German war aims in the First World War developed over the course of the war in part as a response to shifts in the structure of global markets. Germany's industrial economy before the war relied substantially on access to global markets for raw materials, which were mediated by networks of infrastructure constructed as collaborative efforts by private capital and states, particularly the American and British imperial states. During the war, Great Britain and eventually the United States leveraged their position within those networks to isolate the German economy. In response, the German state sought to generate its own public-private alliances to develop German-dominated infrastructures of circulation and exchange in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. This often entailed working through other states, appropriating their sovereignty to further German ambitions. Military victory, however, so weakened these dependent states that they were unable to serve their expected role in advancing German imperial goals.

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World War I reshaped the international economy. This was, in part, the consequence of British mobilization of resources for its own war effort, which aligned producer interests around the world with those of the United Kingdom. But it was also a consequence of Western policy aimed at excluding German businessmen from global markets. German planners noted during World War I that Great Britain, in particular, was expressing an interest in continuing such exclusion after the war, with potentially enormous economic consequences for Germany. Combatting or preventing such an economic “war after the war” prompted German businessmen and politicians to support a series of policies that would have profoundly changed the institutions and norms of the prewar international economy. These policies ranged from imposing one-sided trade agreements, expanding the mark zone, and establishing German control over Eastern European industries and infrastructure, to creating shipping cartels and imposing compulsory raw material delivery agreements on the Western powers. The result of German efforts to direct trade and investment in ways preferable to the German state would have been a deeply politicized postwar international economy. The article argues that economic questions were thus a central component of German war aims, but that these were not fixed: they evolved over the course of the war in response to changes in the international economy, and they focused not on short-term emergencies but rather on longer-term structural changes.