Scramble for Africa

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 1 Jan 2002

Chapter Four asks how it was possible for such a tiny bureaucracy to govern so huge an empire, and explores the symbiotic but ultimately unsustainable collaboration between British rulers and indigenous elites, both traditional and new. Chapter Five deals primarily with the role of military force in the period of the ‘Scramble for Africa’, exploring the interaction between financial globalization and the armaments race between the European powers. Though they had been anticipated before, this was the era when three critical modern phenomena were born: the truly global bond market, the military-industrial complex and the mass media.

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Never in human history had there been such drastic redrawing of the map of a continent. By 1914, apart from Abyssinia and Liberia (the latter an American quasi-colony), the entire continent was under some form of European rule. Roughly a third of it was British. This was what came to be known as ‘the Scramble for Africa’ – though the Scramble of Africa might be nearer the mark. The key to the Empire’s phenomenal expansion in the late Victorian period was the combination of financial power and firepower. It was a combination supremely personified by Cecil Rhodes. The son of a clergyman in Bishop’s Stortford, Rhodes had emigrated to South Africa at the age of seventeen because – so he later said – he ‘could no longer stand cold mutton’.

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.* So impressed was Goldie by Lugard’s performance that he hired him to work for his Niger Company. When Northern Nigeria was made a British protectorate in 1900, Lugard was appointed its first High Commissioner; twelve years later he became Governor-General of a united Nigeria. That transformation from trading monopoly to protectorate was typical of the way the Scramble for Africa proceeded. The politicians let the businessmen make the running, but sooner rather than later they stepped in to create some kind of formal colonial government. Although the new African companies resembled the East India Company in their original design, they governed Africa for far shorter periods than their Indian precursor had governed India.

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity
by Paul Collier
Published 10 May 2010

The system that I have sketched—by which natural assets would accrue to citizens by means of revenues flowing into the government budget— looked as though it would gradually be adopted over the ensuing decade. Instead, there followed an unprecedented global commodity boom and what might be called the Scramble for Africa Mark II. The Scramble for Africa Mark I, otherwise known as colonialism, had been between the various European imperial powers over the continent’s natural assets. The Scramble for Africa Mark II was over those same assets, but predominantly between Asia and North America. In this second Scramble China avoided head-to-head competition by offering a new type of deal: it would build infrastructure in return for extraction rights.

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Natural order—the responsible management of nature—can deliver prosperity, but prosperity alone cannot deliver natural order. The tension between prosperity and plunder is now apparent. The world’s voracious demand for raw materials has driven up the prices of natural resources and food to unprecedented levels; it took a global financial crisis to puncture them. In turn, the price hike has triggered a new scramble for Africa, pumping revenues into the continent. China, the giant of the emerging market economies, comes without the baggage of colonialism; indeed, many of the countries of the bottom billion have long regarded it as an ally. But from the perspective of the rich countries, the Chinese arrival in Africa is not just unwelcome competition.

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During the Ethiopian period the explanation for the lack of trees was that the Italians had plundered them. As with the current government, blaming the previous colonizer had obvious advantages. Nor is that the end of the blame chain. Although Eritrea has a complicated colonial history, it was a relatively brief one. Italy was late on the scene in the scramble for Africa and Eritrea was the last place left to grab. As those first Italian colonizers scanned the terrain around the turn of the twentieth century one disappointing feature was the near absence of trees. Although the Italians could scarcely mistake the fact that they were unwelcome, the lack of trees provided an ethical fig-leaf of justification for colonization: indeed a whole fig-forest.

Think Like a Freak
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 11 May 2014

Like a Bad Dye Job, the Truth Is in the Roots A bucket of cash will not cure poverty and a planeload of food will not cure famine . . . How to find the root cause of a problem . . . Revisiting the abortion-crime link . . . What does Martin Luther have to do with the German economy? . . . How the “Scramble for Africa” created lasting strife . . . Why did slave traders lick the skin of the slaves they bought? . . . Medicine vs. folklore . . . Consider the ulcer . . . The first blockbuster drugs . . . Why did the young doctor swallow a batch of dangerous bacteria? . . . Talk about gastric upset! . . . The universe that lives in our gut . . .

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Such an independent history apparently fosters a lasting trust in civic institutions. In Africa, some countries that regained independence from their colonial rulers have experienced brutal wars and rampant corruption; others haven’t. Why? One pair of scholars found an answer that goes back many years. When the European powers began their mad “Scramble for Africa” in the nineteenth century, they carved up existing territories by looking at maps from afar. When creating new borders, they considered two essential criteria: land mass and water. The actual Africans who lived in these territories were not a major concern for the colonialists, since to them one African looked pretty much like the next one.

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. : See Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales, “Long-Term Persistence,” July 2013 working paper; see also earlier versions by same authors: “Long-Term Cultural Persistence,” September 2012 working paper; and “Long-Term Persistence,” European University Institute working paper 2008. Hat tip to Hans-Joachim Voth and Nico Voigtländer, “Hatred Transformed: How Germans Changed Their Minds About Jews, 1890–2006,” Vox, May 1, 2012. 74 ETHNIC STRIFE IN AFRICA: See Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou, “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa,” NBER working paper, November 2011; and Elliott Green, “On the Size and Shape of African States,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 2 (June 2012). 74 THE SCARS OF COLONIALISM STILL HAUNT SOUTH AMERICA AS WELL: See Melissa Dell, “The Persistent Effects of Peru’s Mining Mita,” MIT working paper, January 2010; and Daron Acemoglu, Camilo Garcia-Jimeno, and James A.

Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order
by Jason Sharman
Published 5 Feb 2019

Not only does this view provide an alternative model to explain war and institutional change in the abstract, it also has particular relevance to the transformative geopolitics of the “new imperialism” in the nineteenth century, and the equally fundamental process of European contraction and collapse that followed. Winning in the End: Motives and Means in the New Imperialism Perhaps the starkest example of the changed military balance between Europeans and non-Europeans is the “Scramble for Africa” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From a position of controlling less than 10 percent of Africa in 1876,4 European empires came to span 95 percent of the continent by World War I.5 Not since the time of Cortes and Pizaro 350 years earlier had Europeans achieved such out-sized military results.

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In the early 1880s, however, new land grabs by the French and German governments, and a quixotic bid by the Belgian king for a vast personal fiefdom, set up a dynamic that culminated in the Berlin conference of 1884–1885 and the subsequent division of Africa among the European powers over the next couple of decades.6 This huge change, the conquest of a continent, raises the questions of first why Europeans embarked on the “Scramble for Africa,” and then how they were able to succeed. The first was often a matter of following cultural prompts on the markers of great power prestige, while the “how” of European conquest was at least as much a matter of politics and logistics as battlefield technology. The Motives of the New Imperialism Taking the “why” question first, one of the most relevant books on the subject observes: Historians have by now abandoned the search for the philosopher’s stone that will reveal the identity of the universal motivation that underlay European imperialism.

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Soldiers of Empire: India and British Armies in World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barkey, Karen. 2008. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnhart, Joslyn. 2016. “Status Competition and Territorial Aggression: Evidence from the Scramble for Africa.” Security Studies 25 (3): 385–419. Bayly, C. A. 1998. “The First Age of Global Imperialism, c.1760–1830.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26 (2) 28–47. Bayly, C. A. 2004. The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell. Behrend, Heike. 1999. Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda 1986–97.

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption
by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins
Published 1 Jan 2006

They see the country as only a source of cheap coltan—vital to making semiconductors—and other minerals. Kathleen Kern explores the direct relationship between the suffering of the Congolese people and the low prices Westerners pay for cell phones and laptops. 6 Mercenaries on the Front Lines in the New Scramble for Africa Andrew Rowell and James Marriott Some 30 percent of America’s oil will come from Africa by 2015, and multinational oil companies are increasingly resorting to private armies to protect their operations there. Communities in the Niger Delta have been campaigning for a share of the oil wealth pumped from under their land.

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• Some 30 percent of America’s supply of oil is expected to come from Africa in the next ten years, but U.S. and UK oil companies will be competing with China for access to these reserves. Local communities have been campaigning to gain a share of this new wealth and to prevent environmental destruction of their region. In “Mercenaries on the Front Lines in the New Scramble for Africa,” Andrew Rowell and James Marriott tell how a British expat security officer found himself in the middle of this struggle for oil and power. • According to most estimates Iraq has the world’s second largest oil reserves—and access to Iraq’s oil has been one of the essential elements of U.S. foreign policy.

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DEBT-LED DEVELOPMENT STEVE BERKMAN The $100 Billion Question ELLEN AUGUSTINE The World Bank and the Philippines BRUCE RICH Exporting Destruction 3. INTERVENTION AND DOMINATION: ACCESS TO RESOURCES KATHLEEN KERN The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones ANDREW ROWELL/JAMES MARRIOTT Oil, Mercenaries, and the New Scramble for Africa GREG MUTTITT Hijacking Iraq’s Oil: EHMs at Work 4. THE DEBT TRAP JAMES S. HENRY The Mirage of Debt Relief GLOBAL SOUTH THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD We must put an end to this. You and I must do the right thing. We must understand that our children will not inherit a stable, safe, and sustainable world unless we change the terrible conditions that have been created by EHMs.

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence
by Robert I. Rotberg
Published 15 Nov 2008

Yet, significant divergences from colonialism as it was experienced in Africa—such as China’s fundamental respect for the sovereignty of African states; its active nurturing of relations with African states in international fora; and its interest in African people as consumers rather than laborers—suggest that China and Africa are engaging in postcolonial relations of interdependency, however economically imbalanced these relations may be. A Chinese “Scramble for Africa?” Geopolitical and Macroeconomic Factors Referring to China’s investments and involvement in Africa from 1996 to 2006 as China’s “Scramble for Africa,” critical observers draw a clear comparison between China and European colonial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 Several macroeconomic and geopolitical factors that propelled the European “scramble” for Africa also appear to be at work in China’s recent engagement on the continent. During the European colonial era, as during the past decade of Chinese activity, the objective of external powers in Africa was to gain economic and 04-7561-4 ch4.qxd 9/16/08 4:11 PM Page 67 Engaging Postcolonial Interdependencies 67 political advantage for the interventionist power.4 This overriding reality offers preliminary evidence that China’s current engagement with Africa is (neo)colonial: in this basic analysis, China uses its power to influence relatively weaker African economic and political systems in its own interest.

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“Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian Meets Nigerian Counterpart,” Xinhua (16 July 2001); “Chi Haotian Meets Nigerian Counterpart,” Xinhua (23 April 2002); “Cooperation between China and Nigeria Fruitful, Defense Minister,” Xinhua (25 June 2004); “Luo Zheng, “Cao Gangchuan Holds Talks with Nigerian Defense Minister,” Jiefangjun Bao (8 April 2007). 52. “Chinese Firm May Manage Nigeria’s Defense Industries Group,” Panafrican News Agency (19 September 2004). See also Michael Klare and Daniel Volman, “America, China and the Scramble for Africa’s Oil,” Review of African Political Economy, XXXIII (2006), 305. 53. “Nigeria to Buy Military Equipment Worth $251 Million from China,” Radio Nigeria-Abuja (29 September 2005); “Nigeria: China Donates $3 Million Equipment to Nigerian Armed Forces,” Rhythm FM (28 October 2005); Hagelin, Bromley, and Wezeman, “International Arms Transfers,” 531; Alden, China in Africa, 26; Donovan C.

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While the AU experts appreciated that Chinese investment gave Africa new leverage, they noted criticisms that China was making “no serious effort” to “transfer skills and knowledge to Africa” and urged China to relocate some of its industries to Africa “as a reflection of a true spirit of partnership.”39 In April 2007, the Nigerian government convened a meeting of African foreign policy scholars and diplomats in Abuja on the theme “The New Scramble for Africa”; speakers at the conference expressed fears of Africa being caught up in a new Cold War between China and the West, with African resources as the bone of contention. There are also critical voices among Africa’s rulers. South African President Thabo Mbeki and former Nigerian President Obasanjo both criticized Chinese companies for violating labor and safety standards.

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
by Tim Butcher
Published 2 Jul 2007

Recently appointed as Africa Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, I was doing what every new foreign correspondent must: cramming. My reading list was long. After Africa's early tribal history came the period of exploitation by outsiders, starting with centuries of slavery and moving on to the Scramble for Africa, when the white man staked the black man's continent in a few hectic years at the end of the nineteenth century to launch the colonial era. Then came independence in the late 1950s and 1960s when the Winds of Change swept away regimes that some white leaders had boasted would stand for ever.

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The explorer had found a river that was navigable across much of central Africa and Leopold envisaged it as the main artery of a huge Belgian colony, shipping European manufactured goods upstream and valuable African raw materials downstream. Stanley's Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. Before his trip, white outsiders had spent hundreds of years nibbling at Africa's edges, claiming land around the coastline, but rarely venturing inland. Disease, hostile tribes and the lack of any clear commercial potential in Africa meant that hundreds of years after white explorers first circumnavigated its coastline, it was still referred to in mysterious terms as the Dark Continent, a source of slaves, ivory and other goods, but not a place white men thought worthy of colonisation.

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I thought of their graves back in the overgrown cemetery in Kasongo and shuddered. There is something about the violence of Congo's post-independence period that is seared into the minds of those whites who call themselves African - second- and third-generation colonials whose ancestors took part in the Scramble for Africa that Stanley's Congo trip precipitated. They remember dark fragments of what happened in the Congo after independence in 1960 - killing, rape. anarchy. The two cotton traders of Kasongo were just a small part of a much larger number of victims whose deaths still cast a sinister shadow through the older white tribes of Africa.

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica)
by Jan Morris
Published 22 Dec 2010

BY THE SWORD: Armies, fleets and British belligerence. 22. SOUTH OF THE ZAMBESI : A failure of logic, with battle scenes. 23. THE END OF THE TASMANIANS: The obliteration of a subject race. 24. THE REBEL PRINCE:: Charles Stewart Parnell. 25. THE MARTYR OF EMPIRE: Charles George Gordon. 26. SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA: Coarsening the imperial idea. 27. AN IMPERIAL FULFILMENT: Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, triumphant Britain and a suggestion of the Last Day. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INDEX About the Author Copyright PART ONE The Sentiment of Empire 1837–1850 CHAPTER ONE A Charming Invention IN October 1837 the Honourable Emily Eden, a witty and accomplished Englishwoman in her forty-first year, was accompanying her brother Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India, on an official progress up-country from Calcutta.

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Thus, though it was to be another seven months before Stanley’s exhausted expedition arrived at the estuary of the Congo on the Atlantic shore, that day the Nile was settled. 7 Speke was right, Burton was wrong: but before we leave this, the central saga of exploration in the imperial age, and the beginning of the ‘scramble for Africa’ which was to give a new style to imperialism, let us go back to Bath again, in 1864, and take our leave of the original antagonists. Burton and his wife had characteristically put up at a hotel near the railway station, but Speke stayed no less typically with his cousin, George Fuller, at his agreeable country house Neston Park about ten miles from Bath.

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A favourite Anglo-Sudanese anecdote concerned the English boy taken by his father every Sunday after morning service to pay homage at this shrine. After several weeks of reverent pilgrimage he ventured to ask his father a question. ‘Who is the man,’ he inquired, ‘on Gordon’s back?’ CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Scramble for Africa IN the last week of December, 1895, a curious military force was assembled at a place called Pitsani, in the Bechuanaland Protectorate just across the frontier from the Transvaal Republic—where President Paul Kruger now ruled the destinies of a State transformed by the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand.

Imperial Legacies
by Jeremy Black;
Published 14 Jul 2019

Whether in functional terms or with reference to values, or both, there could be a contrast between empires operating in a highly competitive context, and, on the other hand, those empires that did not face, or acknowledge, comparable imperial powers. The former was the position with Spain and the Ottomans in the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, or with the Europeans in the late nineteenth century during the “Scramble for Africa.” The second was the Chinese position until repeated defeat in the nineteenth century, first by Britain. That contrast between empires is a realist one, to employ the vocabulary of international relations theory, and this point underlines the extent to which values as the driver of imperialism stemmed, in part, from practicalities, and were, in part, expressed in terms of them.

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Tauris, 2012). 24 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 1997). 25 Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Stuart Laing, Tippu Tip: Ivory, Slavery and Discovery in the Scramble for Africa (London: Medina Publishing, 2018). 26 Dan Jones, Tea and Justice: British Tea Companies and the Tea Workers of Bangladesh (London: Bangladesh International Action Group, 1986); Sarthak Sengupta, The Tea Labourers of North East India: An Anthropo-Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2009); Rana Behal, “Tea and Money versus Human Life: the Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840–1908,” Journal of Peasants Studies 19, no. 3 (1992): 142–72.

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For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. 1765 Stamp Act 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol 1966 Defence White Paper Abolitionism Aborigines abroad, term Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in Restraint of Appeals Acton, John Aden Afghan war Africa; North Africa; out of Africa, debate; Scramble for Africa; South Africa; West Africa ahistoricism air policing alien, word Amelioration American Civil War Amin, Idi amnesia; enforced; historical; imperial; postimperial; term Amritsar Massacre Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India, The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars Anglo-Irish Treaty Anglosphere apartheid apologist Appeasement Arminius Arrow Asian Civilisations Museum assimilation Atlantic slavery Attlee, Clement Atwal, Jaspal Australia Australasia Ayers Rock National Park Baden-Powell, Robert banal imperialism Bashford, Alison Bathos Battle of Koregaon Bavaria Bean, Richard Beckles, Hilary Bengal famine Benn, Tony Wedgwood Bevin, Ernest Biggar, Nigel BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) Black Armband view Black Hole of Calcutta Blair, Tony Blighty UK Café Boer War Bolshevism Bose, Subhas Chandra Boston Tea Party Boudicca Braveheart (film) Bringing Them Home, report Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt British Empire; placing, question of British Empire Exhibition bubble, term Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Burma.

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 6 Oct 2011

Even the way the so-called Mother Country played cricket spoke of a new mood in which the old imperial links meant less and less, with the 1932 England touring team shamelessly attempting to intimidate Australian batsmen with ‘bodyline’ bowling: the Australian reaction was so furious that the tour was very nearly cancelled midway through.* How had what had recently seemed eternal verities withered so quickly? The motive force of empire – the impulse to go out and plant the flag – had gone: the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was long over and the business of the British Empire was increasingly administrative. As that great anti-imperialist George Orwell had noticed, technology had changed everything. ‘The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy’, had been in decline for years, he wrote.

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Chapter Six 114 ‘introductions by a’: Smith, Through Unknown African Continents, pp. 363–4. 114 ‘It is religion’: Smith, ‘Christian Missions, Especially in the British Empire’, p. 542. 114 12,000 British missionaries: Missionary societies spent £2 million per year: see Dr Robert Carr, ‘The Evangelical Empire: Christianity’s Contribution to Victorian Colonial Expansion’, www.britishempire.co.uk. 114 ‘Confound all these’: Quoted in Pakenham, Out in the Noonday Sun, p. 102. 114 ‘They spread the’: Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa, p. 182. 114 ‘First the missionary’: Quoted in Pakenham, Out in the Noonday Sun, p. 94. 116 ‘by victories of’: Ogilvie, Our Empire’s Debt to Missions, p. 5. 116 ‘when excited, a’: George Seaver, David Livingstone: His Life and Letters, quoted in Dictionary of National Biography entry. 117 ‘Dr L is out’: Ibid. 117 ‘I am terribly’: ‘David Livingstone’s last letters deciphered’, Guardian, 20 July 2010. 118 ‘his death has’: British Quarterly Review 61 (1875) p. 397. 118 ‘the flag which’: E.

