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. As tropical regions, they could produce little beyond a limited number of tropical agricultural products.
Yet in reality, the British and French colonies and the nations of the Americas could almost all produce the same kinds of goods. In this timeline, East Africa had also been added as a major world exporter of tropical agricultural products. Not only the Netherlands—even tropical countries such as Brazil could feel East Africa's deep malice, and this had caused the trade income of the Dutch colonies to plummet.
On the other hand, in the previous life, in order to secure victory in the war, the Entente Powers began in the middle and later stages of the conflict to prohibit imports of goods that could be transferred to Germany. The Netherlands became the key link in this, since it could be said