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shaped by imperial boundaries
“We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediments that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were”
“We (the British and the French) have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot ever trod: we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediments that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.”
Lord Salisbury, British Prime Minister, 1906.
PREAMBLE
Since the 15th Century, Europeans had got familiar with the coasts of West Africa, and established settlements along the coast to facilitate trade; in particular, the transatlantic slave trade.
There was little interest in driving colonization inland before the 1870s except in the Cape region (South Africa) and in Algeria, which the French had turned into a settler colony. Forty years later, the situation would be radically different; in 1910, only Liberia and Ethiopia escaped European rule.
At the inception of colonialism in Africa, the alliance of European nations had carved up Africa into 50 political domains.
To gain a grip of the factors that influenced and enabled the partitioning of Africa and the…