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N., Our Empire’s Debt to Missions: The Duff Missionary Lecture, 1923 (London, 1924) O’Gorman, Francis, Late Ruskin: New Contexts (Aldershot, 2001) O’Hegarty, Patrick S., A History of Ireland under the Union, 1801–1922 (London, 1952) Oldfield, J. R., Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, 1995) Oliver, Roland, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (London, 1957) Orwell, George, Burmese Days: A Novel (London, 1935) ____, Coming up for Air (London, 2000; orig. pub. 1939) ____, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, 1941) ____, The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays and Reportage (New York, 1961) ____, The Road to Wigan Pier (London, 1937) Padmore, George, The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom (London, 1953) Pagden, Anthony, Peoples and Empires: Europeans and the Rest of the World, from Antiquity to the Present (London, 2001) Paice, Edward, World War I: The African Front (New York, 2010) Paine, Thomas, The Political and Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Paine, 2 vols.

Culture and Imperialism
by Edward W. Said
Published 29 May 1994

Entities such as races and nations, essences such as Englishness or Orientalism, modes of production such as the Asiatic or Occidental, all of these in my opinion testify to an ideology whose cultural correlatives well precede the actual accumulation of imperial territories world-wide. Most historians of empire speak of the “age of empire” as formally beginning around 1878, with “the scramble for Africa.” A closer look at the cultural actuality reveals a much earlier, more deeply and stubbornly held view about overseas European hegemony; we can locate a coherent, fully mobilized system of ideas near the end of the eighteenth century, and there follows the set of integral developments such as the first great systematic conquests under Napoleon, the rise of nationalism and the European nation-state, the advent of large-scale industrialization, and the consolidation of power in the bourgeoisie.

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Then there is the hierarchy of spaces by which the metropolitan center and, gradually, the metropolitan economy are seen as dependent upon an overseas system of territorial control, economic exploitation, and a socio-cultural vision; without these stability and prosperity at home—“home” being a word with extremely potent resonances—would not be possible. The perfect example of what I mean is to be found in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which Thomas Bertram’s slave plantation in Antigua is mysteriously necessary to the poise and the beauty of Mansfield Park, a place described in moral and aesthetic terms well before the scramble for Africa, or before the age of empire officially began. As John Stuart Mill puts it in the Principles of Political Economy: These [outlying possessions of ours] are hardly to be looked upon as countries,… but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community.

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But most of the great nineteenth-century realistic novelists are less assertive about colonial rule and possessions than either Defoe or late writers like Conrad and Kipling, during whose time great electoral reform and mass participation in politics meant that imperial competition became a more intrusive domestic topic. In the closing year of the nineteenth century, with the scramble for Africa, the consolidation of the French imperial Union, the American annexation of the Philippines, and British rule in the Indian subcontinent at its height, empire was a universal concern. What I should like to note is that these colonial and imperial realities are overlooked in criticism that has otherwise been extraordinarily thorough and resourceful in finding themes to discuss.

Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa
by Martin Meredith
Published 1 Jan 2007

His triumph in winning the support of the British establishment for a chartered company was due as much to the work of Gifford and Cawston in London as to Rhodes’ own efforts. Finally, he managed to obtain a royal charter for his company only because it suited the interests of Lord Salisbury; preoccupied with the need to keep Britain ahead in the Scramble for Africa among European powers, Salisbury saw a means to extend British influence on the cheap, at no cost to the public exchequer. In harnessing allies to his cause, Rhodes displayed remarkable powers of persuasion. But what was equally influential was the power of his money. Many hitched themselves to Rhodes’ band-wagon lured by the prospect of making their own fortunes.

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In effect it was a valuable gift, which could not, one would think, be accepted without some impairment of independence. Yet there were acceptances in unexpected quarters. Rose Innes was one of the few who declined Rhodes’ offer. Lauded by the press, the Rhodes phenomenon caught the public imagination. With the Scramble for Africa reaching a climax, empire-builders in Africa were regarded as popular heroes. Rhodes was seen as upholding the tradition set by David Livingstone, General Gordon and, more recently, the Welsh-born journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley, blazing a trail that would bring civilisation to a benighted continent.

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Stanley’s account of one of his epic journeys through the jungles of the Congo - In Darkest Africa - had just been published to widespread acclaim. Rhodes’ plans to build railways and telegraphs into the interior and to develop mineral and agricultural resources were held up as examples of what needed to follow. The Scramble for Africa added a sense of urgency, justifying the kind of decisive action that Rhodes was willing to take. In August 1888, an ardent young imperialist, Harry Johnston, after spending the weekend at Lord Salisbury’s residence at Hatfield, wrote an article for the London Times advocating an end to Britain’s ‘magnificent inactivity’ in colonising Africa.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

Bachman, adapted for ebook Cover design: Pete Garceau Cover illustration: Michael Markieta/Moment/Getty Images v4.1_r1 a CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Prologue A Note About Maps PART ONE: CONNECTIVITY AS DESTINY CHAPTER 1 FROM BORDERS TO BRIDGES A Journey Around the World Bridges to Everywhere Seeing Is Believing From Political to Functional Geography Supply Chain World Balancing Flow and Friction CHAPTER 2 NEW MAPS FOR A NEW WORLD From Globalization to Hyper-Globalization The Measure of Things A New Map Legend BOX: From Diplomacy to “Diplomacity” PART TWO: DEVOLUTION AS DESTINY CHAPTER 3 THE GREAT DEVOLUTION Let the Tribes Win Growing Apart to Stay Together From Nations to Federations CHAPTER 4 FROM DEVOLUTION TO AGGREGATION Geopolitical Dialectics The New Grand Trunk Road to Pax Indica From Sphere of Influence to Pax Aseana From “Scramble for Africa” to Pax Africana From Sykes-Picot to Pax Arabia BOX: The Israeli Exception? CHAPTER 5 THE NEW MANIFEST DESTINY United States or Tragedy of the Commons? The Devolution Within Pacific Flows Oil and Water Across the World’s Longest Border The North American Union BOX: A South American Union PART THREE: COMPETITIVE CONNECTIVITY CHAPTER 6 WORLD WAR III—OR TUG-OF-WAR?

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Demographic shifts guarantee that Asia’s blending will continue: The erstwhile “Asian Tigers” such as Singapore and Taiwan—to say nothing of much larger China and Japan—are aging, while Indonesia and the Philippines are full of youthful labor. Over 250,000 Burmese live in Thailand alone, without which the micro-economy would grind to a halt just as many American cities and towns would without Mexicans. As in Europe, a generation of post-national Southeast Asians is being born. FROM “SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA” TO PAX AFRICANA Unscrambling Africa Everyone seems to have a one-word answer to the plight of African nations today: “democracy,” “secession,” “micro-credit,” “literacy,” “vaccines.” But African states won’t survive at all without basic physical infrastructure. What will make the difference between celebrating independence and achieving success in Africa is not just political nation building but physical state building—both within and across borders.

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Colonial powers only haphazardly cobbled together African states; they didn’t knit together cohesive societies. The considerations that should guide the design of administrative space—natural geography, demographic commonality, and economic viability—were mostly ignored in Europe’s nineteenth-century “Scramble for Africa.” As a result of divide-and-rule colonialism, its 850 partitioned ethnic groups suffer a far higher incidence of civil wars and conflict spillover than unified national groups.2 The Masai, for example, are two-thirds in Kenya and one-third in Tanzania; the Anyi are 60 percent in Ghana and 40 percent in the Ivory Coast; the Chewa are split across Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe; the Hausa across Nigeria and Niger.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt
by Russell Napier
Published 19 Jul 2021

This was not to be the last crisis when the demands for the punishment of the guilty continued to ring, sometimes for years, after the price of equities had bottomed. That markets are amoral is often forgotten and, as we have discovered since the Asian financial crisis, a fact that has major political ramifications. One hundred years after Fashoda 28 July 1998, Regional The scramble for Africa bewildered everyone, from the humblest African peasant to the master statesmen of the age, Lord Salisbury and Prince Bismarck … Africa was sliced up like a cake, the pieces swallowed by the five rival nations – Germany, Italy, Portugal, France and Britain (with Spain taking some scraps) – and Britain and France were at each other’s throats … Why this undignified rush by the leaders of Europe to build empires in Africa?

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One hundred years after Fashoda 28 July 1998, Regional The scramble for Africa bewildered everyone, from the humblest African peasant to the master statesmen of the age, Lord Salisbury and Prince Bismarck … Africa was sliced up like a cake, the pieces swallowed by the five rival nations – Germany, Italy, Portugal, France and Britain (with Spain taking some scraps) – and Britain and France were at each other’s throats … Why this undignified rush by the leaders of Europe to build empires in Africa? Anglo-French rivalry explains a great deal – but not enough. Historians are as puzzled now as the politicians were then. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1991 A memorable peace conference, as it was a memorable conflict, no longer of individuals engaged in a race for accumulation, but of grouped monopolistic interests; an oligarchy of oil, steel, and railroad overlords in conflict with the power of another railroad monopoly. Here were profound symptoms of a new phase of the industrial or capitalist revolution: the great monopoly or Trust can make unlimited profits when confronted with unorganised, divided sections of consumers and vassals; on such grounds it is irresistible.

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What we are witnessing in Asia is global capital rushing to buy Asian capacity in its need to at least create concentrated oligopolies in the current deflationary (too much supply/not enough demand) environment. In that environment, the capitalists’ scramble for Asian capacity can be seen as perhaps as inexplicable as the politicians’ scramble for Africa at the turn of the last century. At its most mystifying peak (17 September to 4 December 1898), the French and English armies stood facing each other ready to do battle over a sandy island called Fashoda, 700 miles up the Nile from Khartoum. Nobody knew exactly why they were there and it was very difficult to argue for any economic abundance which would flow from the upper Nile even if the Mahdist forces could be subdued.

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912
by Thomas Pakenham
Published 19 Nov 1991

Contents Praise for The Scramble for Africa About the Author By the same author: Copyright List of Illustrations Cartoons and engravings List of Maps Dedication Introduction Prologue The Crowning Achievement Ilala, Central Africa 21 April–May 1873 and after PART I: THE OPEN PATH 1 Leopold’s Crusade Brussels 7 January-15 September 1876 2 Three Flags Across Africa Central Africa and Europe 14 September 1876–June 1878 3 Two Steps Forward Transvaal, Cape Town, Natal 12 April 1877–12 January 1879 4 The Crouching Lion London, Zululand, London November 1878–2, 2 January 1879 5 Ismael’s Dream of Empire Egypt and the Sudan 18 February 1879–June 1880 6 One Step Backward South Africa and London 16 December 1880–3 August 1881 7 Saving the Bey Paris and Tunis 23 March–November 1881 8 Saving the Khedive London and Egypt 31 December 1881–October 1882 PART II: THE RACE BEGINS 9 The Race for the Pool Europe and Central Africa 30 May 1882–April 1883 and before 10 Head in the Clouds The Upper Niger and France 1 February–July 1883 11 Hewett Shows the Flag London and West Africa January 1883–19 July 1884 and before 12 Why Bismarck Changed his Mind Germany, Africa and London 19 May 1884–November 1884 13 Too Late?

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German East Africa July 1905 and after 35 Redeeming the French Congo French Congo and Paris 29 April 1905 and after 36 Restoring Britain’s ‘Old Ideals’ Britain, the Transvaal, Natal and British East Africa December 1905 and after 37 Leopold’s Last Throw Brussels, Washington, London and South Africa 3 June 1906 and after Epilogue Scrambling Out Zimbabwe, Africa and Europe 18 April 1980, before and after Illustrations Chronology Sources Select Bibliography Notes Index Praise for The Scramble for Africa ‘Vast, scholarly and delightful’ Spectator ‘Pakenham tells the story with pace and compulsive readability … no historian could hope for a more wonderful subject, and Pakenham has done it proud … conceived on a grand scale with all the colour and control of a master artist’ Evening Standard ‘Once again Pakenham shows a dazzling, almost filmic ability to tell a good story, cutting from colony to metropolis and back to keep the action flowing’ Independent on Sunday ‘Masterly, full of pace and character’ TLS Livingstone approaching Chitambo’s village, April 1873 from Livingstone’s Last Journals, edited by Horace Walle Sinking a shaft for a goldmine at De Kaap.

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Punch, 28 November 1906) Maps Map 1 Central Africa, 1857–74: British explorers’ routes Map 2 Africa before the Scramble: indigenous and alien powers in 1876 Map 3 Stanley’s and Brazza’s routes in Central Africa, 1874–7 Map 4 South Africa, 1877–81 Map 5 Battle of Isandlwana, 22 January 1879 Map 6 Egypt and the Egyptian empire, 1880 Map 7 Battle of Majuba, 27 February 1881 Map 8 The race for West Africa and the Congo, 1879–84 Map 9 Khartoum under siege, 1884–5 Map 10 Africa in 1886: the Scramble half-complete Map 11 East Africa sliced up by Germany and Britain, November 1886 Map 12 Stanley’s route to rescue Emin, 1887–9 Map 13 The pioneers’ push into Mashonaland, June–September 1890 Map 14 The Congo Free State: the Arab war and the French Congo, 1892–1893 Map 15 Battle of Adowa, 1 March 1896 Map 16 Battle of Omdurman, 2 September 1898 Map 17 South Africa: the Boer War, 1899–1902 Map 18 German South-West Africa: the Herero and Nama rebellions, 1904–5 Map 19 German East Africa: the Maji-Maji rebellion, 1905–6 Map 20 Africa after the Scramble, 1912 Map 21 Africa after independence, 1991 For Val and in grateful memory of Gervase Mathew and Asserate Kassa who together introduced me to Africa ‘All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one, American, English or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world.’ David Livingstone’s last words inlaid in brass on his tomb in Westminster Abbey Introduction The Scramble for Africa bewildered everyone, from the humblest African peasant to the master statesmen of the age, Lord Salisbury and Prince Bismarck. Ever since Roman times, Europe had been nibbling at the mysterious continent to the south. By the mid-1870s, much was still mysterious. It was known that Africa straddled the equator with uncanny precision.

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields
by Tim Butcher
Published 1 Apr 2011

For Graham Greene, still only thirty years old and travelling for the first time in Africa, pushing through the throng of onlookers at the station was like going through a door into a world of new experiences. He writes that from that moment ‘everything was strange’. The building of the railway in the 1890s had been a major moment in the development of Sierra Leone. For almost a hundred years the colony had consisted only of the Freetown peninsula but, during the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, Britain moved to stake a much larger piece of territory, declaring the Sierra Leone hinterland a British protectorate in 1896. Central to its development was the rail network, as it allowed troops to be deployed swiftly to disputed border regions, deterring territorial claims from the neighbouring French colony of Guinea.

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We loaded our gear into his old Mercedes and set off on the 40-mile journey to Kenema, passing a large construction site on the edge of Bo with a perimeter wall bearing a sign written in large, red Chinese characters. The English translation gave the name of a corporation, owned by the Chinese government, announcing a project to build a football stadium and rehabilitate part of the main highway. This was proof of China’s twenty-first-century Scramble for Africa and how it impacted even on relatively small countries such as Sierra Leone. The surging Chinese economy meant Beijing had begun investing heavily in bilateral projects all across Africa as a way to persuade local governments to grant favourable terms for the purchase of raw materials, which were then shipped to mainland China.

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The image of Liberia projected around the world was one of a democratic nation run by Africans for Africans. For years the country was known as The Black Republic, even The Negro Republic, precisely because it was not run by whites, a stark exception following the colonial land-grab of the Scramble for Africa. But the reality was that tension simmered for decades between Americo-Liberians and country people, erupting first in the 1890s when fighters from southern, coastal tribes, such as the Kru and Grebo, rose against the Liberian government, and then in an almost endless cycle of clashes upcountry when administrators sent from Monrovia arrived to levy taxes.

Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
by Adom Getachew
Published 5 Feb 2019

The myth facilitated “the rape of the [African] continent” during the slave trade and subsequent “exploitation under the advanced forms of colonialism and imperialism.”41 For George From Pr inciple to R ight [ 81 ] Padmore, economic exploitation of black labor linked slavery and colonialism. He argued that while emancipation in the Americas was thought to have ended “the slave status of the African,” imperial expansion in Africa “forced the Natives into wage-­slavery.”42 The through-­line linking New World slavery and the scramble for Africa was a racialized structure of domination and exploitation. This account of slavery transcended the limited definitions of slavery that dominated the League of Nations’ abolitionist efforts. As the previous chapter illustrated, the 1926 Convention on Slavery reduced slavery to the ownership and sale of persons, ignoring broader practices of colonial forced labor.

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As Du Bois’s formulation of the global color line suggested, imperial enslavement was organized at an international level through a collaborative pan-­European process by which European states collectively exercised a right of ownership and expropriation over the rest of the world.64 More than any other event, the Berlin Conference of 1884–­85 that divided the African continent between European states exemplified this collaborative spirit. Conceived as unequal members of international society, African territories could be parceled out between European powers in order to stem intra-­European conflicts and competition. Central to this scramble for Africa was a growing sense of racial superiority. According to Du Bois, the distribution of the African continent among European states occurred because once “color became in the world’s thought synonymous with inferiority, ‘Negro’ lost its capitalization and Africa was another name for bestiality and barbarism.”65 International hierarchy not only constituted the terms of colonial slavery but also structured the nature of rivalry, competition, and conflict between states.

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He urged the General Assembly to impress on the secretary general and the peacekeeping forces that preserving law and order required “supporting, safeguarding and maintaining the legal and existing parliamentary framework of the State.”140 A central part of Nkrumah’s analysis of the Congo crisis as laid out in his book-­length Challenge of the Congo emphasized the ways in which the weakness of new postcolonial states combined with persistent international hierarchies to once again constitute Africa as a site of imperial rivalry, competition, and war. Returning to the anticolonial critique of international hierarchy’s causal role in the two world wars, he saw in the international talk of the “strategic importance of the Congo” a new scramble for Africa that threatened to cascade into a broader conflict. Moreover, as journalists and other commentators began to portray the Congo as confirmation of the African state’s artificiality and invoked African incapacity for self-­rule to return once again to models of trusteeship, Nkrumah saw evidence of the “unchanging attitudes of western thought” with respect to Africa—­“racial contempt,” “economic greed,” and “the complete absence of any thought for the well-­being of the [people].”141 The persistence of racial hierarchy and the threats it posed to self-­ determination informed the efforts of postcolonial states to re-­entrench the principle of nonintervention.

Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations
by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel
Published 14 Apr 2008

Just think about something as simple as the name of the Central African Republic. Does that sound like something people chose for themselves to express their sense of nationhood, or one imposed by a French colonial bureaucrat? Most of the forty-odd African countries south of the Sahara were stitched together during the European “Scramble for Africa” in the 1880s with no attention to language, ethnicity, or history. Given the resulting lack of patriotism in these new and artificial 101 CH A PTER F O U R states, perhaps it should not surprise anyone that African corruption levels—the plundering of states by their own officials—are arguably the worst in the world.

