There were a number of naval battles in and around African and Asian waters, as the Allied navies mopped up the German squadrons that had been deployed to the German colonies in Asia and Africa (and the merchant ships they armed as raiders). These were accompanied by a series of campaigns aimed at rolling up the German colonies; highly successful in Asia and the Pacific, but less so in Africa.
The first colonial battle to see significant naval presence was the reduction of the German colony at Tsingtao (now Qingdao) in August-November 1914. From the outset of the war, the colony was blockaded by British and Japanese naval forces. Blockaded in the harbour were the German cruiser Cormoran, Austro-Hungarian cruiser Kaiserin Elizabeth, and a number of gun-boats and torpedo boats. On the 23rd August, there was a brief engagement between one of these torpedo boats and the British destroyer Kennet, with the latter coming off worse. Beyond that, the Germans made few sorties. On the 2nd September, Japanese troops, supported by a vast fleet offshore (mostly Japanese, but including the British battleship Triumph) landed at Lai-chau Bay. This was undefended, as it was in Chinese territory, but it overlooked the German-held port. Two British battalions would arrive on the 24th, but the majority of the forces besieging the town were Japanese. On the 3rd September, the destroyer Shirotae ran aground and was sunk by coastal batteries and a German gunboat. Over the next month, the Allied force surrounded the town and began to bombard it with heavy artillery and naval guns. On the 28th October, the German torpedo boat S-90 slipped out of the harbour and managed to put two torpedoes into the old cruiser Takachiho, which had been converted to a minelayer. This did little to change the outcome of the battle; the garrison of Tsingtao surrendered on the 7th November. For a more detailed account of the battle, see /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov's answer to this question.
While the Allies were besieging Tsingtao, the German East Asian Squadron, normally based at the port, was making its way across the Pacific to South America (where they would destroy a British squadron at Coronel, and be sunk in turn at the Falklands, though these actions are beyond the narrative of this answer). The squadron's commander, Admiral von Spee, had detached one of his light cruisers, the Emden, to raid the waters of South-East Asia and the Indian Ocean. This she did with aplomb. Operating in the Bay of Bengal, she played havoc with the shipping lanes through the area. Arriving in the area on the 10th September, she captured eight ships, sinking six (one was kept as a collier, and the other was spared as her cargo was American-owned and hence not contraband) before withdrawing to coal. Following this brief pause, she bombarded Madras (now Chennai) on the 22nd September, and continued into the heavily trafficked waters off Sri Lanka, where she captured six ships (four were sunk, one was kept as a collier, and the other used to return survivors to British territory). After this, the British cruiser Yarmouth managed to locate and capture two of Emden's colliers, one of which was a German ship and the other a captured vessel. This would in theory have spelt disaster for Emden, but her next raiding sortie captured a steamer carrying coal for the British naval base at Hong Kong, along with another five ships. Evading the Allied patrols, her captain made the surprisingly audacious step of raiding the Malaysian port of Penang, where part of those patrols were based. There, completely surprising the Allies, she sank the Russian cruiser Zemchug and French destroyer Mousquet. On the 9th November, the Emden raided the British telegraph station on the Cocos Islands. This proved to be a mistake, as over the horizon to the north was a well-escorted convoy carrying Australian troops to Europe. The Australian cruiser Sydney was detached from the force and sent to respond to the distress signals from the telegraph operators. Locating Emden at about 9am, a brief action ensued between the German and Australian ships; eventually, Emden was riddled with shell holes from the larger guns of Sydney, and was beached on North Keeling Island. Somewhat surprisingly, the party that had been landed to destroy the signalling station managed to escape in a sailing vessel, travelling back to Germany via the Ottoman Empire.
