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The Great Game
Scramble for Africa
The Scramble for Africa (also known as the Race for Africa or Partition of Africa) was the invasion, occupation, colonization, and annexation of African territory by European powers during the New Imperialism period between 1881 and 1914. The Berlin Conference of 1884, which regulated European colonization and trade in Africa, is often cited as a convenient starting point. Consequent to the political and economic rivalries among the European empires, in the last quarter of the 19th century, the partitioning of Africa was how the Europeans avoided warring amongst themselves over Africa. The last 59 years of the 19th century saw the transition from "informal imperialism" (hegemony) by military influence and economic dominance, to the direct rule of colonies.
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The Portuguese had been the first post-Middle Ages Europeans to firmly establish settlements, trade posts, permanent fortifications and ports of call along the coast of the African continent, from the beginning of the Age of Discovery, in the 15th century. There was little interest in, and less knowledge of, the interior for some two centuries thereafter.
European exploration of the African interior began in earnest at the end of the 18th century. By 1835, Europeans had mapped most of northwestern Africa. In the middle decades of the 19th century, the most famous of the European explorers were David Livingstone and H. M. Stanley, both of whom mapped vast areas of Southern Africa and Central Africa. Arduous expeditions in the 1850s and 1860s by Richard Burton, John Speke and James Grant located the great central lakes and the source of the Nile. By the end of the 19th century, Europeans had charted the Nile from its source, traced the courses of the Niger, Congo and Zambezi Rivers, and realized the vast resources of Africa.
Even as late as the 1870s, European states still controlled only 10 percent of the African continent, all their territories being near the coast. The most important holdings were Angola and Mozambique, held by Portugal; the Cape Colony, held by the United Kingdom; and Algeria, held by France. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent of European control.
Technological advancement facilitated overseas expansionism. Industrialisation brought about rapid advancements in transportation and communication, especially in the forms of steam navigation, railways, and telegraphs. Medical advances also were important, especially medicines for tropical diseases. The development of quinine, an effective treatment for malaria, enabled vast expanses of the tropics to be accessed by Europeans.
Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the last regions of the world largely untouched by "informal imperialism", was also attractive to Europe's ruling elites for economic reasons. During a time when Britain's balance of trade showed a growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets due to the Long Depression (1873–96), Africa offered Britain, Germany, France, and other countries an open market that would garner them a trade surplus: a market that bought more from the colonial power than it sold overall. Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to run an unfavourable balance of trade (which was increasingly offset, however, by the income from overseas investments).
As Britain developed into the world's first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly important sector of its economy. Invisible financial exports kept Britain out of the red, especially capital investments outside Europe, particularly to the developing and open markets in Africa such as to the white settler colonies, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia.
In addition, surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap materials, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement for imperialism arose from the demand for raw materials unavailable in Europe, especially copper, cotton, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, and tin, to which European consumers had grown accustomed and upon which European industry had grown dependent. Additionally, Britain wanted the southern and eastern coasts of Africa for stopover ports on the route to Asia and its empire in India.
However, in Africa – exclusive of the area which became the Union of South Africa in 1910 – the amount of capital investment by Europeans was relatively small, compared to other continents. Consequently, the companies involved in tropical African commerce were relatively small, apart from Cecil Rhodes's De Beers Mining Company. Rhodes had carved out Rhodesia for himself; Léopold II of Belgium later, and with considerable brutality, exploited the Congo Free State. These events might detract from the pro-imperialist arguments of colonial lobbies such as the Alldeutscher Verband, Francesco Crispi and Jules Ferry, who argued that sheltered overseas markets in Africa would solve the problems of low prices and over-production caused by shrinking continental markets.
William Easterly of New York University, however, disagrees with the link made between capitalism and imperialism, arguing that colonialism is used mostly to promote state-led development rather than "corporate" development. He has stated that "imperialism is not so clearly linked to capitalism and free markets... historically there has been a closer link between colonialism/imperialism and state-led approaches to development."