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See specific countries and issues Agnelli, Giovanni, 49 Amassalik Inuit, 138 Amazon (company), 25 Angola, 96, 120b, 175; diamond mining and, 181b–85b; economic revival of, 184b antiparasitic drugs, school attendance and, 193–95 armed conflict, 148–55; Africa and, 114–16, 174–78; civil versus foreign, 173–74; disarmament and, 175–76; economic factors and, 116–17, 120–22; GDP and, 124; government stability and, 176–78; infrastructure investment and, 162–63, 170–71; OECD and, 120–21; political transformation and, 163–64; rainfall and, 122–27, 149; reconciliation and, 179–81; selection bias and, 174; technological inno- vation and, 164; tribal hatreds and, 116–17 Bakrie, Aburizal, 34, 38 behavioral economics, 96–97, 222n8 Bellow, Adam: In Praise of Nepotism, 30 Bimantara Citra, 33–40 Blood Diamond, 183b Bloomberg, Michael, 104 Bono, 9 Borsuk, Rick, 37–38 Botswana, 20–21; Drought Relief Program, 152–53, 199–200 bribery, commerce and, 66–67 Bush, George W., 32, 73–74, 174, 217n4 Busia (Kenya), 193–95, 232n9 Canada: corruption in, 95; United States and, 94–95 Capone, Al, 5–7 Chad, 17–18; corruption and, 156; economic decline of, 111–12; I N DEX Chad (continued) global warming and, 131; Lake Chad, 111–12; paperwork delays in, 66–67; petroleum deposits in, 155–58; political turmoil in, 112–13; rainfall and, 114; violence in, 175; World Bank and, 156–58 cheap talk, 18–20; violence and, 118b–19b Cheney, Dick, 29, 51–52 China: 1998 anticorruption campaign and, 70–73; global warming and, 127–29; smuggling and, 55–57; tariffs and, 60–64, 221n4, 221n6 China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), 185b Clodfelter, Michael, 160–61 coffee, 117–18, 149–50 Collier, Paul, 215n9, 228n20, 230n13 Colombia, 76–78, 102–3, 142 commodity prices, 117–18, 149–50, 227n15 conflict traps, Chad and, 113–14 containerization, 56–57 corruption: bottom line on, 102–3; cheap talk and, 18–20; culture and, 80–81, 87, 102–3; definition of, 18, 83, 216n12; economic growth and, 41–46; income level and, 91–92; mea sur ing, stock markets and, 24–29; national pride and, 100–102; outsiders and, 41–43; poverty and, 15–17; “Scramble for Africa” and, 101–2; stock markets and, 24–27; wages and, 189, 230n3. See also specific countries; under culture costs versus benefits, 54–55, 56–57, 78 crime, organization and, 43b–46b culture: corruption and, 78–80, 87, 102; violence and, 137. See also specific countries Darfur, 115; rainfall and, 135b, 225n22; underground lake in, 134b–35b data, war and, 118b–20b Davis, Don, 162 Deby, Idriss, 157–58 Democratic Republic of Congo, 115–16 deworming, 193–95 diamond mining, Angola, 181b–85b diplomatic immunity, 82–84, 222n4 Duflo, Esther, 231n6 Easterly, Bill, 12–15; White Man’s Burden, 13–14 economic development: corruption and, 41–43; fighting for, 1–3 economic gangsters, 5–8, 215n6.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

The complex reasons for different development paths can be seen most vividly in the contrast between sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, the worst- and best-performing regions of the world with respect to economic development over the past half century. Sub-Saharan Africa never developed strong indigenous state-level institutions prior to its contact with the West. When the European colonial powers began the “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century, they soon discovered that their new colonies were barely paying for the cost of their own administration. Britain in response adopted a policy of indirect rule, which justified minimal investment on its part in the creation of state institutions. The terrible colonial legacy was thus more an act of omission than of commission.

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Africa was intensively colonized only in the period after 1882, in what David Abernethy labeled the third phase of European colonialism. Phase one had begun with the Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the New World, and phase two was a period of contraction from the revolt of the North American colonies to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Phase three began with the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 and culminated in the “scramble for Africa” that began in the last decades of the century.14 There were a number of important differences between the earlier and later phases of expansion. By the nineteenth century, the technological lead of Europe over the non-Western world was even greater than it had been when the Spanish encountered the New World.

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There were a number of new actors on the scene, particularly a newly unified Germany after 1871, and an expansionist Russia, which the older Great Powers sought to balance and contain, even as they played out their own rivalries. Italy, Belgium, Japan, and the United States entered the game, pushing the competition into previously unoccupied parts of the world. David Fieldhouse argues that the scramble for Africa was triggered by the announcement by Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of its long-term goal of establishing an overseas empire. Germany’s ambitions led directly to the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, at which the European powers agreed on general rules for carving up the hinterlands of their coastal beachheads.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

For a modern biography, which includes discussion of both Stanley’s brutality and his opposition to slavery, see Jeal (2007) and the op-ed Jeal (2011); see also Bierman (1990). For a Congolese perspective, see Mbu-Mputu and Kasereka (2012). The Berlin Conference and the scramble for Africa The defining event of the ‘scramble for Africa’ was the Berlin Conference of 1884. Fourteen countries attended and signed the resulting treaty. France and Britain ended up with the largest claims, followed by Germany and Portugal – see Pakenham (1991). King Leopold II; humanitarian disaster in the Congo Free State For a modern account of Leopold’s rule, see Hochschild (1999) and more recently van Reybrouck (2015).

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M., and Titeca, K. (2018a), ‘Market Governance in Kinshasa: The Competition for Informal Revenue Through “Connections” (Branchement)’, Working Paper, Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp. ———— (2018b), ‘How Kinshasa’s Markets Are Captured by Powerful Private Interests’, The Conversation, 11 March. Pakenham, T. (1991), The Scramble for Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Peterson, M. (ed.) (2015), The Prisoner’s Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Poundstone, W. (1992), Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday). Putzel, J., Lindemann, S., and Schouten, C. (2008), ‘Drivers of Change in the Democratic Republic of Congo: The Rise and Decline of the State and Challenges for Reconstruction’, Working Paper No. 26, Crisis States Research Centre, London School of Economics, January.

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
by Silvia Federici
Published 4 Oct 2012

As Jutta Berninghausen and Birgit Kerstan have written in their study of the activities of the Javanese NGOs, the latter have a stabilizing/defensive function rather than an emancipatory one and, in the best of cases, try to recuperate at the micro level of individual or community relations what has been destroyed at the macro level of economic politics (Forging New Paths: Feminist Social Methodology and Rural Women in Java [London: Zed Books, 1992], 253). War, Globalization, and Reproduction 1. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent From 1876 to 1912 (New York: Avon Books, 1991), 126. 2. By a recent count there were seventy-five countries experiencing some form of war in 1999 (Effe: La Rivista delle Librerie Feltrinelli 13 (1999); thirty-three of them are to be found in Africa’s forty-three continental nations.

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Governing the Commons: Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Outram, Quentin. “‘It’s Terminal Either Way’: An Analysis of Armed Conflict in Liberia, 1989-1996.” Review of African Political Economy 24, no. 73 (September 1997): 355-72. Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. New York: Avon Books, 1991. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos. Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)
by Tim Marshall
Published 10 Oct 2016

In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea-lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Modern navies can venture much farther out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent. There is a new scramble for Africa in this century, but this time it is two-pronged. There are the well-publicized outside interests, and meddling, in the competition for resources, but there is also the “scramble within” and South Africa intends to scramble fastest and farthest. It dominates the fifteen-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) and has managed to gain a permanent place at the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, of which it is not even a member.

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There are going to be a lot more ships in the High North, a lot more oil rigs and gas platforms—in fact, a lot more of everything. The Russians not only have their nuclear-powered icebreakers, but are even considering building a floating nuclear power plant capable of withstanding the crushing weight of ten feet of ice. However, there are differences between this situation and the “scramble for Africa” in the nineteenth century or the machinations of the great powers in the Middle East, India, and Afghanistan in the original Great Game. This race has rules, a formula, and a forum for decision making. The Arctic Council is composed of mature countries, most of them democratic to a greater or lesser degree.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor
Published 22 Mar 2022

Rather, it indicates a persistence of fortune, as the wealthy regions of North America today are predominantly home to people whose ancestors emigrated from the richer regions of the world.[27] It is also worth noting that the power of colonial institutions to shape economic development may in some regions have been outweighed by that of other, pre-existing institutions. Consider the African continent. Many of Africa’s ethnic groups were arbitrarily divided by artificial borders imposed by European imperial powers during the era known as the Scramble for Africa (1884–1914). These borders divided regions that shared the same ethnicity, tribal organisation and language between different nations, subjecting them to distinct central governing institutions. Intriguingly, the evidence suggests that present-day economic development in Africa has been primarily influenced by the pre-existing local social structures and ethnic institutions rather than by the national central institutions that persisted from the colonial era.[28] To recapitulate, then: during the colonial era extractive institutions were formed and persisted in some colonies, while more inclusive ones prevailed in others, reflecting geographical characteristics, the disease environment and population density.

