Now, even if the Habsburg Royal Family wanted to engage in colonial ventures, it could not get them off the ground, and East Africa had much to do with that. Before East Africa ruled Togoland, the local population had in fact numbered only seven or eight hundred thousand.
From 1914 until the mid-1920s, Togoland's natives had basically been driven away to the last.
East Africa's process of ruling Togoland had been far more civilized than its expansion across the East African mainland in the nineteenth century. There had been no large-scale racial extermination campaigns. After all, Togoland was surrounded by British and French colonies. By driving Togoland's natives into their jurisdictions, it could easily achieve the "purification" of Togoland.
This outcome was also related to Togoland's geographical characteristics. Its territory stretched long and narrow, and its area was small, making the cost of expulsion low.
During colonial expansion on the East African mainland in the nineteenth century, however, the cost of sending the natives away had been far too high. Driving them inland was unsuitable as well, because that was East Africa's intended future territory.
Therefore, during its nineteenth-century colonial expansion, East Africa had mainly used two methods to expel natives. One was to sell them overseas; the other was to forcibly exile them to West Africa.
Both methods involved migration routes that often stretched thousands of kilometers, and both came at considerable cost.
Togoland was entirely different. At its narrowest point, its territory was barely more than fifty kilometers wide. As long as the East African government exerted a little pressure, the local natives could easily flee to Dahomey, Ghana, and Upper Volta.
The British and French colonies themselves did not resent this, and even welcomed East Africa's move, because all three of those regions needed large numbers of