While tropical Africa was not a large zone of investment, other regions overseas were. The vast interior between the gold and diamond-rich Southern Africa and Egypt, had, however, key strategic value in securing the flow of overseas trade. Britain was thus under intense political pressure to secure lucrative markets against encroaching rivals, in China and the British Empire's eastern colonies, most notably India, Malaya, Australia and New Zealand. Thus, securing the key waterway between East and West – the Suez Canal – was crucial. The rivalry between the UK, France, Germany and the other European powers account for a large part of the colonization. Thus, while Germany, which had been unified under Prussia's rule only after the 1866 Battle of Sadowa and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, was hardly a colonial power before the New Imperialism period, it would eagerly participate in the race. A rising industrial power close on the heels of Britain, it had not yet had the chance to control overseas territories, mainly due to its late unification, its fragmentation in various states, and its absence of experience in modern navigation. This would change under Otto von Bismarck's leadership, who implemented the Weltpolitik (World Politics) and, after putting in place the basis of France's isolation with the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary and then the 1882 Triple Alliance with Italy, called for the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, which set the rules of effective control of a foreign territory. Germany's expansionism would lead to the Tirpitz Plan, implemented by Admiral von Tirpitz, who would also champion the various Fleet Acts starting in 1898, thus engaging in an arms race with Britain. By 1914, they had given Germany the second largest naval force in the world (roughly 40% smaller than the Royal Navy). According to von Tirpitz, this aggressive naval policy was supported by the National Liberal Party rather than by the conservatives, thus demonstrating[weasel words] that the main supports of the European nation states' imperialism were the rising middle classes.
The scramble for African territory also reflected a concern for the acquisition of military and naval bases for strategic purposes and the exercise of power on an international scene. The ability to influence international events depended largely upon new weapons – steel ships driven by steam power – and for the maintenance of these growing navies, coaling stations and ports of call were required. Defence bases were also needed for the protection of sea routes and communication lines, particularly of expensive and vital international waterways such as the Suez Canal.
Colonies were also seen as important aspects of "balance of power" negotiations – useful as items of exchange at times of international bargaining. Colonies carrying a heavy native population were also important as a source of military power; Britain and France used large numbers of British Indian and North African soldiers respectively in many of their colonial wars. In the great age of nationalism there was strong pressure for a nation to acquire an empire as a status symbol; the idea of "greatness" became inextricably linked with the sense of "duty" that many European nations used to justify their imperialistic ambitions.
Germany began its world expansion in the 1880s under Bismarck's leadership, encouraged by the national middle class. Some of them, claiming themselves of Friedrich List's thought, advocated expansion in the Philippines and in Timor; others proposed to set themselves in Formosa (modern Taiwan), etc. At the end of the 1870s, these isolated voices began to be relayed by a real imperialist policy, which was backed by mercantilist thesis. In 1881, Hübbe-Schleiden, a lawyer, published Deutsche Kolonisation, according to which the "development of national consciousness demanded an independent overseas policy". Pan-germanism was thus linked to the young nation's imperialist drives. In the beginning of the 1880s, the Deutscher Kolonialverein was created, and got its own magazine in 1884, the Kolonialzeitung. This colonial lobby was also relayed by the nationalist Alldeutscher Verband. Generally Bismarck was opposed to widespread German colonialism, but he had to resign at the insistence of the new German Emperor Wilhelm II on 18 March 1890. Wilhelm II instead adopted a very aggressive policy of colonisation and introduced colonial expansion in the 20th century with the Weltpolitik (‘World Politics’) strategy.
Germany thus became the third largest colonial power in Africa. Nearly all of its overall empire of 2.6 million square kilometres and 14 million colonial subjects in 1914 was found in its African possessions of Southwest Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Tanganyika. The scramble for Africa led Bismarck to propose the 1884–85 Berlin Conference. Following the 1904 Entente cordiale between France and the UK, Germany tried to isolate France in 1905 with the First Moroccan Crisis. This led to the 1905 Algeciras Conference, in which France's influence on Morocco was compensated by the exchange of other territories, and then to the Agadir Crisis in 1911. Along with the 1898 Fashoda Incident between France and the UK, this succession of international crises reveals the bitterness of the struggle between the various imperalist nations, which ultimately led to World War I.
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While Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was exploring the Kongo Kingdom for France, Henry Morton Stanley also explored it in the early 1880s on behalf of Léopold II of Belgium, who would have his personal Congo Free State. While pretending to advocate humanitarianism and denounce slavery, Leopold II used the most inhumane tactics to exploit his newly acquired lands. His crimes were revealed by 1905, but he remained in control until 1908, when he was forced to turn over control to the Belgian government.
