11.1 — The World of 1900 and the Scramble for Africa

Between November 1884 and February 1885, representatives of fourteen states met in Berlin to agree rules for the partition of Africa.

No African was present.

The conference did not itself divide the continent — that is a common simplification. What it did was agree the procedure: that a power claiming territory must notify the others and must establish "effective occupation" to have the claim recognised.

And that rule started a race. In 1870 European powers controlled roughly 10 percent of Africa, mostly coastal. By 1914 they controlled about 90 percent. Only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent (Chapter 7.8).

Thirty years, one continent, and the borders drawn then are the borders today.

What made it possible

Africa's interior had resisted European penetration for four centuries, and three things changed in a few decades.

Quinine. Malaria killed European soldiers and traders at extraordinary rates — mortality among Europeans on the West African coast in the early nineteenth century ran so high that it was called the white man's grave. Quinine, extracted from cinchona bark, was known as a treatment and was established as a prophylactic taken daily from the 1850s. European mortality in West Africa fell dramatically. A disease barrier that had held for centuries was removed by a South American tree bark.

Steamships and the telegraph. Shallow-draught river steamers could ascend the Niger, Congo and Nile. The telegraph allowed a capital to direct an expedition on another continent.

And the machine gun. The Maxim gun, from 1884, was the first fully automatic weapon, firing hundreds of rounds a minute from a single barrel.

Omdurman, 1898, is the illustration. A British-Egyptian force with Maxim guns and modern artillery faced a Sudanese army of around 50,000. Roughly 10,000 Sudanese were killed and around 47 British. Hilaire Belloc's couplet — whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not — was satire and was an accurate description.

Adwa in 1896 is the exception that proves the point (Chapter 7.8): Ethiopia had bought modern rifles and artillery, and defeated an Italian invasion decisively. Where the technological gap was closed, the outcome changed.

Why they wanted it

Economics, and the economics is more complicated than the standard account.

Raw materials: rubber for the new bicycle and then car industries, palm oil, cotton, cocoa, and minerals — gold and diamonds in South Africa, copper in Katanga and Northern Rhodesia.

And markets, which mattered less in practice than in rhetoric. Most colonies were not profitable for the metropolitan economy as a whole. They were profitable for specific companies and individuals, and the costs of administration and defence were borne by the taxpayer. This is a recurring finding in the economic history of empire and it explains why the political constituency for empire was narrow and intense while the cost was broad and diffuse.

Strategy. Once one power took territory, the others took adjacent territory to deny it — the logic of a race rather than of a calculation. Egypt mattered to Britain because of the Suez Canal and the route to India, and everything up the Nile mattered because of Egypt.

Prestige. A great power had colonies; therefore Italy and Germany, newly unified (Chapter 10.7), needed them.

And ideology. The claim that European rule was a duty owed to less advanced peoples — Kipling's phrase, the white man's burden, published in 1899 and addressed to the United States about the Philippines. Chapter 8.9 traced how Enlightenment ideas of progress were converted into this.

The Congo

The worst case, and it was not a state's colony. It was a man's private property.

Leopold II of Belgium acquired the Congo Free State in 1885 as his personal possession, presented at Berlin as a humanitarian and free-trade venture.

The system he ran was quota extraction. Villages were required to deliver quantities of wild rubber. Concession companies and the Force Publique enforced the quotas by taking women and children hostage until the rubber arrived, and by punishment when it did not.

The severed hands are the detail that became known internationally. Soldiers were required to account for ammunition, and were expected to produce a hand for each cartridge fired, which produced mutilation of the living to make up numbers.

The scale is estimated at several million deaths from killing, starvation, exhaustion and disease — the most commonly cited figure is around 10 million, or roughly half the population, and the estimate is genuinely uncertain because no baseline census exists.

And it became known because of a campaign. E. D. Morel, a shipping clerk in Liverpool, noticed that ships going to the Congo carried guns and chains and returned with rubber and ivory, with no goods going in trade — which told him the rubber was not being bought. He resigned and spent his life on it. Roger Casement, a British consul, produced an official report from a journey up the river. Photographs of mutilated survivors were circulated. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness came from his own time on a Congo steamer.

