The Scramble for and Partition of West (Central) Africa

This chapter offers a historiographical survey of the Scramble for Africa as well as the necessary historical background information to understand the remainder of this book. The main point of the chapter is that most historians have not made a sufficient distinction between the Partition of and the Scramble for Africa: the former refers to the state-based Partition of the 1870s and 1880s with the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–1885 as its apex, the latter as a longer-term process in which private actors competed for Africa’s resources such as palm oil. To this end, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that the Scramble already started in the mid-nineteenth century with the African transition from the slave trade to the so-called ‘legitimate commerce’ in agricultural commodities and natural resources, whereas the Partition took place in two short bursts of activity in the 1880s and 1890s when European imperial powers sought to conquer territories across the continent. The chapter goes on to argue that the economic interests of the Scramble and the political interests of the Partition converged in the late nineteenth century into the system of concession companies that existed across Africa, where private capital was given free rein through monopolies over huge swathes of land, as well as the people living in those territories. Finally, the chapter also offers an extensive introduction to the history of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo between 1875 and 1914, particularly with regard to the economic, social and political policies of the Belgian king Leopold II, who ruled the Congo Free State as a private fiefdom until the Belgian take-over in 1908.