France occupied Tunisia in May 1881 (and Guinea in 1884), which partly convinced Italy to join the German-Austrian Dual Alliance in 1882, thus forming the Triple Alliance. The same year, Britain occupied Egypt (hitherto an autonomous state owing nominal fealty to the Ottoman Empire), which ruled over Sudan and parts of Chad, Eritrea, and Somalia. In 1870 and 1882, Italy took possession of the first parts of Eritrea, while Germany declared Togoland, the Cameroons and South West Africa to be under its protection in 1884. French West Africa (AOF) was founded in 1895, and French Equatorial Africa in 1910.
Italy continued its conquest to gain its "place in the sun". Following the defeat of the First Italo–Ethiopian War (1895–1896), it acquired Italian Somaliland in 1889–90 and the whole of Eritrea (1899). In 1911, it engaged in a war with the Ottoman Empire, in which it acquired Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (modern Libya). Enrico Corradini, who fully supported the war, and later merged his group in the early fascist party (PNF), developed in 1919 the concept of Proletarian Nationalism, supposed to legitimise Italy's imperialism by a mixture of socialism with nationalism: "We must start by recognizing the fact that there are proletarian nations as well as proletarian classes; that is to say, there are nations whose living conditions are subject...to the way of life of other nations, just as classes are. Once this is realised, nationalism must insist firmly on this truth: Italy is, materially and morally, a proletarian nation." The Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1935–36), ordered by Benito Mussolini, would actually be one of the last colonial wars (that is, intended to colonize a foreign country, opposed to wars of national liberation), occupying Ethiopia which had remained the last African independent territory apart from Liberia, for five years. The Spanish Civil War, marking a phase of what some call the European Civil War, began in Spanish Morocco in 1936.
On the other hand, the British abandoned their "splendid isolation" in 1902 with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which would give the Empire of Japan the opportunity to pursue war with Russia without the risk of Russia's allies taking arms against Japan. Japan was consequently victorious during the war against Russia (1904–1905). The UK then signed the Entente cordiale with France in 1904, and, in 1907, the Triple Entente which included Russia, thus pitted against the Triple Alliance which Bismarck had patiently assembled.
David Livingstone's explorations, carried on by Henry Morton Stanley, excited imaginations. But at first, Stanley's grandiose ideas for colonisation found little support owing to the problems and scale of action required, except from Léopold II of Belgium, who in 1876 had organised the International African Association. From 1869 to 1874, Stanley was secretly sent by Léopold II to the Congo region, where he made treaties with several African chiefs along the Congo River and by 1882 had sufficient territory to form the basis of the Congo Free State. Léopold II personally owned the colony from 1885 and used it as a source of ivory and rubber.
While Stanley was exploring Congo on behalf of Léopold II of Belgium, the Franco-Italian marine officer Pierre de Brazza travelled into the western Congo basin and raised the French flag over the newly founded Brazzaville in 1881, thus occupying today's Republic of the Congo. Portugal, which also claimed the area due to old treaties with the native Kongo Empire, made a treaty with Britain on 26 February 1884 to block off the Congo Society's access to the Atlantic.
By 1890 the Congo Free State had consolidated its control of its territory between Leopoldville and Stanleyville and was looking to push south down the Lualaba River from Stanleyville. At the same time the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes (who once declared, "all of these stars... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets") was expanding north from the Limpopo River sending the Pioneer Column, guided by Frederick Selous, through Matabeleland and starting a colony in Mashonaland. To the West, attention was drawn to the land where their expansions would meet Katanga, site of the Yeke Kingdom of Msiri. As well as being the most powerful ruler militarily in the area, Msiri traded large quantities of copper, ivory and slaves, and rumours of gold reached European ears. The scramble for Katanga was a prime example of the period. Rhodes and the BSAC sent two expeditions to Msiri in 1890 led by Alfred Sharpe, who was rebuffed, and Joseph Thomson who failed to reach Katanga. In 1891 Leopold sent four CFS expeditions. The Le Marinel Expedition could only extract a vaguely worded letter. The Delcommune Expedition was rebuffed. The well-armed Stairs Expedition had orders to take Katanga with or without Msiri's consent; Msiri refused, was shot, and the expedition cut off his head and stuck it on a pole as a "barbaric lesson" to the people. The Bia Expedition finished off the job of establishing an administration of sorts and a "police presence" in Katanga.
The half million square kilometres of Katanga came into Leopold's possession and brought his African realm up to 2,300,000 square kilometres (890,000 sq mi), about 75 times larger than Belgium. The Congo Free State imposed such a terror regime on the colonised people, including mass killings and forced labour, that Belgium, under pressure from the Congo Reform Association, ended Leopold II's rule and annexed it in 1908 as a colony of Belgium, known as the Belgian Congo.