The Congo Reform Association is the first international human rights campaign of the modern type, and it worked: Belgium annexed the territory from Leopold in 1908. Conditions improved and forced labour continued.

What colonial rule actually did

Across the continent, with variation.

Cash crops replaced subsistence. Cotton, cocoa, groundnuts and palm oil were imposed or incentivised, which raised export earnings and made populations dependent on world prices and vulnerable to famine when those prices fell.

Forced labour was widespread — for railways, roads, mines and porterage, under various legal forms including tax obligations payable only in cash, which compelled wage labour.

Land alienation in settler colonies. Kenya's White Highlands, Rhodesia's land apportionment, and South Africa's Natives Land Act of 1913, which reserved about 7 percent of the country for the African majority.

Indirect rule, the British system, governed through existing or appointed chiefs. It was cheap and it froze and distorted local authority — chiefs became agents of the state rather than answerable to their people, and in places without chiefs the British appointed some, creating hierarchies that had not existed.

Ethnic categorisation hardened fluid identities into fixed ones, exactly as the Indian census did (Chapter 6.19). Rwanda is the extreme case: Belgian administration issued identity cards recording Hutu or Tutsi status, converted a partly fluid social distinction into a fixed legal one, and favoured one group in administration and education. Chapter 11.11 shows where that ended.

And what was provided: railways to ports, some schools mostly mission-run, some medical services, and the suppression of some practices including slavery within Africa — which was real and which was accompanied by forced labour that was not always distinguishable from it.

The world of 1900

To place it: this is the international system that produced Chapter 11.2.

Britain — the largest empire in history, a quarter of the world's land and population, dependent on naval supremacy, and industrially being overtaken.

Germany — the strongest industrial and military power in Europe, unified only since 1871, with a political system that gave the Kaiser and the general staff control of foreign policy (Chapter 10.7), and a conviction that it deserved a world role.

France — recovering, allied with Russia, and unable to forget Alsace-Lorraine.

Russia — enormous, industrialising fast from a low base, autocratic, and unstable after the 1905 revolution.

Austria-Hungary — a multinational empire of a dozen nationalities in an age of nationalism, which is a slow-motion structural crisis.

The Ottoman Empire — losing territory steadily in the Balkans.

The United States — the largest economy in the world by 1900, having taken the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam from Spain in 1898 and fought a brutal counterinsurgency in the Philippines.

And Japan — the one non-European power to industrialise (Chapter 9.13), which defeated Russia in 1904–05, the first defeat of a European great power by an Asian one in modern times. Its effect across Asia was enormous — it was noticed in India, in China, in Turkey and in Egypt, and it is cited by nationalist writers everywhere as proof that European supremacy was not permanent.

And the world was economically integrated to a degree not reached again until the 1990s — trade, capital flows and migration were all at extraordinary levels, the gold standard linked the currencies (Chapter 9.7), and telegraph cables connected the continents.

Norman Angell published The Great Illusion in 1910, arguing that the economies of Europe were so interdependent that war between them would be economically ruinous and therefore irrational.

He was right about the economics and wrong about the conclusion, and that error — that interdependence prevents war — is one worth remembering, because it is made regularly.

Where this shows up in your life

Africa's borders, and the conflicts they contain.

The countries' economic structures — commodity dependence, transport running to ports, and industries built elsewhere.

And the museums. Chapter 7.8 covered the Benin bronzes. The objects taken in this period fill European collections, and their restitution is an active argument in several countries.

And the general point about technology and power. A thirty-year window in which one region had a decisive military and medical advantage produced a partition of a continent whose consequences are permanent. The window closed — Adwa showed it could be closed, and the twentieth century closed it everywhere — and the borders drawn during it did not.

What the next page covers

In June 1914 a Bosnian Serb student shot an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, and within six weeks the great powers of Europe were at war. Chapter 11.2 explains how that happened — the alliance system and why it converted a local crisis into a general war, the mobilisation timetables that removed the time to negotiate, the Schlieffen Plan that made a war in the east into an invasion of Belgium, and the honest assessment of responsibility, which has been argued for a hundred years.