Honors World History Unit 7 Review: The Scramble for Africa

New Imperialism is the burst of European empire-building between about 1870 and 1914. Earlier European empires in Africa mostly held coastal trading posts. In 1870, Europeans controlled roughly 10% of the continent, and by 1914 they controlled about 90%.

Historians group the motives into categories, and a strong essay names more than one. Industrial factories needed raw materials like rubber, palm oil, cotton and copper, and investors wanted new markets. Nationalism turned colonies into measures of prestige, so when Britain claimed land, France and Germany felt pressure to claim land too. Strategic routes mattered, especially the route to India through the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869.

Ideas made conquest feel acceptable at home. Social Darwinism misapplied Darwin's theory of natural selection to races and nations, claiming Europeans were the "fittest" to rule. Missionaries and the "civilizing mission" framed takeover as a favor to Africans, and Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden" became shorthand for that attitude.

Motives explain only half of it. Europeans could act on those motives because of new tools. Quinine cut malaria deaths, steamships carried troops up rivers, the telegraph linked colonies to capitals, and the Maxim gun (1884) gave small European forces an enormous firepower advantage.

The Scramble for Africa was the rush by European powers to claim African territory, mostly between 1881 and 1914. It moved fast because each claim triggered another.

Several moves set it off around the same time. Henry Morton Stanley signed treaties along the Congo River for King Leopold II of Belgium starting in 1879, and France's Pierre de Brazza signed rival treaties north of the river in 1880. France made Tunisia a protectorate in 1881. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 to protect the Suez Canal, and in 1884 Germany declared protectorates over Togo, Cameroon and Southwest Africa (modern Namibia).

Much of the land was taken by chartered companies, private businesses given government permission to govern territory. Examples include the Royal Niger Company and Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company. In 1888, the Ndebele king Lobengula signed the Rudd Concession, which he understood as a limited mining deal. Rhodes's company used it to justify occupying the region that became Rhodesia, a common pattern of treaties being stretched far beyond what African rulers agreed to.

Rivalries nearly caused European wars. At Fashoda in Sudan in 1898, British and French forces faced off before France backed down. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.

The Berlin Conference ran from November 1884 to February 1885 and set European rules for claiming Africa. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck hosted it, partly to manage rivalries that could spark a war in Europe and partly to raise Germany's standing as a new colonial power.

Fourteen states attended, including the United States and the Ottoman Empire. No African ruler was invited, even though the conference concerned the whole continent.

The final agreement, the General Act, declared open trade in the Congo basin and open navigation on the Congo and Niger rivers. It required powers claiming new coastal territory to notify the others and establish authority there, a rule often called effective occupation. Separately, states at the conference recognized Leopold II's International Association of the Congo through bilateral agreements. Leopold's Congo state was established under his personal rule in 1885.

A common confusion is that the delegates sat with a map and drew Africa's borders. They mostly did not. Most borders came from later treaties between pairs of powers, like the Anglo-German agreement of 1890. The conference's rules still sped up the rush, because powers now had to occupy land quickly to keep it. The resulting borders often split peoples apart, as with the Maasai between British Kenya and German East Africa or the Somali across four different rulers.

By the 1920s, the British Empire was the largest in history, covering about a quarter of the world's land. Its roots were older than the Scramble. The East India Company, founded in 1600, took control of Bengal after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act of 1858 ended East India Company rule and transferred the company's territories and administration to the Crown. The British Raj included directly governed British India and princely states ruled indirectly under British oversight.

India shaped British policy in Africa because Britain wanted to protect the route to it. Britain took the Cape Colony from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars and kept it in 1814. It bought Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal in 1875 and occupied Egypt in 1882. Cecil Rhodes dreamed of a chain of British colonies from Cape Town to Cairo.

Conquest relied on firepower. At Omdurman in Sudan in 1898, about 10,000 Mahdist soldiers died, while Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army lost fewer than 50 men. The discovery of gold near Johannesburg in 1886 intensified British interest and tensions with the Boer republics, contributing to the South African War (1899-1902). British concentration camps held both Boer and Black African civilians, and tens of thousands died in them.

Britain often governed through indirect rule. In Northern Nigeria, Frederick Lugard kept the Muslim emirs in place but under British officials. Where many white settlers lived, as in Kenya's highlands, Britain took land directly for European farms.

Colonial rule reshaped African politics, economies and societies, and most of those changes were designed to serve Europe.

Politically, colonial borders grouped rivals together and split communities apart, and these lines mostly became the borders of independent states. Colonizers also hardened ethnic categories. In Rwanda, Belgian authorities introduced identity cards in the 1930s that classified people as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa.