King Leopold II of Belgium's brutality in his former colony of the Congo Free State, now the DRC, was well documented; up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died between 1885 and 1908. According to the former British diplomat Roger Casement, this depopulation had four main causes: "indiscriminate war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases. Sleeping sickness ravaged the country and must also be taken into account for the dramatic decrease in population; it has been estimated that sleeping sickness and smallpox killed nearly half the population in the areas surrounding the lower Congo River.
Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. As the first census did not take place until 1924, it is difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Casement's report set it at three million. William Rubinstein wrote: "More basically, it appears almost certain that the population figures given by Hochschild are inaccurate. There is, of course, no way of ascertaining the population of the Congo before the twentieth century, and estimates like 20 million are purely guesses. Most of the interior of the Congo was literally unexplored if not inaccessible." See Congo Free State for further details including numbers of victims.
A similar situation occurred in the neighbouring French Congo. Most of the resource extraction was run by concession companies, whose brutal methods, along with the introduction of disease, resulted in the loss of up to 50 percent of the indigenous population. The French government appointed a commission, headed by de Brazza, in 1905 to investigate the rumoured abuses in the colony. However, de Brazza died on the return trip, and his "searingly critical" report was neither acted upon nor released to the public. In the 1920s, about 20,000 forced labourers died building a railroad through the French territory.
Ferdinand de Lesseps had obtained many concessions from Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, in 1854–56, to build the Suez Canal. Some sources estimate the workforce at 30,000, but others estimate that 120,000 workers died over the ten years of construction due to malnutrition, fatigue and disease, especially cholera. Shortly before its completion in 1869, Khedive Isma'il borrowed enormous sums from British and French bankers at high rates of interest. By 1875, he was facing financial difficulties and was forced to sell his block of shares in the Suez Canal. The shares were snapped up by Britain, under its Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who sought to give his country practical control in the management of this strategic waterway. When Isma'il repudiated Egypt's foreign debt in 1879, Britain and France seized joint financial control over the country, forcing the Egyptian ruler to abdicate, and installing his eldest son Tewfik Pasha in his place. The Egyptian and Sudanese ruling classes did not relish foreign intervention.
During the 1870s, European initiatives against the slave trade caused an economic crisis in northern Sudan, precipitating the rise of Mahdist forces. In 1881, the Mahdist revolt erupted in Sudan under Muhammad Ahmad, severing Tewfik's authority in Sudan. The same year, Tewfik suffered an even more perilous rebellion by his own Egyptian army in the form of the Urabi Revolt. In 1882, Tewfik appealed for direct British military assistance, commencing Britain's administration of Egypt. A joint British-Egyptian military force ultimately defeated the Mahdist forces in Sudan in 1898. Thereafter, Britain (rather than Egypt) seized effective control of Sudan.
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The occupation of Egypt, and the acquisition of the Congo were the first major moves in what came to be a precipitous scramble for African territory. In 1884, Otto von Bismarck convened the 1884–85 Berlin Conference to discuss the Africa problem. The diplomats put on a humanitarian façade by condemning the slave trade, prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages and firearms in certain regions, and by expressing concern for missionary activities. More importantly, the diplomats in Berlin laid down the rules of competition by which the great powers were to be guided in seeking colonies. They also agreed that the area along the Congo River was to be administered by Léopold II of Belgium as a neutral area, known as the Congo Free State, in which trade and navigation were to be free. No nation was to stake claims in Africa without notifying other powers of its intentions. No territory could be formally claimed prior to being effectively occupied. However, the competitors ignored the rules when convenient and on several occasions war was only narrowly avoided.