Emden's counterpart on the African coast, the Konigsberg, was less successful. Based at Dar-es-Salaam in German East Africa, her captain had been ordered to raid British shipping in the Red Sea and western Indian Ocean. On the 6th August, she encountered and sank the British merchant City of Westminster, but this would be her only success. After a number of fruitless sweeps, engine problems and a lack of coal forced her to seek shelter in the delta of the Rufiji River. However, a British cruiser left alone at Zanzibar would prove a tempting target; on the 19th September, Konigsberg raided the port, sinking the old British cruiser Pegasus, before returning to her shelter on the Rufiji. The overhaul would be greatly delayed by the lack of facilities there - her boilers had to be man-hauled to the shipyard at Dar-es-Salaam to be repaired. As a result of these delays, she would be located by British cruisers on the 30th October, allowing them to bottle her up in the delta. However, she had been moored far enough up the river that the guns of the cruisers could not reach her. Nor could the guns of the battleship Goliath, as she drew too much water to move into effective range. Ultimately, in April 1915, two river monitors (built in Britain for the Brazilian Navy, but requisitioned at the start of the war) were towed to the Rufiji from Britain. These ships had shallow enough draught to steam up the river, and heavy enough firepower to sink Konigsberg. A number of aircraft from the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) were dispatched along with them, to spot their fall of shot. This combination proved highly effective, sinking Konigsberg on the 11th July. However, much of her useful equipment had been removed, or was salvaged, to assist the German forces under von Lettow-Vorbeck which were fighting to defend the colony.
Some of these guns would come back to haunt the Royal Navy soon after. The Germans had several small craft operating on Lake Tanganyika; the small steamers Hedwig von Wissmann and Kingani, plus the larger Graf von Gotzen which was under construction at the start of the war. All would be armed with weapons taken from Konigsberg, or from the survey ship Mowe, scuttled earlier in the war. Britain and her Belgian allies had no response. These vessels gave the Germans strategic mobility round the waters of the lake. Any attempt at an Allied advance into German-held territory could be outflanked by troops moved across the lake. The Allies had no immediate response to the German craft; while the Belgians had the parts for a steamer available, they could not risk beginning construction, as they could not prevent the Germans raiding the shipyard where it was built. To break the deadlock, the RN dispatched an expedition under the command of the eccentric lieutenant-commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simson to take two fast motorboats across country to Lake Tanganyika. Spicer originally asked for these to be named Cat and Dog, but when these were denied, managed to secure the names Mimi and Toutou ('miaow' and 'woof' in French) for them. After an arduous journey, they arrived on the lake in late 1915, and began work on a harbour at Kalemie. On the 26th December, the German Kingani approached Kalemie to reconnoitre the base; taken by surprise by the faster, more heavily armed British craft, she was soon captured and brought into service as the Fifi ('tweet' in French). On the 9th February, Hedwig would approach the British base, searching for the missing German ship. Again, the British would manage to surprise the Germans, though Toutou had been damaged in the interim and was out of service. Fifi and Mimi would sink Hedwig after a short chase. None of the British craft, nor the Belgian craft that were being brought into service in the breathing room brought by the British were capable of engaging the Gotzen, though. As a result, Spicer-Simson called a halt to operations on the lake for a few months. Meanwhile, Allied forces were beginning to push into German territory around the shores of the lake. Belgian forces threatened the main German base at Kigoma, while the British were moving towards the outlying base of Bismarcksburg. Spicer-Simson was ordered to assist in the attack on Bismarcksburg, but withdrew due to the threat of surface batteries in the fortified settlement; unfortunately, these were dummies, and his withdrawal allowed the German garrison to escape. While the British were attacking Bismarcksburg, the Belgians used seaplanes to bomb Gotzen off Kigoma, though to little effect. As the Belgians moved into Kigoma, the Germans scuttled Gotzen, bringing to an end the naval campaign on the lake. Gotzen would be raised after the war, and still serves as a ferry to this day.
There were other, minor naval engagements in African and Asian waters. On the 26th August 1914, the British cruiser Highflyer found the German armed liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse coaling off the Moroccan coast, swiftly sinking her. The later armed raider Wolf made a successful cruise off the African coast and in the Indian Ocean, laying mines off Cape Town, Colombo and Bombay (Mumbai). The Royal Navy made a number of raids along the Asian coast of Turkey, helped to fend off an Ottoman attack against the Suez Canal, and supported an advance by British and Indian troops up the Euphrates River, as well as supporting the Arab uprising from the Red Sea.
In the far east there was only one major land action, the Siege of Tsingtao (Now Qingdao, I will use Tsingtao for consistency as that is how the battle is remembered to posterity.), where Germany had maintained a Chinese concession of a 99 year lease, essentially negotiated at gunpoint in 1898. In the intervening years, the Germans had built up their concession into a bustling port, not to mention creating the namesake brewery.
