By KiddieDaily Editors · 2026-06-29 · 4 min read · 1 source

Scramble for Africa: How European Empires Took Over a Continent

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Scramble for Africa: How European Empires Took Over a Continent Mark Cartwright The Scramble for Africa describes the competition between European imperial powers to first control trade and then territory in Africa in the final two decades of the 19th century.

1781255005 --> Scramble for Africa How European Empires Took Over a Continent 1 days left Server Costs Fundraiser 2026 It costs $20,000 a year to run our servers, and we need your help to pay for them! --> The Scramble for Africa describes the competition between European imperial powers to first control trade and then territory in Africa in the final two decades of the 19th century. The reasons these powers were interested in Africa included its resources like ivory, gold, and palm oil, control of trade routes, and the prestige of possessing a global empire.

Additional motivations included the desire to spread Christianity and what Europeans called 'civilisation.' The dominant powers in the scramble were Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and Italy. The result of the Scramble for Africa was a continent partitioned on the map by a cartographer's ruler, but with a physical reality of damaging divisions between local peoples and traditional trade networks. Natural resources and indigenous peoples were ruthlessly exploited for profit.

By the early 20th century, only two African states were free from some sort of European control. Palm oil, ivory, rubber, groundnuts, and gold were just some of Africa's resources that European states coveted. Africa had long been a source of slaves, but this particular trade was being replaced by others by the second half of the 19th century.

Diamonds were added to the list of riches after their discovery at Kimberly in Southern Africa in 1867. Massive, world-changing gold deposits would be discovered at Witwatersrand, also in Southern Africa, in 1886. The discoveries of gold and diamonds would inspire more prospectors and colonists to try their luck all over Africa, everyone hoping to find equal treasure but more often than not being disappointed.

All of the above developments came at just the right time for many European economies, as explained by The Cambridge Encyclopedia of History: The 'Great Depression' of the international capitalist economy during the last three decades of the 19th century made prices and profits unstable; merchants trading in Africa warned their governments that their future prosperity might depend on developing new African outlets for exports and investment. As competition heated up between the European powers to grab Africa's resources and control its great rivers, it was recognised that some rules of conquest should be established to avoid empires stepping on each others' toes and potentially causing a war between them that could spill over onto the European continent. This was particularly true for the three main rivals: Britain, France, and Germany.

The result of this concern was the Berlin Conference 1884-5. Of particular interest to the main delegates was the question of who would control Central Africa and the continent's larger rivers. It is significant of attitudes at the time that no representatives from any African states were invited to Berlin.

The conference, although it did not actually divide the continent, provided a framework by which Africa could, in the near future, be partitioned into European areas of effective control and so is widely considered the beginning of a distinct acceleration in the scramble that was, strictly speaking, already underway. What the Berlin agreements did, besides establishing that the major rivers should be accessible to everyone, was to establish that "the claims of a European government to a particular region would only be recognized if the European power in question was already effectively in control of that region" (Reid, 153). This was a far from clear definition of colonial rights as the imperialist powers saw them.

Further, what exactly constituted effective control or occupation was much debated. Effectively, the vague phrasing and informality of the agreements made in Berlin that all of Africa was now up for grabs only meant imperialist powers were now obliged to actually have a presence in an area of Africa, rather than merely point their diplomatic finger at it on a map and say, "that bit is mine." This consequence contains some irony since the leaders who convened in Berlin had hoped merely to control present colonial activity in Africa, call into question rather vague historical claims (particularly by Portugal), and limit future activity to trade, but they had, as time would tell, only succeeded in accelerating, widening, and deepening the process of territorial acquisition. European powers were now all too keen to demonstrate 'effective occupation' by whatever means necessary and, in some cases, were keen to take a slice of the continent simply to prevent a European rival from doing so.

When claims were clear, treaties were signed between European powers, often mutually recognising claims in a sort of “you take that slice and we'll have this slice” arrangement.

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