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Britain's administration of Egypt and the Cape Colony contributed to a preoccupation over securing the source of the Nile River. Egypt was overrun by British forces in 1882 (although not formally declared a protectorate until 1914, and never an actual colony); Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda were subjugated in the 1890s and early 20th century; and in the south, the Cape Colony (first acquired in 1795) provided a base for the subjugation of neighbouring African states and the Dutch Afrikaner settlers who had left the Cape to avoid the British and then founded their own republics. In 1877, Theophilus Shepstone annexed the South African Republic (or Transvaal – independent from 1857 to 1877) for the British. The UK consolidated its power over most of the colonies of South Africa in 1879 after the Anglo-Zulu War. The Boers protested and in December 1880 they revolted, leading to the First Boer War (1880–81). British Prime Minister William Gladstone signed a peace treaty on 23 March 1881, giving self-government to the Boers in the Transvaal. The Jameson Raid of 1895 was a failed attempt by the British South Africa Company and the Johannesburg Reform Committee to overthrow the Boer government in the Transvaal. The Second Boer War was about control of the gold and diamond industries and was fought between 1899 and 1902; the independent Boer republics of the Orange Free State and of the South African Republic (Transvaal) were this time defeated and absorbed into the British Empire.
The French thrust into the African interior was mainly from West Africa (modern day Senegal) eastward, through the Sahel along the southern border of the Sahara, a territory covering modern day Senegal, Mali, Niger, and Chad. Their ultimate aim was to have an uninterrupted link between the Niger River and the Nile, thus controlling all trade to and from the Sahel region, by virtue of their existing control over the Caravan routes through the Sahara. The British, on the other hand, wanted to link their possessions in Southern Africa (modern South Africa), Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zambia), with their territories in East Africa (modern Kenya), and these two areas with the Nile basin. Sudan (which in those days included modern day Uganda) was obviously key to the fulfilment of these ambitions, especially since Egypt was already under British control. This "red line" through Africa is made most famous by Cecil Rhodes. Along with Lord Milner (the British colonial minister in South Africa), Rhodes advocated such a "Cape to Cairo" empire linking by rail the Suez Canal to the mineral-rich Southern part of the continent. Though hampered by German occupation of Tanganyika until the end of World War I, Rhodes successfully lobbied on behalf of such a sprawling East African empire.
If one draws a line from Cape Town to Cairo (Rhodes' dream), and one from Dakar to the Horn of Africa (now Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia), (the French ambition), these two lines intersect somewhere in eastern Sudan near Fashoda, explaining its strategic importance. In short, Britain had sought to extend its East African empire contiguously from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope, while France had sought to extend its own holdings from Dakar to the Sudan, which would enable its empire to span the entire continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
A French force under Jean-Baptiste Marchand arrived first at the strategically located fort at Fashoda soon followed by a British force under Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British army since 1892. The French withdrew after a standoff, and continued to press claims to other posts in the region. In March 1899 the French and British agreed that the source of the Nile and Congo Rivers should mark the frontier between their spheres of influence.
Although the 1884–85 Berlin Conference had set the rules for the scramble for Africa, it had not weakened the rival imperialisms. The 1898 Fashoda Incident, which had seen France and the UK on the brink of war, ultimately led to the signature of the 1904 Entente cordiale, which reversed the influence of the various European powers. As a result, the new German power decided to test the solidity of the influence, using the contested territory of Morocco as a battlefield.
Thus, on 31 March 1905 Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Tangiers and made a speech in favor of Moroccan independence, challenging French influence in Morocco. France's influence in Morocco had been reaffirmed by Britain and Spain in 1904. The Kaiser's speech bolstered French nationalism and with British support the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, took a defiant line. The crisis peaked in mid-June 1905, when Delcassé was forced out of the ministry by the more conciliation-minded premier Maurice Rouvier. But by July 1905 Germany was becoming isolated and the French agreed to a conference to solve the crisis. Both France and Germany continued to posture up until the conference, with Germany mobilizing reserve army units in late December and France actually moving troops to the border in January 1906.
The 1906 Algeciras Conference was called to settle the dispute. Of the thirteen nations present the German representatives found their only supporter was Austria-Hungary. France had firm support from Britain, Russia, Italy, Spain, and the U.S. The Germans eventually accepted an agreement, signed on 31 May 1906, where France yielded certain domestic changes in Morocco but retained control of key areas.
However, five years later the second Moroccan crisis (or Agadir Crisis) was sparked by the deployment of the German gunboat Panther, to the port of Agadir on 1 July 1911. Germany had started to attempt to surpass Britain's naval supremacy – the British navy had a policy of remaining larger than the next two naval fleets in the world combined. When the British heard of the Panther's arrival in Morocco, they wrongly believed that the Germans meant to turn Agadir into a naval base on the Atlantic.
The German move was aimed at reinforcing claims for compensation for acceptance of effective French control of the North African kingdom, where France's pre-eminence had been upheld by the 1906 Algeciras Conference. In November 1911 a convention was signed under which Germany accepted France's position in Morocco in return for territory in the French Equatorial African colony of Middle Congo (now the Republic of the Congo).