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), 176, 184 abortion, 87–8 Aeneid (Virgil), 59 aeroplanes, 111 Africa agriculture in, 21, 179–80, 188–9 colonialism in, 157, 158, 187 diversity in, 220–32 emigration from, 127 fertility rates in, 112 Homo sapiens emergence in, 5, 18–20, 30, 119, 120, 124, 218–32, 221, 222, 237 income per capita in, 106 industrialisation in, 241 institutions in, 157, 187 livestock in, 179–80 living standards in, 7 malaria in, 180 marriage in, 87 Neolithic Revolution in, 202, 203, 204, 207 poverty in, 113 slave trade in, 173–4, 187 trade in, 136 trust in, 173–4 tsetse flies, 180 African Americans, 130–31, 155, 156, 215–17 Afrobarometer 173–4 Age of Enlightenment (c.1637–1800), 27, 58, 66, 170–71, 182, 212 agriculture climate and, 13, 15, 20, 21, 25, 155, 181, 186–7, 193–5, 203–4 comparative advantage in, 181, 211–12, 237 cooperation and, 168–9 diseases and, 8, 180 education and, 77, 81–3, 109, 140 future orientation and, 187–90, 213 gender roles and, 191–2 Green Revolution, 111, 117 hydraulic hypothesis, 184 innovations in, 61, 64, 181 institutions and, 208–10 irrigation, 22, 23, 120, 141–2, 160, 168, 184, 190 labour productivity, 131–2 livestock, 179–80, 203 Neolithic Revolution, see Neolithic Revolution soil and, 8, 21, 30, 141, 155, 186, 187, 191, 198, 204, 209, 236 Akkadian Empire (c.2334–2154 BCE), 23 algebra, 69 altitude, 51 American Civil War (1861–5), 62 Amsterdam, Netherlands, 40 Anatolia, 23, 40, 206 Angola, 154 antibiotics, 111 Aquinas, Thomas, 163 Arabian Nights, 59 Arctic region, 195 Argentina, 77, 154 Arkwright, Richard, 59, 72 Arrow, Kenneth, 172 art, 20, 22, 58, 62, 120, 216 Asia agriculture in, 188, 192 East–West orientation, 203 fertility rates in, 112 income per capita in, 106 industrialisation in, 241 living standards in, 7 marriage in, 87 Neolithic Revolution in, 202, 203 trade in, 136 see also Middle East Assyrian Empire (2500–609 BCE), 40 Athens, 40 Atlantic triangular trade, 136 Australia, 49, 106, 153, 154, 157 Austronesians, 206–7 automobiles, 61, 97, 101, 107, 111 Aztec civilisation, 154, 205 B Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, 19 Babylonian Empire (1895–539 BCE), 40 Bandy, Robert, 217 Banfield, Edward, 172 Bantu people, 207 Battle of the Books, The (Swift), 169 Belgium, 37, 64, 65, 72, 75, 138 Bell, Alexander Graham, 104 Berry, Charles ‘Chuck’, 216 Bessemer, Henry, 60 bicycles, 61 bifurcation theory, 46 Bill of Rights (1689), 148 biodiversity, 9, 29, 33, 202, 210, 236 Black Death (1346–53), 34–5, 36, 149–50, 159, 212 Blake, William, 57 Boas, Franz, 168 Bolivia, 131, 154, 229 Boserup, Ester, 191 brain, 14–17 Brazil, 103, 154, 216 Brexit (2016–20), 110 Brown, Moses, 72 Brown University, 1, 72, 239 Buddhism, 63 Byzantine Empire (395–1453), 48 C Caesar, Julius, 184 caloric yields, 189 Calvinism, 164 Cameroon, 207 Canada, 77, 108, 138, 154 canals, 61 Card, Addie, 78 cargo cults, 233–4 Caribbean, 113, 154, 155, 157, 186 Carthage, 23 Cartwright, Edmund, 59 Çatalhöyük, 23, 40 Catholicism, 148, 163, 217 Central America, see under Meso-America central heating, 101 centralised civilisations, 182–7 cephalopods, 14 de Cervantes, Miguel, 59 Chaplin, Charles, 105 Charlemagne, Emperor of the Romans, 184 Charles II, King of England and Scotland, 148 chemistry, 61, 69 Chicago, Illinois, 60 childbirth, 2, 41, 83 children education of, 8, 52–5, 62–83, 88–91, 94–8, 122, 129, 175 labour of, 57, 67, 78–83, 89, 93, 99, 122 mortality of, 2, 29, 41, 57, 89, 98, 121, 127, 128, 180 quantity–quality trade-off, 52–5, 88–91 Chile, 77, 146, 154 China agricultural productivity, 131 Black Death in (c. 1331–54), 34 centralised authority in, 182, 183, 184–6 coal mining in, 181 collectivism in, 190 dictatorship in, 146 diversity and, 226–9 education in, 64, 91 fertility rates in, 91 geography of, 182 growth in, 115 gunpowder, development of, 47, 61 income per capita in, 210 industrial regions, 108 naval exploration, 213 Neolithic Revolution in, 3, 21, 23, 122, 206, 210 New World crops in, 37–9 one-child policy (1979–2015), 112 Opium War, First (1839–42), 61 poverty in, 113, 114 printing, development of, 48 technological development in, 121, 176, 184 writing development of, 24 cholera, 205 Christianity, 63 Catholicism, 148, 163, 217 Protestantism, 63, 90, 163–4, 175, 184, 217 wealth, views on, 163 civil law systems, 154 civil liberties, 127 civilisations, dawn of, 22–5, 208–10, 236 class conflict, 73, 74, 78 climate, 13, 15, 20, 21, 25, 155, 181, 186–7, 193–5, 203–4 climate change, 116–18, 123, 241 coal mining, 59, 60, 71, 181 Cobbett, William, 86 Collapse (Diamond), 33 Colombia, 154 colonialism, 135–7, 140, 147, 152–9, 168, 175, 205, 235 Columbia, 103 Columbian Exchange, 35–9, 94–6, 195 Columbus, Christopher, 35, 47, 182–3 Comenius, John Amos, 65 common law systems, 154 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 62, 73 comparative advantage, 71, 137, 140, 141, 211–12 competition, 182–6, 198 concrete, 61 de Condorcet, Nicolas, 27 Confucianism, 63 consumption vs investment strategy, 188–90, 213 contraception, 85–6, 118 convergent evolution, 14–15 cooking, 15, 17 cooperation, 8, 168–9, 175, 236 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 44 Corinth, 40 Cortés, Hernán, 205 Covid-19 pandemic, 115, 130, 240 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 59 critical junctures, 212 Crompton, Samuel, 59 Cuba, 216 Cuitláhuac, Emperor of Tenochtitlan, 205 cultural traits, 51–5, 141, 161, 163–77, 187–98, 213 collectivism, 190–91 cooperation, 8, 168–9, 175, 236 entrepreneurship, 52, 72, 165, 182, 184, 193, 197 future orientation, 52, 141, 165, 169–71, 175, 187–90, 197–8, 213, 238 gender equality, see gender equality geography and, 181, 187–90, 208–10, 236 growth and, 169–71 human capital investment, 52–5, 80, 88–91, 94–8, 122, 165, 175 immigration and, 174 individualism, 165, 176, 190–91, 197 institutions and, 182 language and, 195–8 loss aversion, 192–5 prosperity and, 174–7 Protestant ethic, 164–5, 175, 184 racism and, 168 social hierarchies, 197 survival advantage of, 168 technology and, 52–5, 121, 169–70, 176, 231 transmission of, 171 trust, 8, 165, 172–4, 175, 236 Cyprus, 40 D Dante, 59 Darby, Abraham, 60 Darwin, Charles, 27, 50 decline of generations, 169 deindustrialisation, 107–10, 139, 140 democracy, 78, 151–2, 155, 160, 172–3 social capital and, 172–3 demographic dividend, 117 demographic transition, 6, 85–100, 106, 112–18, 175, 176, 198, 240 human capital and, 88–91, 112, 175, 211 Denmark, 104 Detroit, Michigan, 107–8, 217 Diamond, Jared, 21, 29, 32–3, 202, 203 Dickens, Charles, 57 dictatorships, 146 see also extractive institutions diet, 2, 25, 28, 30, 33, 95, 101, 107 diphtheria, 102 diseases, 2, 8, 40, 94, 102, 204–5, 236 agriculture and, 8, 180 Black Death (1346–53), 34–5, 36, 149–50, 159, 212 colonialism and, 156–7 germ theory, 102 immunity to, 51, 205 malaria, 156, 180, 205 sleeping sickness, 180 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 106, 240 vaccinations, 102 diversity, 6, 9, 19, 142, 160, 215–32, 227–8, 237 innovation and, 9, 215–16, 226–30 measurement of, 223–4 origins of, 219–22 prosperity and, 217–18, 222, 224–32 Divine Comedy (Dante), 59 division of labour, 22, 191–2, 196–7, 204 Domino, Fats, 216 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 59 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 59 double-entry bookkeeping, 65 E East Germany (1949–90), 144 Easter Island, 32, 207 economic ice age, 39–41 Edison, Thomas, 60, 104 Education Act (UK, 1902), 76 education, 8, 52–5, 62–83, 88–98, 99, 118, 129, 238 agriculture and, 77, 81–3, 109, 140 child labour and, 57, 67, 78–83, 122 fertility rates and, 89–98, 99, 113, 122 human capital, see human capital industrialisation and, 64, 67–83, 89, 99, 109, 140 inequality and, 127, 140 investment in, 52–5, 80, 88–91, 94–8, 122, 165 land ownership and, 77, 155 technology and, 62–83, 99, 109, 110, 111–12 trade and, 137 universal public, 73–9 women and, 91, 92, 112 Egypt, 3, 20, 23, 24, 40, 63, 87, 88, 121, 207 Einstein, Albert, 44 electricity, 61, 101, 129, 130, 144 elevators, 61 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 147 Engels, Friedrich, 27, 62, 73 England, 3, 35, 37, 91, 147 Enlightenment (c.1637–1800), 27, 58, 66, 170–71, 182, 212 entrepreneurship, 52, 72, 165, 182, 184, 197 environmental degradation, 116–18, 241 Epic of Gilgamesh, 59 Ethiopia, 131, 229 Euphrates River, 20, 23, 206, 236 Europe income per capita, 106 industrialisation, see industrialisation institutions see institutions living standards in, 7, 41 Neolithic agriculture in, 35–7, 94–6, 188, 190, 192 Black Death (1346–53), 34–5, 36, 149–50, 159, 212 colonialism, 135–7, 140, 147, 152–9, 168, 175 competition in, 182–3, 184 East–West orientation, 203 economic growth in, 115 education in, 64–7 Enlightenment (c.1637–1800), 27, 58, 66, 170–71, 182, 212 fertility rates in, 85–6, 122 future orientation in, 190, 213 gender equality in, 92 geography of, 184–5 immigration to, 127, 192 Revolution in, 202, 203 New World crops in, 35–7, 94–6, 190 Protestant ethic in, 164–5, 175, 184 technological development in, 58, 61–2, 97, 212 trade in, 135–7 European Marriage Pattern, 86 European Miracle, 182, 213 European Social Survey, 189, 194 European Union (EU), 110 extinctions, 32, 88, 116, 167, 193, 203 extractive vs inclusive institutions, 145–61, 172, 186–7, 198, 209, 236 eye, evolution of, 14, 51 eyeglasses, 64 F Factory Acts (UK), 80 famines, 29, 40, 102, 193 Irish Famine (1845–9), 37, 96 Faust (Goethe), 59 feedback loops, 17, 48 feminism, 97 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 183 Fertile Crescent, 20, 21, 23, 33, 40, 48, 122, 202–4, 206, 210, 214, 226 fertility rates, 6, 85–98, 87, 112, 113, 117–18, 122, 123, 232 trade and, 137–8 feudalism, 62, 73, 147, 149–50, 159, 172 film, 105 financial crisis (2008), 115 Finland, 40 Florence, Italy, 34 food surpluses, 4, 28–41, 85, 94, 95 Ford, Henry, 107 France Black Death in, 34 colonialism, 153, 154 education in, 64, 67, 68, 70–71, 72, 75, 147 fertility rates in, 90 geography of, 185 guilds in, 150 industrialisation in, 109, 110, 138 late blight in, 37 life expectancy in, 40 living standards in, 147 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 62, 146, 153 Protestantism in, 164 trade in, 137 Fresnes-sur-Escaut, France, 70 future orientation, 52, 141, 165, 168–71, 175, 187–90, 197–8, 213, 236, 238 G Ganges River, 236 Gates, William ‘Bill’, 118 gender equality, 8, 91–4, 99, 106, 118, 122, 236 geography and, 191–2 language and, 196–7 wage gap, 91–4, 99, 122 general relativity, theory of, 44 General Social Survey, 194 Genoa, Republic of (c. 1000–1797), 183 geography, 179–99, 236 competition and, 182–6 future orientation and, 187–90, 197–8, 213 gender equality and, 191–2 individualism in, 190–91 institutions and, 181, 182, 186–7, 207, 208–10 language and, 195–8 loss aversion and, 192–5 Neolithic Revolution and, 203–4, 208–10, 212–14 geometry, 69 germ theory, 102 Germany, 64, 67, 75, 93, 110, 112, 137, 138, 164, 197 glass, 61 global warming, 116–18, 123 globalisation, 115, 137, 235 Godwin, William, 27 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 59 Goldin, Claudia, 111 grass analogy, 140–42 Great Depression (1929–39), 106, 115, 240 Great Fire of London (1666), 150 Great Migration (1916–70), 215 Great Pyramid, Giza, 24 Greece, 3, 18, 23, 40, 48, 58, 63, 88, 121, 160, 170, 213 Green Revolution, 111, 117 Greenland, 33, 49 guilds, 150 gunpowder, 47, 61 Guns, Germs and Steel (Diamond), 21 Gutenberg, Johannes, 48–9, 64, 104 H Habsburg Empire (1282–1918), 173 Hamburg, Germany, 34 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 59 hands, evolution of, 17 Hargreaves, James, 59 Hawaii, 48 head starts, 29, 34, 48, 146, 181, 185, 201–2, 204, 206, 210–12, 236–7 agricultural comparative advantage and, 181, 211–12, 237 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9 Henry IV, King of France, 147 Henry VII King of England, 183 hierarchical societies, 98, 172, 197, 207, 208–10 high-yield crops, 111, 190, 213 Hill, Rowland, 104 Hine, Lewis, 78 Hobbes, Thomas, 2 Hofstede, Geert, 188 Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), 165, 172, 173 Homo erectus, 18 Homo technologicus, 119 Hong Kong, 154 hookworm, 90 hot-air balloons, 61 Huayna Capac, Incan Emperor, 205 Hugo, Victor, 59, 62 human capital, 6, 52–5, 66–73, 88–91, 93, 103, 111–12, 232 child labour and, 80, 81, 83, 122 colonialism and, 158 demographic transition and, 88–91, 112, 175, 232 dictatorships and, 146 industrialisation and, 66–73, 74, 76, 80, 81, 83, 109, 110, 140, 211 investment in, 52–5, 80, 88–91, 94–8, 122, 165, 175 resource curse and, 181 technology and, 62–83, 99, 109, 110, 111–12 human rights, 127 humanism, 170 Hume, David, 182 hunter-gatherer societies, 6, 17, 18, 20, 21–2, 30, 33–4, 203, 206, 207 hydraulic hypothesis, 184 I Ice Age, 18, 19 immigration, see migration Inca civilisation, 154, 205 inclusive vs extractive institutions, 145–61, 172, 186–7, 198, 209, 236 income effect, 89, 93 income per capita, 4, 8, 31, 102, 106, 109, 117, 122, 130, 131–5 diversity and, 229 future orientation and, 198 inequality, 131–5, 132, 134, 210 institutions and, 155, 160 trade and, 137 India, 23, 111, 112, 113, 131, 138, 154, 210 individualism, 165, 176, 190–91, 197 Indonesia, 154, 207 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), see industrialisation industrialisation, 6, 45–7, 55, 57–62, 85, 86, 109, 121, 124, 139, 181, 198–9, 240 agriculture and, 181, 202 decline of, 107–10, 139, 140 education and, 64, 66–83, 89, 99, 109, 110, 140, 211 environment and, 116, 123, 241 institutions and, 147–51 skilled labour and, 67, 71, 137 trade and, 136, 138 inequality, 7, 9–10, 44, 74, 106 climate and, 155, 203–4 colonialism and, 135, 137, 140, 152–9, 235 cultural traits and, 163–77 diversity and, 215–32 education and, 127, 140 geography and, 179–99, 203–4 institutions and, 147–61, 172 legal systems and, 154–5 Neolithic Revolution and, 201–14, 236–7 trade and, 135–40 infant mortality, 2, 29, 41, 57, 89, 98, 121, 127, 128, 180 influenza, 205 innovation, 6, 58, 59, 111 age of growth, 111 climate change and, 118, 123 competition and, 184, 186, 198 cooking and, 17 diversity and, 9, 215–16, 226–30 education and, 53, 91, 99 food surpluses and, 4 industrialisation and, 58, 61–2, 65, 83 institutions and, 144, 161 literacy and, 72 Malthusian epoch, 4, 47, 48 Neolithic Revolution, 23, 120, 204 population size and, 47, 48, 120, 204 institutions, 147–61, 172, 175, 182–7, 198, 204, 213 climate and, 155–6 colonialism and, 152—9, 175 competition and, 182–6 democracy, 151–2, 172 geography and, 181, 182, 186–7, 198, 207, 208–10 technology and, 147–51, 176, 231 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 234 International Organization for Standardization, 111 Internet, 101, 111, 130 Inuit, 49, 195—6 invertebrates, 14 investment vs consumption strategy, 188–90, 213 Ireland, 36–7, 91, 94–6, 175 iron ore, 60 irrigation, 22, 23, 120, 141–2, 160, 168, 184, 190 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 183 Islam, 63 Israel, 2, 13, 18, 201 Italy, 112, 127, 137, 147, 160, 171–3, 185 J Jacquard, Joseph-Marie, 150 James II and VII, King of England and Scotland, 148, 159 Japan, 62, 77, 112, 146, 210, 213, 226, 233 Jericho, 3, 22–3, 24 Jerusalem, 1–2 Jewish people; Judaism, 63, 88–9, 166–7, 169 João II, King of Portugal, 182–3 Joshua ben Gamla, 166 Judaean Revolt (66–70 CE), 166 Judah ha-Nasi, 166 K Kahneman, Daniel, 192 Kant, Immanuel, 170 Karataş, 40 Kay, John, 59 Kenya, 131 kettle analogy, 43, 46, 100 Keynes, John Maynard, 115 Khirokitia, 40 Khoisan, 207 Kitson, James, 75 Korea, 77, 91, 143, 144, 146, 151, 159, 171, 177, 185, 212, 226, 231 L labour productivity, 131 lactase persistence, 24–5 land ownership of, 77, 155 strategies of use, 188–90 see also agriculture landlocked countries, 181 language, 195–8, 221–2 Latin America, see Central America; South America law of diminishing marginal productivity, 133 Lee, William, 147 legal systems, 154–5 Leo X, Pope, 163 Lerna, 40 life expectancy, 2, 41, 57, 89, 99, 102–3, 103, 114, 121, 127, 128, 130 light bulbs, 60 linguistic niche hypothesis, 196 literacy, 2, 63–8, 66, 70–71, 72, 88, 92, 95, 107, 112 Judaism and, 166, 167 Ottoman Empire and, 184 Protestant Reformation and, 90, 164, 165, 167 literature, 58, 59, 62, 216 livestock, 179–80 living standards, 1–10, 28, 94, 99, 101–7, 114, 121–4, 127–31, 240 diversity and, 217–18, 222, 224–32 hunter-gatherer societies, 30, 33 Malthusian thesis and, 3–5, 6, 28–41, 240 London, England, 34, 150 long-term orientation, see future orientation loss aversion, 192–5 lost paradise myth, 34 Lumière brothers, 105 Luther, Martin, 90, 163 Luxembourg, 160 M Madagascar, 207 Madrid, Spain, 40 Mahabharata, 59 maize, 21, 35, 37–9, 190, 203 malaria, 156, 180, 205 Malthus, Thomas, 3–5, 27–30, 50 Malthusian epoch, 3–5, 6, 27–41, 45–7, 83, 85, 99–100, 102, 112, 151, 156, 232 cultural traits and, 52, 54, 89, 94, 95, 97, 98, 188, 193 economic ice age, 39–41 geography and, 181, 188, 193 population composition, 50, 54 population swings, 6, 33–9 poverty trap, 5, 25, 45, 121, 235, 240 Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517), 48 manufacturing, 107–10 Marconi, Guglielmo, 104 marriage, 86–7, 87 Marx, Karl, 9, 27, 62, 73, 74, 78 Mary II, King of England and Scotland, 148 Massachusetts, United States, 81 Mayan civilisation, 3, 33, 46, 121, 154 McCloskey, Deirdre, 57–8 McLean, Malcolm, 111 measles, 205 mechanical drawing, 69 Mediterranean Sea, 13, 19, 20, 127, 213 Meiji Restoration (1868), 62, 146, 213 Memphis, Egypt, 23 Meso-America colonialism in, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 186–7, 205–6 diversity in, 220–21 emigration from, 127 fertility rates in, 112 income per capita in, 106 industrialisation in, 241 institutions in, 156, 157, 158, 160, 186–7, 236 land ownership in, 77, 155 living conditions in, 7 Malthusian crises in, 33 Neolithic Revolution in, 21, 202, 203, 204, 205–6 population density in, 154, 156 poverty in, 113 trade in, 136 writing, development of, 24 Mesolithic period, 40 Mesopotamia, 23, 24, 40, 59 see also Fertile Crescent Methodism, 164 Mexico, 103, 108, 111, 154, 205 microscopes, 64 middle class, 62, 152 Middle East agriculture in, 20, 21, 23, 192, 202–4, 206, 210, 214 emigration from, 127 hunter-gatherer societies in, 33 life expectancy in, 40 marriage in, 87 Neolithic Revolution in, 20, 21, 23, 40, 48, 122, 192, 202–4, 206, 210, 214 migration, 127, 174, 217, 218 Mill, John Stuart, 27 mining, 59, 60, 61, 70, 71 Misérables, Les (Hugo), 59 mita system, 152–3 Mitochondrial Eve, 18 Modernisation Hypothesis, 152 Mokyr, Joel, 170 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 34 Morse, Samuel, 60 mosquitoes, 180 moths, 51 Mount Carmel, Israel, 13, 18 multicultural societies, 218 Murasaki Shikibu, 59 music, 58, 215–16 N nanotechnology, 119 Naples, Italy, 40 Napoleon, Emperor of the French, 184 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 62, 146, 153 Native Americans, 33, 155 Natufian culture (13,000–9500 BCE), 20 Nea Nikomedeia, 40 Neanderthals, 13 Neolithic Revolution, 6, 9, 20–25, 29–41, 46, 48, 51, 120, 122, 199, 201–14, 210, 236–7 diseases and, 204–5 geography and, 199, 203–4 head start and, 29, 34, 48, 202, 204, 206, 210–12, 236–7 technology and, 29–30, 48, 120, 201–2, 204, 206, 207, 209–12 Netherlands, 37, 40, 64, 65, 75, 147, 148, 164, 213 New Guinea, 21, 207 New World crops, 35–9, 94–6, 195 New York City, 23, 60, 61, 217 New Zealand, 106, 153, 154, 157, 207 Newcomen, Thomas, 59 Nigeria, 207 Nile River, 18, 20, 23, 206, 207, 236 North America, 7, 41, 58, 62, 98 colonialism in, 37, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158 economic growth in, 115 fertility rates in, 85 industrialisation, 60, 72, 107, 241 institutions in, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 175 land ownership in, 77, 155 Malthusian crises in, 33 Neolithic Revolution in, 202, 203, 204 technological development in, 58, 61–2 North Korea, 143, 144, 146, 151, 159, 171, 177, 212, 231 North, Douglass, 145 Norway, 104 nuclear energy, 44, 111 numeracy, 63, 67, 88 nurturing strategy, 53 O obesity, 171, 198 Oceania, 7, 32, 87, 105, 202, 203, 207 Ohalo II site, Israel, 201 oil crisis (1973), 115 Opium War, First (1839–42), 61 opportunity cost, 89, 93 Ottoman Empire (1299–1922), 1–2, 64, 173, 182, 183–4 Out of Africa hypothesis, 5, 18–20, 30, 119, 120, 124, 218–32, 221, 222, 237 outsourcing, 115 Owen, Robert, 75 P Pakistan, 111 Palmer, Robert, 215 paper, 61 Paraguay, 103 Paris, France, 34, 40, 150 Pasteur, Louis, 102 Paul the Apostle, 163 Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 72 pendulum clocks, 64 per capita income, see income per capita Perry, Matthew, 62 Persia, 48, 63, 121, 213 Peru, 152–3, 205 Pharisees, 166 phase transition, 43–6, 50, 83, 98, 99–100, 122, 151 Philippines, 207 phonographs, 104 Pickford, Mary, 105 Pitcairn Islands, 33 Pizarro, Francisco, 205 Plato, 9 Pleistocene period, 19 ploughing, 191–2 pneumonia, 205 politeness distinctions, 197 political extremism, 106 political fragmentation, 182–7, 207 pollution, 116–18 Polynesia, 32, 48 population, 46–55, 47 composition of, 50–55 demographic transition, 6, 85–100, 106, 112–18, 175 diseases and, 204–5 diversity of, 9, 142, 160, 177, 214, 215–32, 237 institutions and, 208 labour and, 34–5 Malthusian thesis, 3–5, 6, 28–41, 46, 50, 156 technology and, 5, 29–30, 31, 47–55, 89, 120–24, 156, 179, 181, 202, 211 unified growth theory, 46–55 Portugal, 38, 153, 154, 182–3 positive feedback loops, 17, 48 postal services, 104 potatoes, 36–7, 94–6 poverty, 113–14, 114 poverty trap, 5, 25, 45, 121, 235, 240 Presley, Elvis, 216 printing, 48–9, 64–5, 104, 183–4, 213 production lines, 61 property rights, 92, 144–6, 148, 154, 155, 167, 197, 198, 204, 234 Protestantism, 217 cultural traits, 164–5, 175, 184 Reformation (1517–1648), 63, 90, 163–4, 184 proximate vs ultimate factors, 9, 140–42, 198 Prussia (1525–1918), 68–9, 72, 90, 146, 153, 165 Puritans, 175 Putnam, Robert, 172 Pygmies, 207 Q Qing Empire (1636–1912), 61 Quakers, 175 quantity–quality trade-off, 52–5, 88–91 quantum mechanics, 44 quasi-natural historical experiments, 38–9, 70, 90 Quebec, 54 R racism, 106, 168, 198, 215, 216, 217 radio, 101, 104–5, 111 Rational Optimist, The (Ridley), 216 Red Sea, 19 Reformation (1517–1648), 63, 90, 163 refrigerators, 101 Renaissance (c. 1400–1600), 64, 170 resource curse, 181 Ricardo, David, 27, 144 rice, 190 Ridley, Matt, 216 Roberts, Richard, 80 rock ’n’ roll music, 215–16 Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, 90 Rome, ancient, 1–2, 40, 46, 63, 88, 121, 166, 170, 212 Rome, city of, 23 Roosevelt, Franklin, 217 Royal African Company, 148 rule of law, 144, 186, 204 running water, 101 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 73, 77 Russian Revolution (1917), 73 Rust Belt, 108, 110 S Sadducees, 166 Sahara Desert, 21, 179, 204, 214, 236 Sámi, 195–6 Scandinavia, 185, 211 science, 20, 22, 58, 69, 75, 120, 216 Scotland, 175 Scramble for Africa (1884–1914), 158 Sea of Galilee, 201 serial founder effect, 219–22 Seven Years War (1756–63), 154 sewerage, 101 Shakespeare, William, 59 Shimon ben Shetach, 166 Siberia, 236 silk, 81 Silk Road, 34 Sinai Peninsula, 18 Singapore, 146, 154 skin pigmentation, 51 skyscrapers, 60, 61 Slater, Samuel, 72 slavery, 8, 106, 136, 148–9, 154, 155, 168, 198, 236 sleeping sickness, 180 smallpox, 96, 102, 205 Smith, Adam, 144 smoking, 198 social capital, 172–3, 175 social cohesion, 9, 160, 167, 175, 186, 197, 218, 226, 229–31, 234, 237 social hierarchies, 98, 172, 197, 207, 208–10 soil, 8, 21, 30, 141, 155, 186, 187, 191, 198, 204, 209, 236 Solow, Robert, 132–3 Song Empire (960–1279), 176, 184 South America agricultural productivity in, 131 colonialism in, 154, 156, 157, 158, 186–7, 205 diversity in, 220–21 emigration from, 127 fertility rates in, 112 geography of, 186–7 income per capita in, 106 industrialisation in, 241 institutions in, 154, 156, 157, 158, 160, 186–7 land ownership in, 77, 155 living standards in, 7 Neolithic Revolution in, 202, 203, 204, 205–6 population density in, 154, 156 poverty in, 113 trade in, 136 South East Asia, 19, 20, 21, 131, 180, 184, 202 South Korea, 77, 91, 144, 146, 151, 159, 171, 177, 210, 212, 231 Soviet Union (1922–91), 59 Spaichi, Hans, 150 Spain, 40, 148–9, 152–3, 154, 183, 185, 205 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 106, 240 Sputnik 1 launch (1957), 59 squirrels, 1, 239 Sri Lanka, 103 state formation, 208–10 steam engines, 59, 60, 70–71, 97 steam locomotives, 60, 97 steel, 60, 61 Stockholm, Sweden, 97–8 subsistence, 1, 4–5, 20, 32, 33, 36–7, 39, 94–6 substitution effect, 89, 93 Sumer (c. 4500–1900 BCE), 23, 24, 59 Sweden, 40, 93, 97–8, 104, 137, 138, 160 Swift, Jonathan, 169 Switzerland, 72, 104, 138, 160, 164, 185 T Taiwan, 77, 146, 206 Tale of Genji, The (Shikibu), 59 Tanna, Vanuatu, 233–4, 237–8 Tasmania, 49 taxation, 175, 208, 209, 211, 234 technology, 3, 20, 22, 24, 25, 111–12, 120–24, 147, 240 accelerations, 58–62 agricultural comparative advantage and, 181, 211–12, 237 competition and, 182–6 cultural traits and, 52–5, 121, 169–70, 176, 231 diversity and, 215–16, 226–30 education and, 62–83, 99, 109, 110, 111–12 hands, evolution of, 17 head starts, 29, 34, 48, 146, 181, 185, 201–2, 204, 206, 210–12, 236–7 institutions and, 147–51, 176, 231 living standards and, 104 Neolithic Revolution and, 29–30, 48, 120, 201–2, 204, 206, 207, 209–12 population and, 5, 29–30, 31, 47–55, 89, 120–24, 156, 179, 181, 202, 211 regressions in, 49 Tel Aswad, Syria, 201 Tel Jericho, West Bank, 201 telegraph, 60, 104 telephones, 104 telescopes, 64 television, 101, 111 textiles, 72, 79, 80, 93, 138, 147 Theory of Everything, 44 theory of general relativity, 44 thrifty gene hypothesis, 171 Tigris River, 20, 23, 206, 236 Titanic, 105 toilets, 101 Tonga, 48 trade, 135–40, 144, 185, 235 fertility rates and, 137–8 geography and, 181, 185 Transcaucasia, 21 Trump, Donald, 109–10 trust, 8, 165, 172–4, 175, 236 tsetse flies, 180 Turkey, 23, 40, 210 Tversky, Amos, 192 typhus, 37 U Uganda, 131 ultimate vs proximate factors, 9, 140–42, 198 unified growth theory, 44–55 United Kingdom Brexit (2016–20), 110 child labour in, 80–81 colonialism, 61, 138, 147, 153–5 education in, 67–8, 71–2, 75–6, 78, 91, 96–7 fertility rates in, 91, 83, 97 gender wage gap in, 93 geography of, 185 income per capita in, 210 industrial decline in, 108, 110 industrialisation in, 59, 67–8, 71–2, 75, 96–7, 138, 147, 148, 181 institutions in, 147–51, 154–5, 159 literacy in, 65 Neolithic Revolution in, 210 Opium War, First (1839–42), 61 postal service in, 104 Protestantism in, 164 trade in, 136–7 United Nations, 13 United States African Americans, 130–31, 155, 156, 215–17 agricultural productivity, 131 Apollo program (1961–72), 59 child labour in, 78, 81–3 Civil War (1861–5), 62 education in, 75, 77, 90 fertility rates in, 85, 92, 93 future orientation, 190 gender wage gap in, 93 Great Migration (1916–70), 215 hookworm in, 90 immigration to, 127, 192, 217 income per capita in, 106 industrial decline in, 107–8, 109–10 industrialisation in, 60–61, 67, 69, 71, 72, 138 infant mortality in, 130–31 institutions in, 155, 157, 175 land ownership in, 77 life expectancy in, 130 living standards in, 101, 103, 105, 106, 130 Pacific War (1941–5), 233 Ur, 23 urbanisation, 149, 153, 167, 211–12, 237 Uruguay, 77 Uruk, 23 V vaccinations, 102 Vanuatu, 48, 233–4, 237–8 Venice, Republic of (697–1797), 183 vertebrates, 14 Vietnam, 146 Vikings, 47 Virgil, 59 vitamin D, 51 Voltaire, 154 W wages, 39, 40 Black Death and, 34–5, 36, 149 fertility rates and, 89, 93 women, 91–4, 99, 122 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 27 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 105 war, 39, 102, 123, 149, 154 washing machines, 101 Washington Consensus, 234 Watt, James, 59 Weber, Max, 164 welfare state, 74 Wells, Herbert George, 105 Wesley, John, 164 wheat, 21, 23, 28, 34, 36, 40, 94, 111, 133, 136, 190, 201, 202, 203 whooping cough, 102 Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson), 145–6 William III and II, King of England and Scotland, 148, 159 Wittfogel, Karl, 184 Wizard of Oz, The (1939 film), 105 women childbirth, 2, 41, 83 education of, 91, 92, 112 gender wage gap, 91–4, 99, 122 woodwork, 61 World Bank, 112, 113, 234 World Values Survey, 189, 192, 194 World War I (1914–18), 105, 106, 136, 240 World War II (1939–45), 106, 115, 233, 240 writing, 24, 59 Y Yangtze River, 122, 185, 236 yellow fever, 156 Z Zealots, 166 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z About the Author Oded Galor is Herbert H.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