With the outbreak of war, a small German garrison of several thousand occupied the area, not enough to carry out offensive operations, but a sizable enough defensive contingent. Additionally, and of more immediate concern, was the presence of Central Powers' naval forces in the region and based out of Tsingtau, and their merchant fleet which traveled not just from Tsingtao but the German Pacific islands as well, resulting in the British reaching out to the Japanese to become involved and assist in naval interdiction, despite misgivings as none of the Western powers wanted Japan to actually contribute in the West and thus have claim to the spoils. In any case British diplomats were instructed in August, 1914:
As our warships will require some time to locate and destroy the German warships in Chinese waters, it is essential that the Japanese should hunt out and destroy the German armed merchant cruisers who are attacking our commerce now. If the Japanese Government would employ some of their warships in this way it would be of the very greatest assistance to us. It means, of course, an act of war against Germany, but we do not see how this is to be avoided.
The British need not have asked. The Japanese were as eager as could be to join in. Not in Europe, but certainly in their own backyard where they saw German colonies ripe for the taking. In fact, by the time they communicated to the British ambassador that they were willing to assist, it was clear to him in his report that preparations for an attack on Tsingtao were in "advanced stages". If anything, this was more than the British wanted. Naval assistance was more vital than a garrison that was all bottled up anyways and could be dealt with in due time, but as the Japanese were going to go at it no matter what, they felt that had no choice but to simply join in.
When the Germans, as expected, refused the Japanese demand to withdraw from Tsingtao and through Japan turn it over to the Chinese, they began to blockage the port in late August, which consisted of three full squadrons from the Japanese Navy, and a mere pair of British ships. As ground forces began to be marshalled, they too were similarly disproportionate. For the 4,500 or so defenders, the Japanese collected together 50,000 men, and 144 artillery pieces, which were supported by 1,200 British soldiers, drawn from the South Wales Borders and the 36th Sikhs.
The first 20,000 were landed in early September, some as far as 150 miles from Tsingtao, and began marching through Chinese territory in a manner little different from an occupier in the way that they foraged from the land, and seized government buildings, as well as all rail access. Taking their slow, deliberate time, upon reaching the defenders themselves, the Japanese constructed an extensive network of siegeworks - "one of the most scientific sieges in history" as the British study of the battle would term it - and began their bombardments. The defenders, knowing they would not receive relief, held out best the could, but ran out of ammunition for their own artillery, and surrendered on November 7th, despite insinuations from Wilhelm II that they ought to fight to the last. The Japanese quickly moved in to occupy the city.
The aim of the Japanese was not well disguised, less about defeating Germany than it was about benefiting from Germany's loss. With the defeat of the garrison, and occupation by a large Japanese force, they had little interest in now leaving, and in fact after 3 months of a blockade and little over a week of real fighting, they had little interest in participating in the war at all! They had what they wanted, having wrested control of the German Chinese possessions, as well as occupied several Pacific islands formerly being exploited by Germany. Once the immediacy of victory was no longer assumed and leaders realized more was needed, requests for Japanese soldiers on the Western front were made... and ignored. An American would observe late on in the war the simple lack of concern the Japanese government gave to German citizens within their territory when he noted:
The Japanese have not disturbed any German residents…all are welcome to stay and continue their occupations as before—even though German editors are so very “continuing” in their way of writing that they publish most outrageous and hostile editorials daily. We wait in amazement to see how much longer Japanese magnanimity will ignore such a breach of common sense and press laws.
Similarly the prisoners of war, mostly German but some Austo-Hungarian sailors and marines as well, enjoyed a fairly pleasant captivity, well cared for, and officers even allowed to keep their swords in their possession. More a public curiosity than anything else, they were allowed considerable cultural interaction with the Japanese people until their ultimate repatriation in 1921.
Japan would only again show interest in 1918 when the Entente powers sought to intervene in the Russian Civil War, but again of course, for wholy selfish regions as it allowed them to get involved in Northern China.
