Causes of the Scramble for Africa

Between 1876 and 1914 almost the entire African continent was partitioned among the European colonial powers. In 1876, only a small fraction of Africa was under formal European control; by 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent. The argument of this article is that the Scramble was a contingent process whose outcome was not predetermined, and that the question of causation is best answered by treating the economic, strategic, ideological, and personal factors as a single set of interacting causes rather than competing candidates for the single most important one. The historiography has moved, over the last forty years, towards this more integrated reading, and the most useful work on the question now treats the economic and the strategic as mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive.

The Economic Interpretation

The most influential explanation of the Scramble has been the economic one, associated above all with J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902) and V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). The argument was straightforward: the European powers, in the era of the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914), had developed a chronic problem of overproduction and underconsumption. The European capitalists needed new markets abroad to absorb their surplus production, and Africa was the obvious destination.

The economic interpretation was immensely influential in the twentieth century, and it remains the most familiar popular explanation of the Scramble. The evidence for it, however, has been the subject of considerable criticism. The economic historians of the 1960s and 1970s — D. K. Fieldhouse, Peter Cain, and Anthony Hopkins in particular — pointed out that the European economic interest in Africa was, in the 1880s, very limited. The African trade in the 1870s and 1880s was dominated by the exchange of European manufactured goods for African primary products, and the value of the trade was small compared with the trade of Europe with Europe, with the Americas, and with Asia. The capital that was invested in Africa in the 1880s and 1890s was small compared with the capital that was invested in Europe itself.

The “gentlemanly capitalism” thesis of Cain and Hopkins, advanced in British Imperialism (1993), was a more sophisticated version of the economic interpretation. The thesis is that the British imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century was driven by the interests of the City of London, the banks, the financial services, and the trading houses, rather than by the interests of industrial capital. The City, in this context, was the principal beneficiary of the British imperial expansion, and the British state, in its late-Victorian and Edwardian phases, was, in important ways, the instrument of the City. The thesis has been the subject of substantial debate, and it has been criticised by economic historians who point out that the City’s interest in Africa was, in many respects, modest. The thesis, however, has been a major contribution to the historiography of the Scramble, and it has influenced a generation of scholarship.

The Political-Strategic Interpretation

The most influential alternative to the economic interpretation has been the political-strategic one, associated above all with the work of Robinson and Gallagher, The Imperialism of Free Trade (1953), and D. K. Fieldhouse, Colonialism, 1870–1945 (1981). The argument is that the Scramble was, in the main, the result of strategic and political pressures, and that the economic motivation was secondary. The British, in particular, were reluctant imperialists: they preferred the “imperialism of free trade” — the maintenance of free access to markets and raw materials, without the burden of formal colonial administration. The British were drawn into formal colonial expansion, on this view, by the actions of the French, the Germans, and the Belgians, who threatened to close off the African markets to British commerce.

The political-strategic interpretation has been the most influential in the post-1970s historiography of the Scramble. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the most important British colonial expansion of the period, is explained in this literature as a response to the threat to British communications with India and to the strategic position in the Mediterranean, rather than as a consequence of the economic interest in the Egyptian economy. The British expansion in West Africa, similarly, is explained as a response to the French expansion in West Africa and the German annexation of Cameroon. The British expansion in East Africa, similarly, is explained as a response to the German expansion in East Africa and the Italian expansion in the Horn of Africa.

The political-strategic interpretation has, however, its own problems. The British reluctance to acquire formal colonies is, in some respects, overstated. The British, in the 1880s and 1890s, were quite prepared to acquire colonies in Africa when it suited their interests, and the British expansion in the Rhodesias, in East Africa, and in West Africa was not, in many respects, a reluctant response to the actions of other powers. The British, in this light, were not so much reluctant imperialists as pragmatic imperialists, willing to acquire colonies when it suited them and reluctant to acquire them when it did not. The historian John Darwin, in The Empire Project (2009), has argued that the political-strategic interpretation and the economic interpretation are best treated as complementary rather than competing: the strategic calculation required the colonial expansion, the colonial expansion was paid for by the economic interests, and the two worked together.

The Role of Individuals

The most striking feature of the Scramble is the role of individuals. The most famous of these is King Leopold II of Belgium, who established the International Association of the Congo in 1877 and was the driving force behind the Congo Free State. Leopold was not a major European power, and his establishment of a personal colony in the Congo was a remarkable achievement. The other individuals who played important roles include Bismarck, who in 1884 made the German decision to acquire colonies in West and East Africa; Jules Ferry, the French foreign minister, who was the principal architect of the French colonial expansion in West and Central Africa; Cecil Rhodes, who established the British South Africa Company and the Rhodesias; and Frederick Lugard, who was the principal architect of the British expansion in Nigeria.

