The Scramble for Africa

The Scramble for Africa, roughly 1881 to 1914, refers to the extraordinarily rapid colonial partition of nearly the entire African continent among European powers, which controlled scarcely ten percent of Africa's land in 1870 but had carved up all but Ethiopia and Liberia into colonial territories by the eve of the First World War. The process was formalized without any African representation at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, convened by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, at which European powers agreed rules for claiming African territory and drew colonial boundaries with little regard for existing African political, ethnic or linguistic divisions, boundaries that endure as the borders of many modern African states. Driven by industrial-era competition for raw materials and markets, nationalist prestige among rival European powers, and new military and medical technology, including quinine prophylaxis against malaria, that made sustained European occupation of tropical Africa newly viable, the scramble produced deeply exploitative colonial economies and, in cases such as Belgian King Leopold II's Congo Free State, campaigns of forced labor and violence that killed millions. The era's colonial administrative structures shaped African governance, economies and internal conflicts long after the independence movements of the mid-twentieth century.