In only four years between 1925 and 1958 did the number of cases exceed 400 a year.65 Malaria was also curbed by the systematic destruction of the mosquitoes’ swampy breeding grounds and by the isolation of victims, as well as by the distribution of free quinine.66 Yellow-fever epidemics, too, became less frequent in Senegal after the introduction of an effective vaccine. The Scramble for Africa has become a byword for the ruthless carve-up of an entire continent by rapacious Europeans. Its bizarre climax was the Fashoda incident, when rival French and British expeditions converged on the Eastern Sudanese town of Fashoda (today Kodok) in the province of Bahr-el-Ghazal. The French, led by Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand, dreamt of a line from Dakar to Djibouti (then French Somaliland), linking the Niger to the Nile and creating an unbroken chain of French control from Senegal to the Red Sea coast.

…

The showdown came on 18 September 1898 at the point where these two lines intersected. Though the numbers of men were absurdly small – Marchand was accompanied by twelve French officers and 150 tirailleurs – and the bone of contention an utterly desolate quagmire of reeds, mud and dead fish, Fashoda brought Britain and France to the brink of war.67 Yet the Scramble for Africa was also a scramble for scientific knowledge, which was as collaborative as it was competitive, and which had undoubted benefits for natives as well as for Europeans. The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.

…

Lurking within the real science was a pseudo-science, which asserted that mankind was not a single more or less homogeneous species but was subdivided and ranked from an Aryan ‘master race’ down to a black race unworthy of the designation Homo sapiens. And where better to test these theories than in Germany’s newly acquired African colonies? Africa was about to become another kind of laboratory – this time for racial biology. Each European power had its own distinctive way of scrambling for Africa. The French, as we have seen, favoured railways and health centres. The British did more than just dig for gold and hunt for happy valleys; they also built mission schools. The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast slave state. The Portuguese did as little as possible. The Germans were the latecomers to the party.

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism
by Elizabeth Becker
Published 16 Apr 2013

“Safari” is an Arabic word meaning “journey.” It found its way into the Swahili language and was adopted by British colonialists to mean a specifically African journey or adventure. Beneath the surface, the idea of a safari is loaded with the baggage of European colonization begun in the late-nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa” that didn’t fully end until the 1960s and beyond. The Europeans conquered some 10 million square miles of territory, tore apart traditional African nations and tribes, reassembling the land into thirty colonies ruled by white foreigners: British, French, German, Belgium, Portuguese and Italian.

…

Environmentalists say this is a disaster in the making: Caroline Shearing, “Dubai Golf Drive Upsets Greens: Plans to Open 11 New Golf Courses in Dubai Have Hit Environmental Opposition,” The Telegraph, April 25, 2008. Abu Dhabi Policy Agency: Dubai: Gilded Cage, p. 181. Seven: Safari The Europeans conquered some 10 million square miles: Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Abacus, 1993). Nearly 50 million visitors: UNWTO, Tourism Highlights, 2011 Edition, Africa, http://mkt.unwto.org/sites/all/files/docpdf/unwtohighlights11enlr.pdf. the $76 billion in revenue: WTTC: Travel and Tourism, Economic Impact, 2011, Africa, http://www.wttc.org/site_media/uploads/downloads/africa2.pdf.

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Onge, Alain, 174 Salas, Isabel, 247, 249, 251 Sanders, Daniel, 60 Sanders, Véronique, 60–61 Sands Macao, 369 San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice), 82 San Miguel, Mexico, 129 Santiago de Compostela, pilgrimages to, 182, 185–86 Sarajevo, Bosnia, 106 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 48, 71 Sata, Michael, 238 Saudi Arabia, 167 and commercial development in Mecca, 184–85 Hajj pilgrimage controlled by, 182–83 Save the Rhino Trust, 218 Scat (Hiaasen), 384 Schweitzer Mountain, 384 Scott, Ridley, 73–74 “scramble for Africa,” 208 Sea Lion (ship), 245, 246, 248, 255–57, 262 Selling the Sea (Dickinson and Vladimir), 137 Semeleer, Jane, 150 Senegal, 242 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: aircraft grounding after, 354 impact on U.S. tourism of, 347–48, 353–59, 361–62, 365, 366 serendipity, disappearance of, 18 Sex and the City 2 (film), 180 sex slavery, 115, 117, 190–91 sex tourism, 20, 30, 114–21, 190–91 in Cambodia, 92, 93, 104–5, 111, 114–21 exploitation of children in, 114–15, 116–17, 119 rape and torture in, 117 Seychelles Tourism Board, 174 Shaanxi, China, 336 Shaanxi Grand Opera House, 334 Shanghai, 319, 322–23, 364 Art Deco buildings in, 324, 325–26 Bund in, 324, 325 Disneyland in, 323–24 historic preservation vs. development in, 326–27 2010 World Expo in, 322–23 Shanghai Literary Festival, 326 Sharma, Rashmi, 311 Shenandoah National Park, 384–85 Sheridan, Virginia, 32 shipping industry, see maritime transport industry Shoumatoff, Alex, 235 Sichuan Province, China: panda reserves in, 335 2008 earthquake in, 320, 335–36 Siegel, Bugsy, 368 Siem Reap, Cambodia, 92–93, 103–4, 105 poverty in, 99–100 unrestricted tourism in, 98 water infrastructure in, 98–99 Siem Reap River, 93 pollution in, 98 Sierra-Caro, Lyan, 145 Sihanouk, Norodom, 90 Sihanoukville, Cambodia, 111, 119 Singapore, 113, 369 Sinhalese, 279–80 Sir Bani Yas Island wildlife preserve, 198 Ski Dubai, 176–77 slave trade, heritage of, 242–43 Sleeping Buddha Temple, Beijing, 298 Smith, Richard F., 199–200 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, 248 Society of American Travel Writers, 31 Sofitel Angkor resort, 103–4 Sok Nguon, 88, 92 solar energy, 195 Soubert, Son, 98 Sound of Music, The (film), 180 South Africa, 208, 209, 210, 222, 233, 240, 375 South Korea, Cambodian tourism industry and, 98–99 South Luangwa National Park, 211–17, 218, 224–29 infrastructure of, 224–26 Norwegian investment in, 224–25 Soutif, Dominique, 95–96, 97, 100 Soviet Union, 13, 54 Spark, Muriel, 28 Spelling, Aaron, 137 Spence, Jonathan D., 317 sports, tourism industry and, 273 Sri Lanka, 19 biodiversity of, 283–84 civil war in, 278–80, 282, 286 degraded infrastructure of, 286 human rights issues in, 282 national parks of, 284 Sri Lanka, tourism in, 36 during civil war, 280, 286 economic share of, 281 effects of civil war on, 278–79, 282 guest houses in, 284, 285 high-end travelers in, 283, 284 postwar land grab in, 280–81 sustainable development in, 287 Sri Lanka Tourism, 282 Stadhams, Dianne, 45 Stahl, Ralf, 200 Stark, Freya, 25 Starwood Hotels, 314 State Department, U.S., 191 Bureau of Consular Affairs, 358 improved visa process of, 363–64, 366 Stettinius, Edward, 139 Steves, Rick, 32 stewardship principles, 267 Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 82 Storella, Mark C., 210 Sud Ouest, 62 Summers, Lawrence, 360 Sunday Times (London), 355 Sun House, 284 Suraphon Svetasreni, 194 Svalbard Archipelago, 162 Sweeting, James, 154, 157, 159, 161, 163 Switzerland, 10 Sylor, Lin, 118 Syria, 193 Taine, Hippolyte, 49 Taj Mahal, overcrowding of, 30 Taliban, 169 Tamils, 279–80 Tamil Tigers, 280 Tang Dynasty, 330–31 Tang Paradise Hotel, 330 Tanzania, 208, 235 Taylor, Matthew, 74 Tazara Railway, 236 technological revolution, tourism and, 14 Tedjini, Patrice, 8, 34, 303 Terra-Cotta Army (Xian), 328–29, 331–32 Terzani, Tiziano, 298 Thailand, 112, 181 civil unrest in, 194, 281 sex tourism in, 114, 116, 117 tourism industry in, 19, 194 Thai Tourism Industry Association, 194 theme parks, tourism and, 382–84, 385 Thong Khon, 103–5 Tiananmen Square massacre, 305, 330 Tibet: Chinese invasion of, 302 Chinese tourism industry and, 302, 321 political protests in, 321 Tilarán Mountains, 253 Tilton, Glenn, 359 Timbers, Becky, 255 Tisch, Jonathan M., 361 Tollman, Brett, 116 Tonlé Sap River, 98 Torrey Canyon oil spill, 158 Tottle, Brian, 83–84 Toujours Provence (Mayle), 72 tourism, tourism industry, 7–39 academic degrees in, 379–80 as consumer engine, 45 cultural degradation from, 20–21, 30, 202–3 “dark,” 37, 92, 105–8 definition and categorization of, 16 as development strategy, 89–90, 99, 376 diplomatic role of, 358, 364 environmental degradation and, 20, 30, 35, 38, 195–96, 199–200, 271, 272 future of, 389 governmental role in, 33–34, 66, 69, 347, 349 Great Recession (2008) and, 271, 273–274, 360 growth of, 10, 13–14, 15, 19, 29, 57, 173, 355 history of, 9–17 homogenization of, 67 as ignored by governmental and economic leadership, 17, 272 low-volume, high-value, 21 motivation for, 10 paucity of debate on, 22, 390 poverty reduction and, 19–20, 35, 230, 376, 390 size of, 7, 10, 14–17, 45, 66–67, 194, 270, 351, 389 see also ecotourism; geotourism; green tourism Tourism for Tomorrow Awards, 270, 276 Tourism Ministry, Cambodia, 105, 108–10, 119 Tourism New Zealand, 307–8 Tourism Policy Council, U.S., 352 Tourism Satellite Account system, 16–17, 45, 270 tourism villages, 154 Tourtellot, Jonathan, 154–55, 266–68, 341 Toynbee, Arnold, 297 Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV), 56–57, 59 transportation, tourism and, 56–57, 67 Transportation Security Administration, U.S., 354 travel agents, 381–82 Travel and Tourism Administration, U.S., 349, 365 Travel Business Roundtable, 359 travel guides, 11–13, 23–24, 26 travel philanthropy, 101–2, 103 Travel Promotion Act (2010), 362, 372 “Travel to America?

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa
by Paul Kenyon
Published 1 Jan 2018

The young men of the Colonial Office knew how to get ahead. The mine, if Lord Kimberley would be so gracious, was to be called Kimberley, and the town was to be named Kimberley too. Even the diamond-bearing volcanic rock was given the colonial stamp. It was named kimberlite, and has been known as such ever since. The scramble for Africa began in earnest shortly afterwards, culminating in the famous Berlin Conference of 1884–5, when European powers formally divided the continent among themselves. In its aftermath came a series of diamond discoveries: in Congo Free State – owned at the time by Leopold, king of the Belgians – Portuguese Angola, and British-run Sierra Leone.

…

Plant your stake in its turf, and there was the possibility of spreading out across the whole region. Congo was a strategic prize without equal. For Russia it would be a first foothold in African soil, a prospect that was scaring the living daylights out of the cold warriors in Washington. The decolonization of the continent was the beginning of a second ‘scramble for Africa’, and the American objective was simple: keep the Russians out. Lumumba had put himself very much on the wrong side of the wire as far as the US was concerned. Not only had he alienated himself from the West, but his high-handed and capricious manner meant that he had burned his bridges with Kasavubu too, a relationship whose demise was helped along by the interference of Western intelligence agencies.

…

Four thousand Eritreans were killed or wounded in the conflict, and several hundred were taken as Ethiopian prisoners of war, during which time they were mutilated either by castration, or by having their right hands and left legs amputated. The next Italian territorial offensive came in 1911 when they conscripted 60,000 Eritrean ascari for the conquest of what is now Libya. However, Italy’s designs on Ethiopia were far from over. Ethiopia was one of only two nations that had remained independent during the scramble for Africa, the other being Liberia. Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in much need of a popular triumph, viewed the territory as the missing piece of a jigsaw – once joined to Eritrea and Italian Somaliland it would give him a sweep of territory in the Horn of Africa that would represent an unrivalled power base in the Red Sea area and much influence in the Middle East.

Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure
by Julian Smith
Published 7 Dec 2010

On another, Grogan dove into a crocodile-infested stream toavoid a wounded buffalo that finally dropped three yards from Sharp’s feet. The activity helped toughen the explorers to the ordeals ahead, but it also helped conceal the true nature of their mission. As the age of exploration morphed into the era of colonization, the “Scramble for Africa” was in full gear. Europe had salivated at the thought of controlling Africa’s vast expanses, manpower, and natural riches since Roman times. For more than a century before Grogan arrived, foreign powers had been slicing up the continent into colonies and protectorates like a pie at a murderous family gathering.

…

“The Manyema Hordes of Tippu Tip: A Case Study in Social Stratification and the Slave Trade in Eastern Africa.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 69–84. Paice, Edward. Lost Lion of Empire: The Life of Cape-to-Cairo Grogan. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912. New York: Random House, 1991. “People of Africa’s Past: Ewart Grogan.” Travel Africa, no. 11 (Spring 2000). Pettitt, Clare. Dr. Livingstone, I presume?: Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire. London: Profile, 2007. Roberts, Chalmers. “A Wonderful Feat of Adventure.”