France and Spain subsequently established a full protectorate over Morocco (30 March 1912), ending what remained of the country's formal independence. Furthermore, British backing for France during the two Moroccan crises reinforced the Entente between the two countries and added to Anglo-German estrangement, deepening the divisions that would culminate in World War I.
Following the Berlin conference at the end of the 19th century, the British, Italians and Ethiopians sought to claim lands owned by the Somalis such as the Warsangali Sultanate, the Ajuuraan State and the Gobroon Dynasty.
The Dervish State was a state established by Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, a Somali religious leader who gathered Muslim soldiers from across the Horn of Africa and united them into a loyal army known as the Dervishes. This Dervish army enabled Hassan to carve out a powerful state through conquest of lands sought after by the Ethiopians and the European powers. The Dervish State successfully repulsed the British Empire four times and forced it to retreat to the coastal region. Due to these successful expeditions, the Dervish State was recognized as an ally by the Ottoman and German empires. The Turks also named Hassan Emir of the Somali nation, and the Germans promised to officially recognize any territories the Dervishes were to acquire.
During the period 1904-08 Germany's colonies in German South-West Africa and German East Africa were rocked by separate, contemperaneous native revolts against their rule. In both territories the threat to German rule was quickly defeated once large-scale reinforcements from Germany arrived, with the Herero rebels in German South-West Africa being defeated at the Battle of Waterberg and the Maji-Maji rebels in German East Africa being steadily crushed by German forces slowly advancing through the countryside, and the natives resorted to guerilla warfare. German efforts to clear the bush of civilians in German South-West Africa then resulted in a genocide of the population.
In total, as many as 65,000 Herero (80% of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Namaqua (50% of the total Namaqua population) either starved, died of thirst, or were worked to death in camps such as Shark Island Concentration Camp between 1904 and 1908. Characteristic of this genocide was death by starvation and the poisoning of the population's wells whilst they were trapped in the Namib Desert.
In its earlier stages, imperialism was generally the act of individual explorers as well as some adventurous merchantmen. The colonial powers were a long way from approving without any dissent the expensive adventures carried out abroad. Various important political leaders such as Gladstone opposed colonisation in its first years. However, during his second premiership in 1880–1885 he could not resist the colonial lobby in his cabinet, and thus did not execute his electoral promise to disengage from Egypt. Although Gladstone was personally opposed to imperialism, the social tensions caused by the Long Depression pushed him to favor jingoism: the imperialists had become the "parasites of patriotism" (Hobson). In France, then Radical politician Georges Clemenceau also adamantly opposed himself to it: he thought colonisation was a diversion from the "blue line of the Vosges" mountains, that is revanchism and the patriotic urge to reclaim the Alsace-Lorraine region which had been annexed by the German Empire with the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt. Clemenceau actually made Jules Ferry's cabinet fall after the 1885 Tonkin disaster. According to Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this expansion of national sovereignty on overseas territories contradicted the unity of the nation state which provided citizenship to its population. Thus, a tension between the universalist will to respect human rights of the colonised people, as they may be considered as "citizens" of the nation state, and the imperialist drives to cynically exploit populations deemed inferior began to surface. Some, in colonising countries, opposed what they saw as unnecessary evils of the colonial administration when left to itself; as described in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) – contemporary of Kipling's The White Man's Burden – or in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932).
Thus, colonial lobbies were progressively set up to legitimise the Scramble for Africa and other expensive overseas adventures. In Germany, in France, in Britain, the middle class began to claim strong overseas policies to insure the market's growth. In 1916, Vladimir Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism describing this phenomenon. Even in lesser powers, voices like Enrico Corradini began to claim a "place in the sun" for so-called "proletarian nations", bolstering nationalism and militarism in an early prototype of fascism.