As for what they had already taken from Germany, not to mention the environs that they had also occupied in doing so, the Chinese government requested them to leave but they were ignored, and the Japanese simply tightened their controls, appointing Japanese nationals to important Customs positions, and establishing a Japanese controlled government of the region that was even less charitable to the Chinese than had been Germany's. Although the failure of Japan to see all of their Twenty-One Demands met, due to lack of support from the European powers would be humiliating and lead to a long held grudge, control of Tsingtao, and the surrounding Shandong Province was not one that they lost support on. They couldn't openly keep it, but the terms negotiated in the 1921-1922 Washington Conference that saw them end their occupation in 1922, meant they kept a well established economic toe-hold, including the beer factory, but maybe more importantly, joint control of the railroad.
So as to your whole question, this of course is a bit narrow. Africa I leave to someone else, and /u/thefourthmaninaboat has you more than covered for the naval side of things. Even the Far East there is a bit more to talk about, at the very least the Pacific islands, but insofar as the war in China went, it was brief, not particularly bloody, but hardly without any impact, as it first played out as a key stepping stone in the rising spector of Japanese power in the region and their drive for an Asian 'Manifest Destiny", but then also in the end saw a general lack of support from the Western Powers, who certainly didn't want that, and helped drive in the wedge that would eventually see the former allies at war a little over two decades later.
Sources
Elleman, Bruce A. Wilson and China : A Revised History of the Shandong Question Routledge, 2015.
Hiery, Hermann. The Neglected War the German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1995.
Leon Godshall, Wilson. Tsingtau Under Three Flags. Commercial Press, 1929.
Minohara, Toshihiro, Hon, Tze-Ki, and Dawley, Evan N. The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s Brill, 2014.
Murphy, Mahon. "Brücken, Beethoven und Baumkuchen: German and Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War and the Japanese Home Front" in Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial. eds. Joachim Bürgschwentner & Matthias Egger & Gunda Barth-Scalmani. Brill, 2014. 125-145
Xu, Guoqi. Asia and the Great War : A Shared History Oxford University Press, 2016.
In Africa, Entente forces launched campaigns to capture the German colonies in Togoland (modern Togo), Kamerun (Cameroon), Southwest Africa (Namibia), and East Africa (Tanzania). In all of these areas but East Africa, the campaign was brief and largely uneventful. All of these colonial campaigns were preceded by some form of effort on the part of the German colonial authorities in their respective colonies to negotiate for neutrality
Togoland, being lightly defended and surrounded by hostile French and British colonies, had its capital of Lome fall without a fight in the opening days of the campaign, and, although the small garrison of German officers, colonists, and local Askaris fought a few brief skirmishes, the colony had been occupied in under 20 days.
In Kamerun, the situation was similar to Togoland, although the size of the colony and larger garrison meant that the German forces were able to hold on significantly longer. British moves into Kamerun from neighboring Nigeria would mark the opening of any hostilities in Sub-Saharan Africa during WW1, but the campaign moved significantly slower and the German garrison here put up more of a fight. The coastal capital of Douala would fall in 1914, but the Germans withdrew to the interior and held on through 1915. The last German forces in Kamerun would surrender in 1916 with the end of the siege of Mora in the far north.
The campaign in Southwest Africa was a bit slower to start and was pursued by the more independent South African forces rather than the British, French, and Belgian colonial forces that had invaded the other colonies. The British government asked South Africa to invade neighboring German Southwest Africa, and as it moved to do so, a rebellion broke out among some of the more disloyal Boer officers. German forces launched a pre-emptive invasion once it became clear that South Africa was to invade, but they were repulsed. Once the South Africans had recovered and the Boer rebellion had been put down, the South Africans conquered the colony fairly quickly (given its vast size), with the last Germans surrendering in July 1915.
The East African campaign was the longest lasting and the most strategically significant one. Although German authorities here had attempted to remain neutral, General Lettow-Vorbeck pushed for an aggressive campaign from the start. Raids were performed into neighboring Kenya, Mozambique, and the Tanganyika region by German colonial forces, and, despite being heavily outnumbered, Lettow-Vorbeck's forces managed to repulse the initial British invasion at Tanga and Kilimanjaro. At sea, the light cruiser SMS Konigsberg ambushed and sunk a British protected cruiser at Zanzibar. After the British dispatched significant forces to hunt it down, Konigsberg retreated to the Rufiji Delta, where the pursuing British ships couldn't follow it.