The role of individuals in the Scramble has been the subject of a substantial revisionist literature. The older tradition, of which the work of H. E. G. Robinson and the popular account by Richard Cox is representative, treated the Scramble as a consequence of broader forces and played down the role of individuals. The more recent scholarship, of which the work of John Lonsdale, Bruce Berman, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire is representative, has insisted on the importance of individuals in the process. The Scramble, on this more recent view, was the product of a complex interaction between broader forces and individual decisions, and the individuals themselves shaped the outcomes in many ways.

The Role of African Resistance

The role of African resistance in the Scramble has been one of the most significant revisions of the post-1960s historiography. The older tradition, of which the work of Robinson and Gallagher is representative, treated the European powers as the principal actors and the African societies as the passive objects of the partition. The post-independence African historiography, of which the work of A. Adu Boahen, J. F. Ade Ajayi, and the contributors to the Cambridge History of Africa is the most distinguished representative, has insisted on the active African response. The African rulers, on this more recent view, were not simply the passive objects of the European partition; they were active participants in the process, and they made choices that shaped the outcome.

The African response to the European partition was complex. Some African rulers, like Menelik II of Ethiopia and Samori Ture of the Mandinka, were able to resist the European partition for decades. Others, like Lobengula of the Ndebele, were forced to accept the European protectorate but tried to maintain their internal autonomy. Still others, like the kings of Buganda, actively sought the European alliance in order to maintain their position against their African rivals. The European partition, in this sense, was not a simple process of European conquest; it was a complex set of negotiations, alliances, and conflicts in which the African societies played an active role.

The most striking example of African resistance was the Ethiopian victory over the Italians at the Battle of Adwa on 1 March 1896. The battle, in which an Ethiopian army of perhaps 100,000 men under Emperor Menelik II defeated an Italian army of some 17,000 men under General Oreste Baratieri, was a decisive moment in the history of the Scramble. The Italian defeat at Adwa forced the Italian government to renounce its claim to an Italian protectorate over Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian independence was preserved. The battle has been the subject of substantial historical and political work, and it became a symbol of African resistance to European colonialism. The Ethiopian example, as the historian Bahru Zewde has shown in A History of Modern Ethiopia (1991), demonstrated that African resistance was possible, and the Ethiopian victory was the model that other African statesmen, from Nkrumah to Nyerere, invoked in the post-independence period.

The Ideological Dimension

The ideological dimension of the Scramble is the most difficult to assess, but it is also the most important. The European partition of Africa was accompanied, and in part justified, by a substantial ideological apparatus. The new imperialism of the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a set of ideas about race, civilisation, and the destiny of the European peoples that gave the partition a moral and political meaning. The most important of these ideologies was the ideology of “civilising mission” — the idea that the European peoples had a duty to bring the benefits of European civilisation to the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

The ideology of “civilising mission” was, in important respects, a sincere belief on the part of many European administrators, missionaries, and intellectuals. The most famous statement of the ideology was the speech of the French colonial administrator Jules Ferry to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1884, in which he argued that the European powers had a duty to bring the benefits of European civilisation to the peoples of Africa. The ideology was, however, also a justification for the European conquest and exploitation of Africa, and it has been the subject of substantial critical work since the 1960s.

The most important recent contribution to the ideological dimension of the Scramble has been the work of Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978) and the subsequent Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said’s argument, broadly, is that the European imperial expansion was accompanied by a substantial apparatus of representation that constructed the non-European peoples as the Other, as the inferior, as the object of European knowledge and power. Said’s work has been the subject of considerable critical debate, and his argument has been refined and qualified by later scholarship. The work of Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994), has produced a more nuanced account of the cultural interaction between the European and the non-European. The work of Christopher Bayly, in Empire and Information (1996) and The Birth of the Modern World (2004), has situated the ideological dimension of the Scramble in the broader context of the modern world.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Scramble for Africa has been substantially revised since the 1970s. The older tradition, of which the work of J. A. Hobson, Lenin, and the early British imperial historians is representative, treated the Scramble as a consequence of the European search for markets and raw materials. The more recent scholarship, of which D. K. Fieldhouse, Robinson and Gallagher, and the work of John Lonsdale, Bruce Berman, and the contributors to the Cambridge History of Africa is representative, has produced a more nuanced picture. The Scramble, on this more recent view, was the result of a complex set of economic, political, and strategic factors, and the European powers were drawn into the partition by the actions of their rivals. The current generation of historians, of whom the work of Frederick Cooper, John Lonsdale, John Darwin, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a more integrated picture. The Scramble, on this most recent view, was a complex and contingent process whose causes are not reducible to any single factor.

In this Section

Other Sections