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However, by the end of World War I the colonial empires had become very popular almost everywhere in Europe: public opinion had been convinced of the needs of a colonial empire, although most of the metropolitans would never see a piece of it. Colonial exhibitions had been instrumental in this change of popular mentalities brought about by the colonial propaganda, supported by the colonial lobby and by various scientists. Thus, the conquest of territories were inevitably followed by public displays of the indigenous people for scientific and leisure purposes. Karl Hagenbeck, a German merchant in wild animals and future entrepreneur of most Europeans zoos, thus decided in 1874 to exhibit Samoa and Sami people as "purely natural" populations. In 1876, he sent one of his collaborators to the newly conquered Egyptian Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and Nubians. Presented in Paris, London and Berlin, these Nubians were very successful. Such "human zoos" could be found in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York, Warsaw, etc., with 200,000 to 300,000 visitors attending each exhibition. Tuaregs were exhibited after the French conquest of Timbuktu (discovered by René Caillié, disguised as a Muslim, in 1828, thereby winning the prize offered by the French Société de Géographie); Malagasy after the occupation of Madagascar; Amazons of Abomey after Behanzin's mediatic defeat against the French in 1894. Not used to the climatic conditions, some of the indigenous exposed died, such as some Galibis in Paris in 1892.
Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Parisian Jardin d'acclimatation, decided in 1877 to organise two "ethnological spectacles", presenting Nubians and Inuit. The public of the Jardin d'acclimatation doubled, with a million paying entrances that year, a huge success for these times. Between 1877 and 1912, approximatively thirty "ethnological exhibitions" were presented at the Jardin zoologique d'acclimatation. "Negro villages" would be presented in Paris' 1878 and 1879 World's Fair; the 1900 World's Fair presented the famous diorama "living" in Madagascar, while the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931) would also display human beings in cages, often nudes or quasi-nudes. Nomadic "Senegalese villages" were also created, thus displaying the power of the colonial empire to all the population.
In the U.S., Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, exposed Pygmy Ota Benga in the Bronx Zoo alongside the apes and others in 1906. At the behest of Grant, a prominent scientific racist and eugenicist, zoo director Hornaday, placed Ota Benga in a cage with an orangutan and labeled him "The Missing Link" in an attempt to illustrate Darwinism, and in particular that Africans like Ota Benga are closer to apes than were Europeans. Other colonial exhibitions included the 1924 British Empire Exhibition and the successful 1931 Paris "Exposition coloniale."
From the beginning of the 20th century onwards, the elimination or control of disease in tropical countries became a driving force for all colonial powers. The sleeping sickness epidemic in Africa was arrested due to mobile teams systematically screening millions of people at risk. In the 20th century, Africa saw the biggest increase in its population due to lessening of the mortality rate in many countries due to peace, famine relief, and medicine. Africa's population has grown from 120 million in 1900 to over 1 billion today.
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During the New Imperialism period, by the end of the 19th century, Europe added almost 9,000,000 square miles (23,000,000 km2) – one-fifth of the land area of the globe – to its overseas colonial possessions. Europe's formal holdings now included the entire African continent except Ethiopia, Liberia (which was in many ways an American colony), and Saguia el-Hamra, the latter of which would be integrated into Spanish Sahara. Between 1885 and 1914 Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under its control; 15% for France, 11% for Portugal, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and 1% for Italy. Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire. It was paradoxical that Britain, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to its long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting its advantageous position at its inception. In terms of surface area occupied, the French were the marginal victors but much of their territory consisted of the sparsely populated Sahara.
The political imperialism followed the economic expansion, with the "colonial lobbies" bolstering chauvinism and jingoism at each crisis in order to legitimise the colonial enterprise. The tensions between the imperial powers led to a succession of crises, which finally exploded in August 1914, when previous rivalries and alliances created a domino situation that drew the major European nations into the First World War. Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia to avenge the murder by Serbian agents of Austrian crown prince Francis Ferdinand, Russia would mobilise to assist allied Serbia, Germany would intervene to support Austria-Hungary against Russia. Since Russia had a military alliance with France against Germany, the German General Staff, led by General von Moltke decided to realise the well prepared Schlieffen Plan to invade and quickly knock France out of the war before turning against Russia in what was expected to be a long campaign. This required an invasion of Belgium which brought Britain into the war against Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies. German U-Boat campaigns against ships bound for Britain eventually drew the United States into what had become World War I. Moreover, using the Anglo-Japanese Alliance as an excuse, Japan leaped onto this opportunity to conquer German interests in China and the Pacific to become the dominating power in Western Pacific, setting the stage for the Second Sino-Japanese War (starting in 1937) and eventually World War II.
The British were primarily interested in maintaining secure communication lines to India, which led to initial interest in Egypt and South Africa. Once these two areas were secure, it was the intent of British colonialists such as Cecil Rhodes to establish a Cape-Cairo railway. Control of the Nile was viewed as a strategic and commercial advantage.