The initial failures by British colonial forces in the region would lead to a lull in the campaign as more forces were brought in and reorganized. Lettow-Vorbeck scored another victory in early 1915 when he defeated a British garrison at a town on the Kenyan-East African border, and the British would attain their first significant land victory in the theater in June 1915 when a wireless station on the west end of Lake Victoria was captured. At the Rufiji Delta, the British had brought in two shallow-draught monitors and a number of aircraft to locate and destroy Konigsberg. They succeeded in doing so in July of that year, but the shallow waters the cruiser was sunk in meant that the Germans were able to salvage much of the equipment on the ship, including several of its 105mm guns. These guns would be significant, as they were given to land forces and were carried along with Lettow-Vorbeck's forces, staying in action until late 1917. At the end of the year, the British had moved two small armed steamers overland to Lake Tanganyika, where they succeed in destroying the German naval forces there and securing naval supremacy over the lake.
1916 would mark the start of the most signficant campaigning in East Africa in WW1. German forces had grown to over 20,000 German officers and Askaris, and Entente forces had grown to over 70,000. In mid 1916, the British and Belgians launched attacks from the Uganda, Kenya, Nyasa, and Congo sectors. Rwanda and Burundi were overrun quickly by Belgian forces, and the Germans suffered their first significant defeat in the theater at Tabora. However, while the overwhelming force of the Entente forces pushed deep into German East Africa, they were unable to totally defeat Lettow-Vorbeck's forces. Lettow-Vorbeck retreated away from the Entente forces, setting up ambushes and often resorting to scorched-earth tactics to let attrition take its toll. The Germans made their way south, ultimately fighting their way into Mozambique. Meanwhile, attrition ground Allied efforts to a halt, preventing them from capturing Lettow-Vorbeck.
1917 saw the British work to reorganize their supply lines to allow them to catch up with Lettow-Vorbeck, while the Germans invaded Portuguese Mozambique. The invasion of Mozambique was significant, as the victories scored there over Portuguese garrisons gave the dwindling German forces fresh supplies and modern rifles (as opposed to the obsolete Gewehr '71s they had started the war with). The British would resume their pursuit in mid 1917, but were unable to trap the German forces, which would work their way back north out of Mozambique and make their way into Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia) in 1918. At this point, however, Lettow-Vorbeck's forces had dwindled. Exhausted, short on supplies, and riddled by disease, some units had been captured, and attrition had reduced their numbers to fewer than 2,000. Nevertheless, the surprise invasion did mean that Lettow-Vorbeck's forces were able to capture a town in Northern Rhodesia without a fight two days after the Armistice was signed in Europe. When news of the Armistice finally reached Lettow-Vorbeck the next day, he agreed to a ceasefire, and he formally surrendered the last German forces in Africa on November 25, 1918.
Others have covered the battles and campaigns that took place on the African continent, so I want to take a step back and address your question "what impact did the Great War have on European colonies in Africa and Asia?"
Approximately 2 million Africans participated directly in the First World War, as soldiers, porters and laborers both in theaters in West, South and East Africa, as well as on the Western front.
Roughly half of that total, 1 million men, were involved in the East Africa Campaign. The ratios of Askaris (soldiers) to baggage carriers was usually 1:3. Back-of-the-envelope math would put that at approximately 250,000 askaris (in German, Belgian, British, and Portuguese service) to 750,00 carriers, (though /u/Slipperybiscuit gives figures of 400,000 and 600,000 respectively) . During that four-year-long campaign, over 100,000 men died, the majority of whom were carriers and whose deaths were caused by disease exacerbated by overwork. That number also reflects civilian deaths due to disruptions, disease and famine caused by passing armies on the march requisitioning food supplies (and replacement carriers) from villages in the campaign theater.
