While the Kingdom of Dalmatia was under internal martial law, purging ethnic saboteurs within its borders, the region's troops, under Vienna's arrangements, also entered the Province of Bosnia to maintain stability.
The Province of Bosnia was home to the largest concentration of Serbs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, meaning the area could now become a high-risk zone.
City of Ploče.
Compared with Zadar, the northern capital of Dalmatia, Ploče, this newly risen southern port city, was now the true economic center of Dalmatia's mixed-blood Germans.
In recent years, Ploče had surpassed cities such as Šibenik and Split within the kingdom in economic terms. Its total economy and industrial scale ranked second only to the capital, City of Zadar.
The reason Ploče was called the economic center of the mixed-blood Germans was that, in this city, mixed-blood Germans—or Germans, rather—held an absolute dominant advantage.
In the Kingdom of Dalmatia's population distribution, the farther south one went, the higher the proportion of Germans. Thus, in Ploče, the southernmost coastal city, Germans accounted for nearly one hundred percent of the population.
There was another reason for this phenomenon: the Dalmatian region had originally been too underdeveloped and too sparsely populated.
Before large numbers of immigrants arrived, the Kingdom of Dalmatia, as a first-level administrative region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had barely possessed any real presence.
Besides being relatively remote, the local terrain was also poor. Though it had quite a few excellent harbors, the land was mainly mountainous and difficult to develop.
This was also one of the important reasons East Africa had been able to slip through the cracks and scatter immigrants here before World War I. Before World War I in the previous life, Dalmatia's entire population had only been around six hundred thousand, which said much by itself.
The influx of