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

The United States and most Central and South American countries had gained their independence by the mid-1800s, but other nations lost theirs over the nineteenth century. Much of South and Southeast Asia became colonized, as did many islands in the South Pacific. Europeans also engaged in a “Scramble for Africa”: by the early twentieth century more than 90 percent of the continent had been claimed by France, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Italy. King Leopold II of Belgium didn’t even go through the motions of using his country’s government as the instrument of colonization. He instead established himself as the “proprietor” of the Congo Free State, a huge amount of land in the middle of the continent corresponding roughly to the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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Seebohm, 24 Royal Crown Cola, 101 Russia, 185 Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), 66 Salemi, Jason, 216 Salesforce, 256–57 Samasource, 255–56 sanitation, 22–23, 194 Saudi Arabia, 104 Save the Elephants, 154 Schmidt, Christian, 148 Schnakenberg, Keith, 175 Schumpeter, Joseph, 122 Scientific American, 59–60 Scotland, 38 Scramble for Africa, 39 sea otters, 43, 96, 152 Second Enlightenment, 123, 141, 238–39, 265 Second Machine Age, 112–13, 114–15, 122–23, 141, 162, 168, 177, 200, 206, 213, 231 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson), 112 self-employment, 138–39 self-healing cities, 21–23 self-interest, 127 Sen, Amartya, 68–69, 94 service industry, 88, 200–201 Shapiro, David, 190 Shell Oil, 103, 104–05 Shellenberger, Michael, 251 Sherman, Brad, 107 Sheskin, Mark, 210 Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (las Casas), 39–40 Sidgwick, Henry, 142n silver, 120 Simon, Julian, 69–70, 71–72, 75, 151, 179, 244–45 Singapore, 148 Singh, Manmohan, 171–72 Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg), 179, 181 slash-and-burn agriculture, 148 slavery, 35, 36, 37–38, 181 Sloman, Steven, 226 smartphones, 102, 111, 113, 168–69, 205, 235, 236 Smil, Vaclav, 31, 101 Smith, Adam, 125–39, 128–29 Smith, Noah, 191 smog, 42, 55, 186 Snow, John, 22–23 social capital, 212–13, 216–17, 228–29, 247, 254, 255, 270 social democracy, 133–34 social development, 24–25, 26 social development index, 60n social safety nets, 131–32 socialism, 132–38, 192 sodium nitrate, 17 solar power, 111, 240, 250, 269 Song, Jian, 93 Sørlle, Petter, 47 Soros, George, 132 South Korea, 117–18, 174 Soviet Union, 133, 163–64, 170–71 “Spaceship Earth”, 64–65 Staggers Act (1980), 109 Starmans, Christina, 210 steam engine, 16, 17, 27, 30, 36, 44, 48–49, 205, 206, 237 steamships, 17–18, 26 steel, 80 Steller, Georg Wilhelm, 273 Steller’s sea cow, 273 Stenner, Karen, 217 Sterba, Jim, 43–44 Stigler, George, 126 Strangers in Their Own Land (Hochschild), 221 Suicide (Durkheim), 215–16, 219 sulfur dioxide, 54–55, 95, 186, 249 Sullivan, Andrew, 219 Summers, Larry, 254 sustainability, 64 taxation, 5, 130, 250 tech progress, 2–3, 4, 36, 67, 99–123, 113, 141, 151, 158–59, 167–68, 169–70 defining of, 114–15 Tesla, Nikola, 27 Texas, Hill Country of, 29, 205 Thatcher, Margaret, 132, 138 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 129 Thomas, Chris, 182–83 3-D printing, 239 tin, 72 tin cans, 101 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 89–90, 212–13 Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), 66 tragedy of the commons, 183 transportation, 241–42 Trump, Donald, 158, 201 trust, 212, 213, 217 Truth About Soviet Whaling, The (Berzin), 164 Ulam, Stanislaw, 19n Ultimate Resource, The (Simon), 69, 179 unfairness, 210, 220–24 Union Oil, 54 United Airlines, 257 United Kingdom, 76, 85 United Nations, 40, 58, 199 United States, 117–18 agriculture in, 81–82, 100 coal consumption in, 102–03 cropland acreage in, 201–02 dematerialization in, 76–85 industrial production in, 88–89 mortality rates in, 213–14 slavery in, 37–38 suicide rate in, 214–16 water pollution in, 189–90 urbanization, 91–92, 199–200 Utopia or Oblivion (Fuller), 70 vaccination, 227 Van Reenen, John, 203, 204, 207 Varian, Hal, 236 Veblen goods, 152–53 Veblen, Thorstein, 152 Venezuela, 118, 134–38, 172 voluntary exchange, 117 wages, 20–21 Waggoner, Paul, 76 Wagner, Stephan, 148 Wald, George, 61 water, drinking, 194 water pollution, 189–90 Watt, James, 15–16, 20, 121, 206, 237 Watt, Kenneth, 58 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 127, 131 Weeks-McLean Law Act (1913), 96 Welzel, Christian, 176, 177 Wernick, Iddo, 76 whales, 44, 46–47, 163–65 wheat, 31–32 Wheelwright, William, 17–18 Whole Earth Catalog, 68 Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson), 159 Wilson, James, 19n wind power, 111, 240, 250 Winship, Scott, 215 Wolff, Edward, 206 Woodbury, N.J., 65 wooly mammoth, 180 World Bank, 118, 168, 169, 192 World Values Survey, 176 Yao Ming, 154, 161 Yellowstone National Park, 46, 153 YouTube, 236 Zoorob, Michael, 216 First published in the United States by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2019 First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK, Ltd, 2019 A CBS COMPANY Copyright © 2019 by Andrew McAfee The right of Andrew McAfee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

The Challenge for Africa
by Wangari Maathai
Published 6 Apr 2009

Notes One THE FARMER OF YAOUNDé 1 Arthur Bright, “South Africa's Anti-Immigrant Violence Spreads to Cape Town,” Christian Science Monitor, May 23, 2008. 2 “Poverty Rates in Sub-Saharan Africa Steadily Declining Over Last Ten Years: Report,” Ethiopian News Agency, August 28, 2008. 3 “The State of Africa's Children, 2008,” UNICEF, May 28, 2008. 4 Cathy Maj tenyi, “Women Have Strong Voice in Rwandan Parliament,” Voice of America, July 16, 2007. Two A LEGACY OF WOES 1 See Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa. 2 See Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost. 3 “Zambia: Rise of African Nationalism (1945-1964),” EISA, www.eisa.org.za. 4 See Meredith, The Fate of Africa, p. 176. 5 For the history of Africa in precolonial times, see Wikipedia entries for “Ashanti,” “Benin,” “Dahomey,” “Great Zimbabwe,” “Kongo,” “Mali,” “Songhai,” “Sankore,” “Zulu” (accessed on September 2, 2008).

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New York: Vintage, 2002. Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994. Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Wizard of the Crow. New York: Anchor, 2007. Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa. London: Abacus, 1992. Sachs, Jeffrey D. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York: Penguin, 2005. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Making Globalization Work. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

Global power is conspicuous by its absence from all these approaches. Conversely, the classic theorists of imperialism had little to say about the desire, appropriation and use of things. For J. A. Hobson, Heinrich Friedjung and Joseph Schumpeter, all writing in the immediate aftermath of the European scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, imperialism was driven by finance capitalism, aggressive nationalism, or an ‘atavistic’ aristocracy that was clinging on to feudal power and glory. Consumers featured, if at all, as victims of a jingoist conspiracy that enriched the few at the expense of the many.

…

The rising tide of goods brought mixed fortunes to all sides. For indigenous societies, European shirts, sofas and umbrellas upset existing hierarchies. For imperial masters, goods were signs of power, too, but ones to mark the distance between ruler and ruled. Consumption amongst colonial subjects had to be controlled. By the 1880s, when the scramble for Africa got under way, the internal contradictions of liberal empire were in plain view. Global levels of trade and consumption were rising fast, but so was the pace of conquest and annexation. Here was the paradox of this phase of globalization. Economically, the world was more open in the 1870s and 1880s than a century or two earlier, but in terms of political and cultural power it was becoming more rigid and closed.

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Some were imitation pearls and crystal from Venice and Bohemia.9 The slave trade was part of this expanding world of goods, enriching local rulers and their followers. The King of Dahomey, for example, made £250,000 from the sale of slaves in 1750. It is impossible to do justice here to the rich literature about different regions, but three general points can be made. First, consumption was on a long, upward curve before the scramble for Africa got under way in the 1880s. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 accelerated this process, as West African communities started to trade ever greater amounts of palm oil, gum and other export crops. But it did not originate it. A taste revolution was already creating distinct regional styles.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Published 20 Mar 2012

In this scenario, changes that would have created better economic institutions in society would have made the king and aristocracy political as well as economic losers. The interaction of economic and political institutions five hundred years ago is still relevant for understanding why the modern state of Congo is still miserably poor today. The advent of European rule in this area, and deeper into the basin of the River Congo at the time of the “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century, led to an insecurity of human and property rights even more egregious than that which characterized the precolonial Kongo. In addition, it reproduced the pattern of extractive institutions and political absolutism that empowered and enriched a few at the expense of the masses, though the few now were Belgian colonialists, most notably King Leopold II.

…

All the same, Tewodros’s reconstructed government did manage to pull off one of the great anticolonial triumphs of the nineteenth century, against the Italians. In 1889 the throne went to Menelik II, who was immediately faced with the interest of Italy in establishing a colony there. In 1885 the German chancellor Bismarck had convened a conference in Berlin where the European powers hatched the “Scramble for Africa”—that is, they decided how to divide up Africa into different spheres of interest. At the conference, Italy secured its rights to colonies in Eritrea, along the coast of Ethiopia, and Somalia. Ethiopia, though not represented at the conference, somehow managed to survive intact. But the Italians still kept designs, and in 1896 they marched an army south from Eritrea.

…

More accurate data exist from early French colonial records for the western Sudan, a large swath of western Africa, stretching from Senegal, via Mali and Burkina Faso, to Niger and Chad. In this region 30 percent of the population was enslaved in 1900. Just as with the emergence of legitimate commerce, the advent of formal colonization after the Scramble for Africa failed to destroy slavery in Africa. Though much of European penetration into Africa was justified on the grounds that slavery had to be combated and abolished, the reality was different. In most parts of colonial Africa, slavery continued well into the twentieth century. In Sierra Leone, for example, it was only in 1928 that slavery was finally abolished, even though the capital city of Freetown was originally established in the late eighteenth century as a haven for slaves repatriated from the Americas.

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel
by Nicholas Ostler
Published 23 Nov 2010

Completing this triptych on its western side, we turn to eastern Africa.11 In the British colonial states here, there has been, as almost everywhere else in the continent, a profound mismatch between linguistic boundaries and national frontiers. This is because the nation-states derive ultimately from competing European land grabs in the nineteenth century “scramble for Africa,” irrespective of social alliances that might have arisen among African tribes. With far more languages than states, attempting to pick out one majority language within a country and declaring it the national language is dangerously divisive. Some kind of lingua-franca—with sufficient development of its vocabulary to serve all the needs of a modern state— has been needed, and the natural choice by default in a former British colony was English.

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In a number of cases the incipient lingua-franca spread of some of these languages has faced insuperable obstacles, particularly through deliberate Relegation. German, for example, had been introduced as a command language of empire to many territories in Africa. From the Berlin Congress of 1884–85, which attempted to regulate the “scramble for Africa,” Germany claimed Togoland (modern Togo and the Volta region of Ghana) and Cameroon in the west, Southwest Africa (modern Namibia) in the south, German East Africa (Tanganyika, with Rwanda and Burundi) in the east, all of which it held until World War I. This amounted to 10 million subjects in Africa, comparable with 33 million then at home in Europe (and the 93 million estimated for Africa as a whole).1 German colonies were distinctive in these thirty years for their dedication to education, with not only primary but also secondary and vocational courses being established; a widespread network of mission schools was also set up independently of the government.

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 20 Mar 2007

The British explorer David Livingstone described Britain’s supposedly noble intentions (guided by the “three C’s”: commerce, Christianity, and civilization) a bit like how some Americans today believe they should spread freedom and democracy overseas. The French had something similar, described in Thomas Pakenham’s classic The Scramble for Africa: Overseas empire would soothe the amour-propre of the French army, humiliated by its collapse in the Franco-Prussian war.4 . . . A whiff of colonial fever, a panicky fear the door was closing (what the Germans called Torschlusspanik), had infected the French public.5 . . . To redeem France’s humiliations in Europe by acquiring a great overseas empire, to develop new overseas markets for France, were the aims common to all French colonialists.6 . . .

…

See, for example, “Natural Resources and Violent Conflict,” paper by Ian Bannon and Paul Collier, World Bank, 2003, or Bottom of the Barrel: Africa’s Oil Boom and the Poor, by Catholic Relief Services, June 2003. In François-Xavier Verschave, L’envers de la dette (Paris: Agone, 2002). As revealed in, and widely reported from, the Elf trials. See, for example, Karl Laske, “La pompe Afrique: Tours de passe-passe,” Libération, January 13, 2003. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, (London: Abacus, 1992) page xxiv. Ibid., page 358. Ibid., page 359. Ibid., page 154. From a BBC chronology, February 27, 2004. From Adam Hochschild’s classic King Leopold’s Ghost (London: Papermac, 2000). Douglas A. Yates, The Rentier State in Africa: Oil Rent Dependency and Neocolonialism in the Republic of Gabon (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996), page 90.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

In its rhetoric, and increasingly in policy, there is a growing tendency on the part of Chinese foreign-policy leaders to assert that the US-based international system and way of doing things are no longer working.26 China’s deepening commercial involvement in African countries, such as the Congo, calls to mind the book The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham (an Anglo-Irish historian, formally known as Lord Longford) in which he details the partition and despoiling of Africa in the nineteenth century by European powers such as England, Italy, France, and Belgium.27 A subtle variant on Chinese promotion of its prestige internationally is apparent in Chinese cinema, which is already forging ahead here with films like Operation Red Sea (2018) and Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) depicting the bravery of Chinese overseas interventions.

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Fu Ying, “Quo Vadis,” Valdai Club, October 25, 2016. She has made similar remarks in the Western press, notably in “The US World Order Is a Suit That No Longer Fits,” op-ed, Financial Times, January 6, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/c09cbcb6-b3cb-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51. 27. T. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (Random House, 1990). 28. “Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries,” http://www.china-ceec.org/eng/. 29. On the place of religion in China, see Johnson, The Souls of China. 30. E. Feng, “Security Spending Ramped Up in China’s Restive Xinjiang Region,” Financial Times, March 12, 2016. 31.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

We can see others not as selfish, greedy, ignorant, or lazy people who just “don’t get it,” but rather as divine beings who desire to give to the world; we can see that and speak to that and know it so strongly that our knowing serves as an invitation to ourselves and others to step into that truth. 1. See, e.g., Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 497–98. 2. A slight caveat: in theory, if the interest rate is no higher than the default risk premium, then there will be no necessity for economic growth and the monetization of the commons. The relevant components of the real interest rate, however, are the liquidity premium and the market rate for money, determined by supply, demand, and government monetary policy.

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Mankiw, N. Gregory. “It May Be Time for the Fed to Go Negative.” New York Times, April 18, 2009. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934. Nemat-Nejat, Karen Rhea. Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa. London: Abacus, 1991. Paine, Thomas. Agrarian Justice. 1797. Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. New York: Penguin, 2005. Piff, P. K., M. W. Kraus, B. H. Cheng, and D. Keltner. “Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 12, 2010. doi:10.1037/a0020092.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

Its declaration that a claim to a colony required ‘effective occupation’ was a dead letter, since such a claim really applied only to coastal areas, and the conference’s insistence on free trade along major rivers like the Congo and the Niger was more or less ignored. But by laying down ground rules for annexation, the conference effectively declared that the ‘Scramble for Africa’ – a British term coined in 1884 – had begun, so it stimulated further annexations. In 1885 the British declared their protectorate over the Nigerian coast and authorized the Royal Niger Company, founded in 1879, to go inland, conclude treaties with local rulers, and exercise British rule, rather like the East India Company of former times.

…

Minor adjustments remained: between the French and British in northern Nigeria and in particular on the Upper Nile at Fashoda in 1898, where a military clash between the two powers threatened until the French, feeling very much the inferior power, prudently withdrew in the face of a larger British force. In northern Africa, Italy and France settled claims in Tripoli (Libya) and Morocco in 1900. To all intents and purposes the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was over by the middle of the 1890s. It was paralleled by a similar rush for influence and control in Asia and the Pacific, also sparked by Bismarck, who claimed New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, New Pomerania, the northern Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands and Nauru. In 1885–6 the British and French recognized these claims, allotting north-eastern New Guinea to Germany in return for German acceptance of British rule over south-eastern New Guinea and the southern Pacific, and French suzerainty in parts of the eastern Pacific.

…

Westminster law was supreme, but there was no attempt to impose a uniform system of rule from London. The insistence on free trade across the empire made central control even less necessary. Power therefore devolved onto the colonial state on the ground. Major parts of the empire had been in British possession long before the ‘Scramble for Africa’. These included first of all colonies of settlement, notably Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the Cape Colony on the southernmost tip of Africa. While there was European settlement on some scale in some non-British colonies, notably Algeria and German South-West Africa, these British colonies were unique in being mainly intended as goals for emigration.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

Prestige and FOMO (fear of missing out) were just as important motives. Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister from 1874 to 1880, saw imperialism as a way of attracting voter support; that’s why he made Queen Victoria Empress of India in 1876. In the 1880s, Bismarck was sniffy about the “scramble for Africa”, fearing that colonial disputes would only damage relations with other European powers. He succumbed to the temptation to seize territory at the Congress of Berlin in 1885, in part because he saw empire-building as politically popular at home. But by 1889, he was trying to give away German south-west Africa, arguing that it was “a burden and an expense”.

…

The cost of defending these colonies was high and the authors suggest that “in the absence of empire, the burdens on the British taxpayer could have been reduced and resources diverted to more productive activities”.20 Other academics point out, however, that the empire added considerably to British military might, as the First World War was to show, and that the late Victorian empire “does not appear to have been a waste of money”.21 The two most successful economies of the late 19th century were Germany and the US. The former had a few colonies in Africa, such as Togoland and Namibia; the latter had the Philippines and Hawaii. In neither case did these seem to be hugely profitable. The scramble for Africa was a mistake, and not just for the Africans. Precisely because the African economies were underdeveloped they were unlikely to be a huge source of demand for European goods. France seems to have lost money in its tropical African colonies while making money from Algeria and Indochina.22 An alternative argument for colonial expansion is that the Europeans were not interested in exports but in controlling access to raw materials.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
by Peter Warren Singer
Published 1 Jan 2003

William Thorn, "Africa's Security Issues through 2010," Military Review (Department of the Army Professional Bulletin 100-99-5/6. vol. 80. no. 4 (July-August 2000). http:// u-ww.cgsc.army.mil/milrev/ Fnglish/JuIAugoo/thorn.htm 8. William Reno. Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998), p. l. 9. Jeremy M. Weinstein, ".Africa's 'Scramble for .Africa'": Lessons of a Continental Wan" World Policy Journal 17, no. 2 (Summer 2000). 10. Duffield, Internal Conflict. 1 1. Michael Renner, "The Global Divide: Socioeconomic Disparities and International Security." in World Security: Challenges for a Xeio Century, ed. Michael Klare andYogesh Chandrani (New York: St.

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Wallenstein: Soldinunder Saturn. London, Appleton-Century, 1938, Weber, Max. Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson, New York: Free Press, 1964. Weiner, Myron, ed. International Migration and Security. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993. \Veinstein,Jeremy M, "Africa's 'Scramble for .Africa': Lessons of a Continental War." World Policy Journal 17, no. 2 (Summer 2000). Wendt, Alexander. Social Theory of International Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press 1999. Wendt, Alexander, and Michael Barnett, '"Dependent State Formation and Third World Militarization." Review of International Studies 19, no. 4 (August 1993): Westwood, Chris.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Rosanne Curriaro, “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America,” Journal of American History, 93 ( 2006): 22–27. CHAPTER 8. RULERS AS CAPITALISTS 1. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York, 1991), 18–74; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1999), 26–33. 2. Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (New Haven, 2007), 230. 3. Pakenham, Scramble for Africa, 15, 22. 4. Ibid., 71–87. 5. Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 2nd ed.

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World
by Kwasi Kwarteng
Published 14 Aug 2011

The Germans, Goldie believed, had poisoned the ‘minds of the native rulers, especially as rumours pass rapidly in Central Africa from district to district and acquire strength by repetition’. In the wake of the international Conference of Berlin in 1885, which precipitated the controversial ‘Scramble for Africa’, the Germans, the French and the British were all vying for trade and dominance in West Africa. Goldie complained to his political masters in the Foreign Office in London that the Germans had claimed that ‘wherever the English went they subjugated and oppressed the populations, that the native laws and customs would be overthrown, and that the power of the Chiefs would be abolished’.20 The company, as far as Goldie was concerned, had no ‘desire to interfere more than is absolutely necessary with the internal arrangements of the Chiefs of Central Africa’.

…

Goldie came back to England, but never held another post linked to the empire. When he died in 1925, aged seventy-nine, he remained unshaken in his belief that there ‘was no God and no life to come’.27 The country over which Goldie had presided as the unofficial leading statesman was not really a country at all. The mad scramble for Africa had been notoriously careless of ethnic boundaries and tribal distinctions. As Lord Salisbury himself described it, the partition of Africa was haphazard and disorganized. After an agreement with the French in 1892, Salisbury wrote that ‘we have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were’.28 In the eyes of the British the country which we would later know as Nigeria was, like Julius Caesar’s Gaul, split into three parts.