Economically, colonies were pushed into producing one or two cash crops or minerals for export. The Gold Coast, now Ghana, became the world's largest cocoa exporter by 1911. Railways mostly ran from mines and plantations to ports rather than linking African regions to each other. Colonial governments often required hut or poll taxes in cash, which pushed many Africans toward wage labor, trade or cash-crop production. Many left home to work on settler farms or in distant mines. In settler colonies like Kenya and South Africa, Africans lost their best land.

Socially, mission schools spread Christianity and European languages and created a small Western-educated elite. That elite later used European ideas about rights and self-rule against colonizers, and leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta came from it.

When you evaluate claims that colonialism brought development, ask who the roads, railways and schools were built for and who profited. Infrastructure existed, but it was built mainly to move wealth out.

Start with the name, because it causes confusion. From 1885 to 1908, the Congo was King Leopold II's personal property, officially the État Indépendant du Congo, not a colony of the Belgian government. It became the Belgian Congo in 1908, when Belgium took it over, and it stayed a colony until independence in 1960.

Leopold ran the Congo for profit, especially after the 1890s rubber boom created by bicycle and car tires. Villages received rubber quotas. The Force Publique, African soldiers under European officers, enforced them by holding women and children hostage, burning villages and flogging people with the chicotte, a hippo-hide whip. Soldiers had to account for every bullet, so they cut off hands as proof, and living people were mutilated too.

The Congo's population fell sharply because of violence, famine, disease and falling birth rates. Some estimates put the total population loss at about 10 million, or roughly half the population, but the lack of reliable censuses means historians debate the figure. E. D. Morel, a shipping clerk, noticed that ships went to the Congo carrying guns and ammunition and came back full of rubber and ivory. Roger Casement's 1904 report documented the abuses, and Morel founded and led the Congo Reform Association with support from Casement and others.

Belgian rule ended the worst of the rubber terror but stayed coercive. Katanga's copper enriched the company Union Minière, and uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine went into the U.S. atomic bombs of 1945.

Africans resisted colonization everywhere, and some won major victories. Fix the myth that Africa was taken without opposition before you write about this period.

At Isandlwana in January 1879, a Zulu army overwhelmed a British force, though Britain defeated the Zulu at Ulundi that July. In Sudan, Mahdist forces took Khartoum in 1885 and ruled independently until Omdurman in 1898. Samori Touré held off the French in West Africa from the 1880s until his capture in 1898 by building a professional army, making his own rifles and moving his entire state east. The biggest success came at Adwa in 1896, where Emperor Menelik II's army, armed with modern rifles he had bought, defeated Italy and kept Ethiopia independent.

Other uprisings came after colonial rule was established. In 1896-1897, the Shona and Ndebele rose against the British South Africa Company, with the spirit medium Nehanda as a leader. The Asante queen mother Yaa Asantewaa led a 1900 war after a British governor demanded the sacred Golden Stool. In German East Africa, the Maji Maji rebellion (1905-1907) united many groups who believed blessed water would turn bullets to water. Germany responded with a famine strategy that caused many tens of thousands of deaths, and in Southwest Africa it carried out the 1904-1908 genocide of the Herero and Nama.

Resistance also took nonmilitary forms, including diplomatic missions to London, trade boycotts and religious movements. Most armed resistance failed because of the firepower gap and because colonizers recruited African soldiers and exploited local rivalries.

This topic is France's overseas colonial empire, not Napoleon's earlier wars in Europe. By 1914, France held the second-largest empire after Britain, much of it in North and West Africa.

It started with Algeria, invaded in 1830. Resistance led by Abd al-Qadir lasted until 1847, and Algeria became a settler colony where about a million Europeans eventually lived. France legally treated Algeria as part of France itself, which made the later independence war especially bitter. France then expanded from its base in Senegal across West Africa, joined the colonies into French West Africa in 1895 with Dakar as the capital from 1902, and created French Equatorial Africa in 1910. It also made Tunisia (1881) and Morocco (1912) protectorates and annexed Madagascar in 1896.

France's official ideal was assimilation, the idea that colonized people could become French by adopting French language and culture. In practice, very few did. Residents of Senegal's Four Communes could vote, and in 1914 Blaise Diagne became the first Black African elected to the French parliament. Most Africans were subjects under the indigénat, a legal code allowing punishment without trial, and faced forced labor. Building the Congo-Ocean Railway (1921-1934) cost the lives of an estimated 17,000 or more workers. France also recruited African soldiers, the tirailleurs sénégalais, to extend French rule in Africa and later to serve in World War I.