Colonisation of Africa - Misplaced Pages

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Ancient colonization

North Africa in particular experienced colonization from Europe and Asia Minor in the early historical period.

The city of Carthage was established in what is now Tunisia by Phoenician colonists, becoming a major power in the Mediterranean by the 4th century BC. Over time the city changed hands, falling to the Romans after the Third Punic War, where it served as the capital city of the Roman's African province. Gothic Vandals briefly established a kingdom there in the 5th century, which shortly thereafter fell to the Romans again, this time the Byzantines. The Ancient Egyptian civilization also fell under the sway of the Greeks, later passing to the Romans. The whole of Roman/Byzantine North Africa eventually fell to the Arabs in the 7th century, who brought the Islamic religion and Arabic language (see History of Islam).

Early modern period

(Insert post-7th century, pre-1880 information here.)

"New Imperialism" (1880-1900)

Amalgamation of industrial cartels in the era of finance capitalism, in the forms of larger corporations and mergers and alliances of separate firms, and technological advancement during the Second Industrial Revolution, particularly the increased utilization of electric power and internal combustion engines fueled by coal and petroleum, were mixed blessings for British business during the late Victorian era. The ensuing development of more intricate and efficient machines along with monopolistic mass-production greatly expanded output and lowered production costs. As a result, production often exceeded domestic demand. Among the new conditions, more markedly evident in Britain, the forerunner of Europe’s industrial states, were the long-term effects of the severe ‘Long Depression’ of 1873-96, which had followed fifteen years of great economic instability. Business after 1873 in practically every industry suffered from lengthy periods of low—and falling—profit rates and price deflation .

Some powerful industrial lobbies and government leaders in Britain, such as Joseph Chamberlain, concluded that that profits were falling because too many manufactures and too much capital were chasing too few markets. In such overseas markets, whether in colonial areas or in nominally sovereign, pre-industrial states outside Western Europe, with their cheep labor, limited competition, and abundant raw materials, a greater premium was often possible for investments of such surplus capital.

But unfortunately for Britain, as the Long Depression had bred longstanding fears regarding economic decline and the emergent strength of trade unionism and socialism, Europe descended into an era of aggressive national rivalry with newly industrializing nation-states that were merely securing colonies before they strictly professed to needing them. German imperialists, for instance, argued that Britain’s world power position gave the British unfair advantages on international markets, thus limiting Germany’s economic growth and threatening its security . Their reasoning was that markets might soon become glutted, and a nation’s economic survival depend on its being able to offload its surplus products elsewhere. British reactionaries hence concluded that formal that formal imperialism was necessary for Britain because of the relative decline of the British share of the world’s export trade and the rise of German, American, and French economic competition.

Continental political developments in the late nineteenth century also rendered such an imperial competition feasible. The decline of Pax Britannica, glaring after the Franco-Prussian War, was made possible by recent changes in the European and world economies and in the continental balance of power, such as the breakdown of the Concert of Europe and the consequent establishment of nation-states in Germany and Italy. Protectionism and formal empire, characteristic of an era neo-mercantilism during the age of New Imperialism, thus became the major tool of ‘semi-peripheral’, newly industrialized states, such as Germany, seeking to usurp Britain’s position at the ‘core’ of the global capitalist system . In Britain, a strategically minded and opportunistic Disraeli, thus ushered in this age of empire for empire’s sake in reaction to both depression at home and a shifting balance of power on the Continent with his watershed Crystal Palace Speech of 1873.

The Age of Imperialism, to an extent, was the by-product of an undisputable flight of capital. Imperialism, in a sense, heralded a consistent, but gradual internationalization of economic connections from what contemporary World Systems Theorists, Dependency Theorists, and neo-Marxists would call the ‘core’ of the industrial countries to an overseas ‘periphery’. New Imperialism, in a sense, was one way of capturing new overseas markets. By the eve of the Great War, Europe, for instance, represented the largest share (27 percent) of the global ‘zones of investment’, followed by North America (24 percent), Latin America (19 percent), Asia (16 percent), Africa (9 percent), and Oceania (5 percent) for all industrial powers. Britain, the forerunner of Europe’s capitalist powers, however, was clearly the chief world investor, though the direction of its investments underwent a striking change, becoming oriented less toward Europe, the United States, and India, and more toward the rest of the Commonwealth and Latin America. Formal imperialism was often a last resort—an attempt to subjugate new markets in largely tropical areas, largely organized according to seasonal patterns and not wage productivity, where informal control was relatively difficult. Hobson observed this during the Boer War, concluding “It is not indeed necessary to own a country in order to do trade with it or to invest capital in it.” Such theory is justified when one considers this broader movement of European capital from domestic markets and to other industrial states or overseas in self-governing settler colonies and nominally sovereign states in Asia and Latin America, aside from formal colonies. Imperialism, in a sense, does not merely refer to the appropriation by the western nations of vast expanses of Asia and Africa. New Imperialism was just one means of many of securing overseas markets.

Here is a list of the partition of Africa from the years 1885 to 1914; it shows the colonies as they were known then and who ruled them:

British

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 to Cairo railway.