Undoing Border Imperialism
by Harsha Walia
Published 12 Nov 2013

Spain colonized the Indigenous Guanches of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and imposed a plantation economy that used forced labor to produce sugarcane and cochineal as cash crops. Today, as the outermost region of the European Union, the islands are a major gateway for African migrants into Europe. Migrants from the western regions of Africa—born of a legacy of slavery, civil wars fueled by Western geopolitical interests, and the colonial Scramble for Africa with its contemporary expression of landgrabs—flee to the Canary Islands in the tens of thousands every year. This is one of the most dangerous and heavily patrolled migration routes in the world, with a Spanish official estimating that 40 percent of those attempting the journey die en route.(30) Even according to conservative estimates cited by the Red Cross, approximately fifteen hundred migrants died trying to reach the Canary Islands in just a five-month period in 2005.(31) Border securitization operates not at a fixed site but rather through structures and technologies of power across geographies.

Africa: A Biography of the Continent
by John Reader
Published 5 Nov 1998

Abstr., 27, pp. 1 – 9 Fynn, J.K., 1971, ‘Ghana-Asante (Ashanti)’, in Crowder (ed.), 1971, pp. 19 – 52 Galbraith, John K., 1992, ‘The challenge to the South: seven basic principles’, South Letter (The South Centre, Geneva and Dar es Salaam), no. 14, pp. 12 – 13 Galbraith, J.S., 1963, Reluctant Empire, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press Galbraith, John S., 1971, ‘Gordon, MacKinnon, and Leopold: the scramble for Africa 1876 – 84’, Vict. Stud., vol. 14, pp. 369 – 88 Galenson, David W., 1986, Traders, Planters, and Slaves. Market Behaviour in Early English America, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Gamble, C.S., and Soffer, O., 1990, The World at 18 000 BP, vol. 2: Low Latitudes, London, Unwin Hyman Gann, L.H., 1975, ‘Economic development in Germany's African Empire, 1884 – 1914’, in Duigan and Gann, (eds.), 1975, pp. 213 – 55 Gann, L.H., and Duigan, P.

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J., 1992b, ‘Early human mental abilities’, in Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, p. 342 Gray, Albert, and Bell, H.C.P., (eds.), 1887, 1890, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas, and Brazil, London Grébénart, D., 1988, Les Premiers Métallurgistes en Afrique Occidentale, Paris/Abidjan, Editions Errance/Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines Greenberg, Joseph H., 1966, The Languages of Africa, The Hague, Mouton Gregory, J. W., Cordell, D.D., and Gervais, R., (eds.), 1984, African Historical Demography, Edinburgh, African Studies Centre, University of Edinburgh Griffiths, Ieuan, 1986, ‘The scramble for Africa: inherited political boundaries’, Geogr. J., vol. 152, pp. 204 – 16 Grigson, C., 1989, ‘Size and sex: evidence for domestication of cattle in the Near East’, in Milles, Williams, and Gardner, pp. 77 – 109 Grove, A.T., 1984, ‘The environmental setting’, in Grove, A.T. (ed.), 1984 Grove, A.T., 1993, ‘Africa's climate in the Holocene’, in Shaw et al., pp. 34 – 5 Grove, A.T.

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Edward, 1900, William Cotton Oswell: Hunter and Explorer, 2 vols., London, Heinemann Pacheco Pereira, Duarte, 1506, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, trans. and ed. George H.T. Kimble, 1937, Cambridge, Hakluyt Society (Ser. II, vol. 79) Page, Melvin E., (ed.), 1987, Africa and the First World War, London, Macmillan Pakenham, Thomas, 1991, The Scramble for Africa, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson Park, Mungo, 1813, Travels to the Interior of Africa, London Parker, I.S. C., and Graham, A.D., 1989, ‘Elephant decline: downward trends in African elephant distribution and numbers’, 2 pts, Int. J. Environ. Stud., vol. 34, pp. 287 – 305, and vol. 35, pp. 13 – 26 Partridge, Tim C., 1994, ‘Between two oceans’, Johannesburg, pp. 1 – 2 (unpub. draft MS.)

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls
by Tim Marshall
Published 8 Mar 2018

We are now well into the twenty-first century and Africa stands at a point which, with hindsight, was always coming: it needs to balance the rediscovery of its pre-colonial senses of nationhood with the realities of the current functioning nation states. That’s a fine line, fraught with danger, but to ignore or deny the divisions that occur the length and breadth of this vast space will not make them go away. Once there was the ‘scramble for Africa’; now there is a race to bring about a degree of prosperity so that people may be persuaded to live peacefully together, while working on solutions where they wish to live apart. CHAPTER 7 EUROPE ‘Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another.

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags
by Tim Marshall
Published 21 Sep 2016

The rays stand for the various peoples of the country, the star representing their equality and unity. It is also variously considered to be the Star of King Solomon and the Star of David, as the first Emperor Menelik was claimed to be the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Italy was late to the ‘Scramble for Africa’. By the early 1890s the British, French, Germans and Belgians had seized the majority of what was considered the most valuable territory and Italy was left with what is now Eritrea; it used its colony there as a launch pad to invade what was then Abyssinia – now Ethiopia. In 1895 heavy fighting broke out, and, to their surprise, the following year the Italians were driven back to Eritrea, having suffered the loss of at least 7,000 men.

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom
by Martin Jacques
Published 12 Nov 2009

The economic chasm that opened up between Europe and nearly everywhere else greatly enhanced its ability to dominate the world.52 The colonial era had started in the seventeenth century, but from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, with the progressive acquisition of India, it rapidly expanded. In the name of Christianity, civilization and racial superiority, and possessed of armies and navies without peer, the European nations, led by Britain and France, subjugated large swathes of the world, culminating in the scramble for Africa in the decades immediately prior to 1914.53 Savage wars took place between whites and non-whites as Chinese, Indians and native peoples in North America, Australasia and southern Africa made their last stand against European assaults on their religions, rulers, land and resources.54 Niall Ferguson writes: Western hegemony was one of the great asymmetries of world history.

…

Its rapidly growing influence suggests that in due course it will probably become the dominant player on the continent, and serves as a bold statement of China’s wider global intentions. The speed of China’s involvement in Africa, and its success in wooing the African elites, has put the West on the defensive in a continent where it has a poor historical record.57 Unlike the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the late nineteenth century, which generated bitter intra-European rivalry, China’s involvement has not as yet produced significant tensions with the US, Britain or France, though that could change. The recent establishment of the United States Africa Command to coordinate its military relations and activities on the continent suggests that it is concerned about China’s growing influence; as of late 2008, however, the US had failed to find an African location for its headquarters, stating that it would be based in Stutt gart for the foreseeable future.

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

From 1914 to 1918, four years of grisly conflict and slaughter left 8.5 million Europeans dead. Characteristically, Du Bois viewed matters from his own black nationalist perspective. On the eve of America’s entry into the war, he wrote in The Crisis that the true origin of the Great War lay in the imperialist scramble for Africa, “the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races.” With the coming of the armistice in 1918 and the Versailles settlement, in which Germany was forced to surrender its colonial possessions, Du Bois forsaw a new opportunity for nonwhite nationalisms of all types.

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Finally, in the thirties, he turned to Marx and Communism. He had learned a good deal about Marx during his stay in Germany in 1892 to ’94 and visited the Soviet Union in 1924. His own analysis of imperialism had anticipated V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued (wrongly) that the scramble for Africa was due to surplus capital, and that late capitalism could only derive its profits from an expanding colonial empire.* For a time after World War II, Du Bois even worried that the capitalist world, in its final death agonies, would crush out the cause of liberation of nonwhite people.72 Then the British granted independence to India, the United States forced the Dutch to leave Indonesia, and the European powers began to shed their colonies—and prospered.

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405
by John Darwin
Published 5 Feb 2008

But nowhere else was their imperial expansion so dizzyingly swift or so astonishingly complete as in sub-Saharan Africa – the ‘dark continent’, whose interior Europeans had been noticeably slowto claim. This is why the African case has so fascinated historians. More than a century later, the ‘scramble’ for Africa in the 1880s and the continent’s ‘partition’ and ‘conquest’ evoke strong emotions and uneasy debate. This is partly because they offend contemporary notions of racial justice, and partly because Africa’s postcolonial condition has made its colonial past seem more painfully real than has been the case in more fortunate regions.

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So, while the Europeans had fought wars to divide the Americas, and periodically threatened to do so over the Middle East, they shared out Africa with surprising bonhomie. This had two crucial results. It reduced the scope for African leaders to exploit European differences and so prolong their freedom. And it meant that, once they were demarcated, colonial borders could be left undefended (until the First World War) against any European foe. The scramble for Africa was the most obvious case of Europe’s growing appetite for global supremacy, and the irresistible strength it could bring to the task. But it was also a paradox. Firstly, European governments showed little enthusiasm for extending their control over the African interior. They responded grudgingly to the clamour of lobbies.

Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya
by Nicholas Best
Published 9 Aug 2013

His plan for subduing the Masai and securing the Nile for Britain had been turned down by a Government ruled by Little Englanders for whom any colonial involvement was a sin. Whether the Government liked it or not, though, Germany was already on the march. Behind the Germans would come the French and the Italians. There was really no way now that the British could avoid becoming involved in the scramble for Africa. CHAPTER TWO The lunatic express The first Britons to reach East Africa had been sailors stocking up with food and water for the long voyage across the ocean to India. They followed the route taken by Vasco da Gama, whose arrival at the port of Mombasa in 1498 had touched off more than two centuries of intermittent Portuguese colonisation along the coast.

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier
by Michael Peel
Published 1 Jan 2009

In December 2008, the Financial Times reported that Dangote Group, a sprawling Nigerian 154 A SWAMP FULL OF DOLLARS conglomerate, had postponed plans to buy $3.3bn of cement plant building and materials from Sinoma International Engineering, a Chinese contractor. The idea of a new international scramble for Africa – and in particular for its energy reserves – is hardly original. But what’s striking up close is how intense and amoral the process is. Both the USA and China are wooing countries in the region, including Nigeria, that have poor records on holding credible elections and respecting human rights.

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
by Alex von Tunzelmann
Published 7 Jul 2021

The slave trade had been abolished in the British Empire by the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and beyond that by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Indenture had often replaced it. The Industrial Revolution had occurred. European powers were in the middle of a colonizing frenzy characterized as the Scramble for Africa. Though Britain appeared to be riding high by the 1890s, there was great anxiety about Britishness. Outside, it seemed as if every European nation was snapping at Britain’s heels, trying to grab an empire of its own. Inside, there was inequality, poverty and dissent.15 There had been an upsurge of republican feeling against Victoria’s stodgy monarchy in the 1870s.

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Published 27 Aug 2018

MOVING BOUNDARIES Deciding which nation is yours is further complicated when political boundaries keep shifting. Schmitz’s life epitomizes, in a somewhat exaggerated form, the experience of millions of people in the twentieth century: he was a citizen of one country who became a citizen of another without leaving home. The turn of the twentieth century was an age of empires. In the Scramble for Africa, between the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and the First World War, almost all of Africa was colonized by European states. Asante, where I grew up, became a British protectorate in 1902. In 1900 most of Central and Eastern Europe was part of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman empires.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney
Published 16 Aug 2021

FIVE CENTURIES AFTER the government of Chioggia installed a tower clock on their city hall in 1386, overlooking the scene of brutal massacres recently carried out by occupying forces, a new series of violent occupations had reshaped the global map and forcibly changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. By the 1880s, the British Empire included India, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the so-called scramble for Africa was seeing Britain take land and people up and down the African continent—“from Cape Town to Cairo,” as the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes described it in 1892.9 And clock towers accompanied them on their march. At Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, the first British time signal had begun to operate in 1806, within weeks or even days of the invading force seizing control.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

In order to generate profits for growth, capital seeks to appropriate nature as cheaply as possible – and ideally for free.40 The elites’ seizure of Europe’s commons after 1500 can be seen as a massive, uncompensated appropriation of nature. So too with colonisation, when Europeans grabbed huge swathes of the global South; vastly more land and resources than Europe itself contained. Silver and gold from South America, land for cotton and sugar in the Caribbean, Indian forests for fuel and shipbuilding, and – during the scramble for Africa that got under way after 1885 – diamonds, rubber, cocoa, coffee, and countless other commodities. All of this was appropriated virtually for free. By ‘free’ here I mean not just in the sense that they didn’t pay for it, but also in the sense that they gave nothing back. There was no gesture of reciprocity with the land.

The Grand Scuttle
by Dan Van der Vat

The Germans took exception to the French unilateral initiative, while the French suspected that the Germans planned to exploit the unrest in Morocco to extend their influence there into the political sphere. Secret Franco-German talks of which the British knew nothing took place, during which the Germans made major demands for cession of French African territory. The cuckoo was still hungry, feeling as strongly as ever that it had been done down in the European scramble for Africa in the later half of the nineteenth century. The French found themselves in an impossible position: a little local difficulty suddenly became a challenge to their status as a world power. Then in July the Germans sent the gunboat Panther to the Moroccan port of Agadir to ‘protect German interests’.

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

Closer linkages were intended only for the ‘civilized nations’ – the cosy club of Western colonial powers.5 ‘Barbaric nations’ – which included south-eastern European states and principalities that only won their independence from the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the nineteenth century – were to be treated as second-tier societies and, where necessary, forcibly occupied to allow the great powers to pursue their individual and collective interests. ‘Savage nations’ were to be colonized, most obviously reflected in the late nineteenth-century ‘Scramble for Africa’, a race that, more than anything, revealed that Europeans themselves were capable of immense savagery in the name of civilization.6 There were rules and procedures aplenty but their interpretation varied enormously. Cobden’s civilized belief in free trade, for example, was too often expropriated by others in a bid to gain commercial advantage in parts of the world that had no desire to open up their societies to avaricious Europeans.

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein
Published 18 May 2020

The Russians aggressively expanded their land borders south and west, which frightened the British into additional conquests—Afghanistan, Burma, much of East Africa, and most of southern Africa—ostensibly meant to secure the defense of India. Britain would also fight in Central Asia, Persia, and Tibet because of its fear of losing India. The scramble for Africa became so intense that an international conference (known as the West Africa Conference) was held in Berlin in 1884–85 to prevent military clashes between the European powers. Fig. 1.1 World trade did not surpass its 1873 peak until the 1970s (total exports as a share of world output). Source: Bank for International Settlements By the eve of World War I, all of Africa except for Ethiopia and Liberia had been brought under European control.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

Chapter 9 Blood Cobalt 1 Van Reybrouck, D., Congo: The Epic History of a People (New York, Ecco Press, 2015), p. 119. 2 Kavanagh, M., ‘This is our land’, New York Times, 26 January 2019. 3 Liwanga, R.C., Child Mining in An Era of High-Technology, Understanding the Roots, Conditions, and Effects of Labor Exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Dearborn MI, Alpha Academic Press, 2017), p. vii. 4 See other studies: Faber et al. estimated that about 23 percent of children worked in the cobalt mining sector, while Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (BGR) found children at 17 mines (or 29 percent); Faber, B., Krause, B., Sánchez de la Sierra, R., ‘Artisanal mining, livelihoods, and child labor in the cobalt supply chain of the Democratic Republic of Congo’, UC Berkeley CEGA White Papers, 6 May 2017; ‘Mapping of the artisanal copper-cobalt mining sector in the provinces of Haut-Katanga and Lualaba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’, BGR, October 2019. 5 Dauvergne, P., The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment (Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2010), p. 209. 6 ‘Building a responsible supply chain’, Faraday Insights, 7 (May 2020), https://faraday.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Insight-cobalt-supply-chain1.pdf. 7 Banza Lubaba Nkulu, C., Casas, L., Haufroid, V. et al., ‘Sustainability of artisanal mining of cobalt in DR Congo’, Nature Sustainability, 1 (2018), 495–504, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0139-4. 8 ‘Metal mining and birth defects: a case-control study in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo’, The Lancet Planetary Health, April 2020, www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30059-0/fulltext. 9 Van Reybrouck, Congo, p. 526. 10 Ibid., p. 527. 11 Carroll, R., ‘Return of mining brings hope of peace and prosperity to ravaged Congo’, Guardian, 5 July 2006. 12 US diplomatic cable, 29 April 2005, Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05KINSHASA731_a.html. 13 Kabemba, C., Bokondu, G., Cihunda, J., ‘Overexploitation and injustice against artisanal miners in the Congolese cobalt supply chain’, Southern Africa Resource Watch, Resource Insight, 18 (January 2020), www.sarwatch.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Cobalt-Report-v2-English_compressed.pdf. 14 Quoted in Liwanga, Child Mining, p. 22. 15 Clark, S., Smith, M., Wild, F., ‘China lets child miners die digging in Congo mines for copper’, Bloomberg News, 23 July 2008. 16 ‘This is what we die for, human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo power the global trade in cobalt’, Amnesty International, 19 January 2016, www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/3183/2016/en/. 17 ‘Exposed: child labour behind smart phone and electric car batteries’, Amnesty, 19 January 2016. 18 Pakenham, T., The Scramble for Africa (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), p. 588. 19 Jasanoff, M., The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (London, William Collins, 2017), p. 210. 20 Ibid., p. 213. 21 Ibid., p. 213. 22 Sovacool, B.K., Hook, A., Martiskainen, M., Brock, A., Turnheim, B., ‘The decarbonisation divide: Contextualizing landscapes of low-carbon exploitation and toxicity in Africa’, Global Environmental Change, 60 (2020), 102028. 23 Xing, X., ‘A video allegedly staged by UK journalists in DR Congo has nobody fooled about Sino-Congolese relations’, Global Times, 20 December 2017, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1081258.shtml. 24 Sanderson, H., ‘Glencore warns on child labour in Congo’s cobalt mining’, Financial Times, 16 April 2018. 25 ‘Eurasian Resources Group joins with leading businesses and international organisations to launch the Global Battery Alliance’, Eurasian Resources Group, 20 September 2019, https://eurasianresources.lu/en/news/eurasian-resources-group-joins-with-leading-businesses-and-. 26 Sanderson, H., ‘NGOs hit out at LME’s cobalt sourcing plans’, Financial Times, 7 February 2019. 27 ‘Glencore fails to disclose royalty payments for US-sanctioned businessman Dan Gertler’, Resource Matters, 24 April 2019, https://resourcematters.org/glencore-fails-disclose-royalty-payments-us-sanctioned-businessman-dan-gertler/.

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
by Siddharth Kara
Published 30 Jan 2023

________[Morel, E. D]. (1968). E. D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement. Eds. William Roger Louis and Jean Stengers. Clarendon Press. Oxford. Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. (2002). The Congo: From Léopold to Kabila: A People’s History. Zed Books. London. Pakenham, Thomas. (1992). The Scramble for Africa. HarperCollins. New York. Stanley, Henry M. (1885). The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State: A Story of Work and Exploration, 2 vols. Harper & Brothers. New York. ________[Stanley, Henry M]. (1872). How I Found Livingstone; Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa; Including Four Months’ Residence with Dr.

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World
by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro
Published 11 Sep 2017

In the early 1800s, the amount of territory seized ranged between 810,000 and 1.77 million square kilometers a decade. After a brief slowdown in the 1850s and 1860s, that number shot up to between 5.9 million and 8.8 million square kilometers a decade for the rest of the century—a good deal of it caused by the European scramble for Africa. Figure 1: Territory Conquered Per Decade (in Square Kilometers) The pace of conquest slowed in the early 1900s, but only relative to the acquisitiveness of the late 1800s. Military seizure of land remained both common and legally sanctioned. This was true during the continuing colonization of Africa by the United Kingdom and France.