Aside from campaigns on the continent, Africans also participated extensively in the Western Front. The French recruited large numbers of West African soldiers, called Tirailleurs Senegalais (even though many of them were not from what is now Senegal). Different estimates suggest 140,000 to 180,000 Tirailleurs fought on the Western Front^1, while the international encyclopedia for the first world war states that approximately 450,000 soldiers from France's African colonies were deployed, mostly in Europe. That discrepancy reflects heavy deployment of Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and Somali troops. The encyclopedia also provides wide ranges for combat deaths, from 25-65,000 for tirailleurs, 12-100,000 for Algerians, 2-9,000 Moroccans.
Of course, Africans were also used as laborers in Europe. 25,000 black South Africans were enlisted in the South African Native Labor Contingent for work in France.^3 Ditto, France extensively recruited North Africans to replace French workers in the Army, as well as recruiting Indochinese laborers in logistics (nurses, office staff, materiel transport).
On the home-front in Africa, the war was also very disruptive. The exertion of mobilizing massive numbers of men for combat in Europe and in Africa carried the logistical challenge of providing enough foodstuffs to feed these men.
For African households, the recruitment of men as soldiers or war-related laborers meant households losing productive men.
In the case of Kenya, White coffee plantation owners pressured the colonial government to 'encourage' Kikuyu women and children to work on coffee plantations to make up for the labor shortage. Troublingly, working on coffee plantations did not relieve these women and children of the obligation to work their own subsistence farm plots on the Native Reserves.^4
One more impact of the war was the mass mobilization of men to participate, and their subsequent demobilization and return home.
I am sure that you have heard of the great influenza pandemic of 1918, and how demobilized soldiers brought the flu from European battlefields to the United States.
Well, influenza had comparable impact in Africa. Similarly, increased mobility lead to increased incidence of smallpox, tuberculosis and sleeping sickness in wartime and immediate post-war era.
Sources
1 Palgrave Handbook of Colonial and Post Colonial Africa chapter 13 "Africa and the First World War" by Meshak Owino. pp 343
2 Cambridge Handbook of African History, Vol 7 1905-1940 by J.D. Fage and Roland Oliver. pp 16.
3 Palgrave Handbook pp 343
4 Palgrave Handbook "African Women in Colonial Economies" by Judith Blyfield. pp 155
The First world War made a sizable impact on Africa, but the conflicts on the African continent are often left out of histories of the first world war because the African theatre is not seen as having impacted the outcome of the European theatre, but I will argue that it did. The biggest change the war made to the African continent was Germany’s loss of all of it’s fledgling African colonies in Togoland, the Cameroons, German South West Africa (Namibia), and German East Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania).
The German controlled African colonies where in a tough position when the war began, because many where directly bordered on multiple sides by French, British, and later Portuguese colonies, all of which would eventually become involved in the conflict against Germany. South West Africa, Togoland, and the Cameroons fell relatively quickly while putting up token resistance, but German East Africa is what I would consider the most interesting area of conflict. Under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the colony’s Schutztruppe composed of mixed European and African soldiers have the distinction of being the first German troops to take over British territory of the war, as well as being among the last German soldiers to surrender after fighting until the end of the war in 1918. Lettow-Vorbeck fought a series of set piece battles in the early days of the war, including defeating an amphibious assault on the coastal town of Tanga in 1914 that should have given the British a taste of how difficult amphibious assaults under fire could be a year before the Disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Lettow-Vorbeck was under no illusions that he could defeat the allied armies arrayed against him, so instead he sought to run a guerilla campaign that would tie down as many allied troops as possible so that they could not be utilized on other fronts. Through these efforts, as many as 400,000 Allied military personnel where involved in the east African theatre, with a further 600,000 African porters utilized to transport goods for the military operations on the allied size. this tying down of troops that could have gone to other fronts is the conflict's largest impact on the greater war, and the eventual loss of the German colonies in Africa is the largest impact on Africa because of the conflict.
Further reading: My Reminisces of East Africa-Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck Vorbeck’s account of the east Africa campaign Tip and Run: the untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa Includes an excellent account of the battle for Tanga and the strategic blunders made by both sides. Lettow-Vorbeck had a bad habit of scouting on his own via bicycle, and nearly pedaled on his own into the British soldiers on multiple occasions. The African Rank and File: Social implications of colonial military service in the king’s African rifles 1902-1964-by Timothy H Parsons Excellent book for the perspective of the Kings African Rifles on both the first and second world war.