In the 1890s a now highly industrialized and economically rapidly growing Germany started to be seen as a serious contender for Britain’s leading place in world trade. Under William II the German Reich adopted an incalculable and aggressive foreign policy. Germany, the belated colonial power, attempted a new distribution of the various regions of the world. This policy put as much pressure on the German-British dynastic relations as on the general relations between the two countries. In the 1890s, Queen Victoria’s relationship with her grandson, the Emperor, was notoriously bad. William’s relationship with his uncle, the future Edward VII, was even worse.