…

Some vulnerable territories acquiesced in the establishment of protectorates that would permit them some measure of self-governance for this reason. In a world where conquest was common, a colonial “protectorate” offered the subjugated state security against would-be conquerors. During the scramble for Africa, for instance, local leaders frequently agreed to the creation of protectorates as a defensive move to prevent more aggressive assertions of authority. With the outlawry of war, however, colonies no longer had to worry that they would be reconquered if they became independent. In a world where aggressive war was illegal, protectorates offered little that an independent state could not obtain on its own.

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick
Published 3 Aug 2020

“Whoever understands that mighty empire… has a key to world politics for the next five centuries.”10 Although Hay knew Europe well, his name will forever be associated with a problem arising from U.S. diplomacy in East Asia: He assumed office as China’s last dynasty was crumbling and foreign powers were threatening to carve China into “concessions” and colonies. Hay called it “the great game of spoliation.”11 The European powers were just completing their “scramble for Africa,” during which they had divided some ten million square miles and 110 million Africans into thirty new colonies and protectorates.12 The big powers grasped for pieces of China next. The starting gun for the scramble for China had been sounded, however, by Japan and Russia, not the Western Europeans.

…

See, among others, Parker Thomas Moon, Imperialism and World Politics (New York: Macmillan Company, 1926), 321. 11. Quoted in Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, 446. For the original, see Hay to Paul Dana, March 16, 1899, in Life and Letters of John Hay, vol. 2, 241. 12. See Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: 1876–1912 (New York: Random House, 1991). 13. S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2. 14. On Japan’s acquisitions, see Merry, McKinley, 415. 15. For data on China in the nineteenth century, see Merry, McKinley, 414–15.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

Privately, Harris was serious about his representation of slave culture, and paid tribute to the rich tradition of speech and narrative he was trying to preserve: ‘If the language of Uncle Remus fails to give vivid hints of the really poetic imagination of the Negro’, Harris wrote, then he would have failed to capture its essence. 6 The half-century between the American Civil War and the First World War saw two contrasting, but equally humiliating, sets of experience for black people in the English-speaking world. In Africa, Britain became engaged on an imperial competition, the ‘scramble for Africa’, with rival European powers that saw the whole continent subjugated to colonial rule. In America, meanwhile, the slaves, finally liberated in December 1865, found themselves catapulted from servitude to legal equality and then reduced to a state almost as degrading as slavery. Four million African-Americans were freed at the end of the Civil War, and an old English legal phrase, ‘civil rights’, entered the American lexicon for the first time.

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War
by Tim Butcher
Published 2 Jun 2013

In keeping with its history of resistance, Herzegovina was one of the last regions to fall to the new occupiers. The Austro-Hungarians claimed their occupation of Bosnia was a philanthropic act of civilisation, a ‘cultural mission’, as they put it rather prosaically. Like so much colonialism of the era – the Scramble for Africa was taking place at the same time – outsiders routinely presented themselves as being committed to upliftment, promising to modernise, reform and advance the local population. But, just as in Africa, the philanthropy turned out to be largely a sham. Furthermore, the Ottoman legacy in Bosnia brought out many Western prejudices against Islam, the implicit message being that a Christian nation would necessarily make good the cruel, corrupt, conservative incompetence of Muslim rule.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

Up until then, the European powers had confined themselves largely to the African coast. But now they hoped to penetrate the interior, superimposing new territorial boundaries that bore little relation to the existing cultural boundaries under which the indigenous African population had lived for generations. The great European Scramble for Africa, as it has come to be known, would set in motion a series of geopolitical conflicts that would reverberate for decades to come—not just in Africa, but all over the world. Belgium also took part in the Congress of Berlin. King Leopold’s son, King Leopold II, had ascended the throne in 1865, bringing with him a zeal for colonial expansion.

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World
by Jonathan Hillman
Published 28 Sep 2020

It will also land in Mombasa, Kenya, home to a major port that Kenya’s auditor general has warned China could take if Kenya defaults on its loans.11 In all three countries, China’s high-tech footprint is expanding along with the other signature BRI projects. “China’s Strength Will Always Support You” In East Africa, China is following in the footsteps of European powers, which competed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for territory in what is sometimes called the “scramble for Africa.” It was really the partition of Africa, and infrastructure was a favored tool for carving up territory. The Europeans arrived on Africa’s coasts and established ports as toeholds. Then they pushed inland, building railways and laying telegraph wires, redrawing Africa’s political map as they went.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

When the unequal treaties they had signed upon independence expired in the 1870s and the 1880s, the Latin American countries introduced rather high protective tariffs (30–40 per cent). However, elsewhere in the ‘periphery’, the forced free trade we talked about earlier spread much further. European powers competed for parts of the African continent in the ‘scramble for Africa’, while many Asian countries were also taken as colonies (Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar by Britain; Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos by France). The British Empire expanded enormously, backed up by its industrial might, leading to the famous saying: ‘The sun never sets on the British Empire.’ Countries like Germany, Belgium, the US and Japan, which had not so far engaged in much colonialism, also joined in.13 Not for nothing is this period also known as the ‘Age of Imperialism’.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

In 1884 they gathered for a series of meetings known as the Berlin Conference, during which they drew borders across the continent, set guidelines about which powers could lay claim to which regions, and established rules for what counted as effective occupation of a territory. The Berlin Conference added considerable impetus to the scramble for Africa. In 1870, only 10 per cent of Africa was under the control of Europeans; by 1914 they had extended their reach across 90 per cent of the continent. Britain controlled a huge swathe of land stretching all the way from the Cape to Cairo, plus Nigeria and a few outposts along the north-west coast.

The Deepest Map
by Laura Trethewey
Published 15 May 2023

In 1967, Arvid Pardo, the Maltese representative to the United Nations, stood up on the floor of the UN General Assembly in New York and delivered a three-hour filibuster of a speech on the resources of the global ocean.27 He spoke of the growing militarization of the seabed and the stationing of nuclear weapons on seamounts,28 detailed the rise of aquaculture and of scientists mastering fish husbandry to feed the world, and referenced a now-outdated paper estimating that more than a trillion tons of precious metals might be lying on the seabed.29 His point was that all those resources could no longer be left to the freedom of the seas, a legal concept developed by a Dutch jurist in the seventeenth century.30 If the status quo were to continue, he predicted, the rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer. Another race for resources was afoot, Pardo warned, one that echoed the colonial scramble for Africa at the turn of the previous century, only this time at the bottom of the ocean.31 If the United Nations acted now, Pardo said in his 1967 filibuster, and gave the international seafloor legal status as the “common heritage of mankind,” the international agency could regulate a resource before extraction began.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera
Published 28 Jan 2021

Furthermore, academics have shown that empire meant different things to different people at certain points even within single states such as India,9 while in Latin America and Egypt there was also what could be classed as an informal empire, where Britain wielded power through financial dominance. More generally, it is important to remember that parts of the empire were still expanding in the 1870s (the Scramble for Africa was just beginning) when in other areas it was very old (the Caribbean) or had already collapsed (the USA). The tone and culture of empire varied wildly during its history. There was an extended period between 1660 and 1807 when Britain profiteered from the evils of the Atlantic slave trade, shipping around 3 million Africans to America, but then, after Parliament had outlawed slavery, it took a leading role in abolishing it.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

Glick, Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 228–9. 6 Anthony Bale, ‘Afterword: Violence, Memory and the Traumatic Middle Ages’ in Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (eds.), Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narrative and Contexts (York: York Medieval Press, 2013), 297. 7 Though the quote is often ascribed to Goebbels, it is only fitting that neither I nor my devoted research assistant could verify that Goebbels ever wrote or said it. 8 Hilmar Hoffman, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933–1945 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997), 140. 9 Lee Hockstader, ‘From A Ruler’s Embrace To A Life In Disgrace’, Washington Post, 10 March 1995. 10 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), 616–17. 18. Science Fiction 1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2007), ch. 17. 19. Education 1 Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis (eds.), Encyclopedia of Library History (New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 432–3. 2 Verity Smith (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (London, New York: Routledge, 2013), 142, 180. 3 Cathy N.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

It likely entered the hunters’ blood through cuts in their skin—a fairly common way slaughterhouse workers still become plagued by infections. The virus may have traveled with African “porters,” who were coerced laborers forced to cut deep into forests by Belgian colonizers. HIV then likely hitched rides along routes of colonialism, as the European “Scramble for Africa” robbed the continent of its resources—which means that neocolonialism moved HIV in the twentieth century around the globe much as European classical colonialism moved pathogens to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade. So much of why and how people come into contact with animals is economic; thus, the risk of humans encountering zoonotic viruses is very classed.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
by Antony Loewenstein
Published 1 Sep 2015

“UK: Ill-Trained, Dangerous and Unaccountable, Amnesty Calls for Complete Overhaul of Enforced Removals by Private Security Companies,” Amnesty International, press release, July 7, 2011. 63Robert Verkaik and Chris Green, “Failed Asylum Seekers Are Abused by Private Security Companies, Says Report,” Independent, July 14, 2008. 64Amelia Gentleman, “Rising Unemployment Puts Cameron’s Work Program in the Spotlight,” Guardian, February 1, 2012. 65Ibid. 66Patrick Butler, “Benefits Sanctions: They’re Absurd and Don’t Work Very Well, Experts Tell MPs,” Guardian, January 9, 2015. 67John Grayson, “Enquiry into Asylum,” House of Commons, Home Affairs Committee report, June 17, 2013. 68Oliver Wright, “Record Number of Prison Deaths ‘Due to Cuts and Overcrowding,’” Independent, October 31, 2014. 69“Child Detained for Two Months ‘By Mistake’ at Mitie Center,” Corporate Watch, February 3, 2015, at corporatewatch.org. 70Miriam Ross, “UK ‘Aid’ Is Financing a Corporate Scramble for Africa,” Ecologist, April 3, 2014. 71Paul Mason, “The Best of Capitalism Is Over for Rich Countries—and for the Poor Ones It Will Be Over by 2060,” Guardian, July 8, 2014. 72Russell Brand, “New Era 4 All,” December 22, 2014, at russellbrand.com. 7Australia 1When I visited Christmas Island, the local publication The Islander published a front-page feature on how to navigate around the animals: “A broom or grass rake is ideal for moving crabs from in front of the vehicle.”

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 3 Sep 2012

At the Chinese port city of Weihaiwei, the Japanese, creeping up overland from the rear, turned China’s own guns on the Chinese fleet in the bay. As Japan secured the choicest spoils of war in the subsequent Treaty of Shimonoseki with China, imperialists elsewhere were further emboldened. The Western scramble for Africa and South-east Asia was already under way. Qing China seemed an even easier picking. Britain forced China to lease it Weihaiwei and the New Territories north of the island of Hong Kong. France established a base on Hainan Island and mining rights across China’s southern provinces. Germany occupied part of Shandong province.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
by William Easterly
Published 1 Mar 2006

In Buganda, the chiefly allies of the British exploited the 1900 agreement to distribute the kingdom’s land among themselves.20 Like today’s donors and postmodern imperialists, the colonizers were outside Planners who could never know the reality on the ground. Like their modern-day counterparts, colonizers often unwittingly destabilized the balance of internal power. Before the scramble for Africa, there had been educated Africans who had some power in colonial regimes. Missionaries founded a university in Sierra Leone, the Fourah Bay College, in 1827. West Africans sent their children there, as well as to London law schools. Many of these graduates held positions in the colonial administrations, including legislative posts in the Gold Coast and Lagos as early as the 1850s.

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap
by Graham Allison
Published 29 May 2017

Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 194–96; MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace, 54–55. [back] 44. If Germany was late to the table, it was in large part because Bismarck himself was reticent about colonial adventurism, describing Germany as a “saturated” power with other priorities. In the midst of the “scramble for Africa” in the 1880s, he pointed to a map of Europe and told an explorer, “My map of Africa lies here in Europe. Here lies Russia, and here lies France, and we are right in the middle; this is my map of Africa.” MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace, 80–82; Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 211–13.

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010
by T M Devine
Published 25 Aug 2011

Instead, Livingstone presented it as a land suitable for cultivation, settlement and economic development, the whole penetrated by the great Zambesi River along which an immense trade might one day flow.46 Not surprisingly, not only British but leading imperialist politicians throughout Europe seized on this seductive vision. It helped to drive the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ between 1885 and 1895, when European states divided the continent up into their own colonial possessions and statesmen often legitimized their predatory behaviour as their response to Livingstone’s famous appeal to intervene in order to rid Africa of the obscenities of the slave trade. Even King Leopold of the Belgians, creator of the Congo Free State which was to become synonymous with appalling abuse and cruelty, invoked Livingstone.47 Yet, though some might describe him as such, Livingstone was no crude imperial propagandist.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

If you invade a continent that had previously been largely or entirely left alone, such as Australia or the Americas, you fundamentally disrupt societies every bit as much as if they had been invaded by aliens landing from outer space with unbelievable weapons, incredibly lethal attitudes, and the deadliest of previously unencountered germs. At first there is rapid population decline in the territories that are invaded. The decline is so great that overall worldwide human population slowdown occurs. Look carefully at the decade prior to 1850 to see proof of this. The “scramble for Africa” took place long after the rise of the European slave trade, which was established to populate the Americas with free labor (free in terms of not wage-paid). The transatlantic slave trade devastated Africa. After the initial shock and destruction, the social structures and norms that had developed over centuries across the continent (and everywhere else in the world that was invaded and colonized), norms that had before produced relatively stable populations, broke down.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

And at the century’s close there was a sense of weary, uncomfortable completion. The unknown was exhausted, the known triumphant, and the world felt jaded as much as gilded; fin de siècle had arrived. The frontier that defined America’s challenge and potential, the demographer and historian Frederick Turner told his compatriots, had closed. The scramble for Africa, Europe’s last great theft, was almost over. The British Empire on which the sun never set lacked for that very reason a sunset beyond which to sail. Riches continued to accumulate, quarries to be quarried, mines to be mined. But the age was now one of intensification not extension, one constrained by unaccustomed limits.

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

The ultimate irony—and hypocrisy—of labeling China a neocolonial power is that China’s investments in cross-border infrastructures such as the East African Railway, spanning a half-dozen countries, are actually enabling Africans to overcome the artificial and restrictive boundaries they inherited from European colonialism. The fact that Asians are scrambling around Africa does not mean that Europe’s nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa” is being restaged. Asians are racing to connect Africa, not to divide it, building modern infrastructures that both Western multilateral agencies and African governments have been neglecting for decades. Afro-Asian linkages date back many centuries but have never been stronger. Aggressive courting of developing countries by major powers is often assumed to be a “race to the bottom,” but as African countries’ economies grow and their leaders become more pragmatic, shrewd diplomacy among various suitors can drive a race to the top where the winners accrue the most benefits from foreign interests.

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 19 Jan 2021

After the initial sub-Saharan explorations had been completed, once heroic figures like Mungo Park, like Sir Richard Burton and John Speke, and, of course, like Henry Stanley and his long sought prize, Doctor Livingstone, had all come home, written their books, colored their maps, given their lectures, and collected their medals, that madcap period which historians would call the scramble for Africa began, and it did so in particular earnest. As usual the missionaries went out first, eradicating as best they could what they saw as the spiritual impoverishment of animism and witch doctoring, and bringing as many natives as possible under the ecclesiastical authority of Rome or, better still, of Canterbury.

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Published 25 Feb 2021

Inside the hill there are three enormous pits, each 150 metres deep, where trucks loaded with copper ore snake up and down like ants on an anthill. The owner of this warren of activity in one of the world’s most remote and difficult mining frontiers is none other than Glencore. Mutanda is a symbol of the scramble for Africa that took hold of the resources industry in the 2000s. As the supercycle gathered pace, miners, oil companies and traders alike could no longer ignore Africa’s riches. For decades, the bulk of the continent had been neglected by big Western companies as too remote, too underdeveloped and too corrupt.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

The story Peck and Lindqvist tell begins not in the Americas, but in Europe in the centuries leading up to the Spanish Inquisition and the burnings at the stake and the bloody expulsions of Jews and Muslims. Then it crosses the Atlantic and plays out on a vastly larger scale in the genocide of Native Americans, as well as the so-called Scramble for Africa, before looping back to Europe during the Holocaust. This challenges how the story of the Second World War is so often told: as one of heroic anti-fascist Allies united against the monstrous Nazis. Certainly, defeating Hitler and freeing the camps, however belatedly, was the most righteous victory of the modern age.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham
Published 30 Oct 2009

The Silk Road Strategy (SRS) outlines a framework for the development of America’s business empire along an extensive geographical corridor.’ See Michel Chossudovsky, America’s ‘War on Terrorism, Pincourt, Québec: Center for Research on Globalization, 2005. 144 Michael Watts, ‘Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa’, Monthly Review 58: 4, 2006. 145 Michael Klare, ‘The Pentagon as Energy Insecurity Inc.’, Tom Dispatch, 12 June 2008. 146 See Michael Klare’s books, Blood and Oil, London: Penguin, 2004; and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. 147 Klare, ‘America Out of Gas’. 148 Klare, ‘The Pentagon as Energy Insecurity Inc.’. 149 Ann Wright, An “Enduring” Relationship for Security and Enduring an Occupation for Oil’, truthout.org, 5 December 2007. 150 See stratfor.com; cited in Boal, Clark, Matthews, and Watts, Afflicted Powers, 47. 151 Klare, ‘The Pentagon as Energy Insecurity Inc.’. 152 Dave Webb, ‘Thinking the Worst: The Pentagon Report’, in David Cromwell and Mark Levene, eds, Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe, London: Pluto Press, 2007. 153 Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, ‘An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security’, report to the Pentagon, October 2003, available at www.gbn.com. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid., 18. 156 Mark Lynas, ‘Food Crisis: How the Rich Starved the World’, RedOrbit.Com, 22 April 2008. 157 As Mark Lynas points out in ‘Food Crisis’, in the 2007–8 period, the world population was growing by 78 million a year. 158 George Monbiot, ‘Credit Crunch?

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
by Costas Lapavitsas
Published 14 Aug 2013

It should be stressed that this is a merit, in view especially of mainstream theories that have often defined themselves in opposition to the Marxist approach.43 By and large, classical Marxist theories avoided bland historical generalizations and related imperialism to well-defined economic processes of their era. They typically sought to account for phenomena such as the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the rise of militarism among European powers at the end of the nineteenth century. These events had a shocking novelty for societies that had not known a major European war since 1815 and were pervaded by the ideological belief that capitalism meant rational progress in human affairs.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

The paint was cleaned away and a report was published a couple of years later raising the prospect of melting down the statue and re-forming the bronze into something commemorating the people of Congo but, at the time of writing at least, Leopold is still up on his saddle, looking as disapproving and unrepentant as ever. The legacy of colonialism is the unpleasant underbelly of the Material World. Belgium, of course, was hardly the only country engaged in the ‘scramble for Africa’. Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the rest also raced to invade, divide and control the continent, exploiting its minerals, trading them elsewhere and pocketing the proceeds. A similar process had occurred many times before, from ancient Rome through to the conquest of the Americas, but this scramble for resources (both mineral and, in the form of slavery, human) was particularly brutal.

Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 9 Mar 2000

Among the academic disciplines involved in this cultural pro- duction ofalterity, anthropology was perhaps the most important rubric under which the native other was imported to and exported from Europe.22 From the real differences of non-European peoples, nineteenth-century anthropologists constructed an other being of a different nature; differential cultural and physical traits were con- strued as the essence ofthe African, the Arab, the Aboriginal, and 126 P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y so forth. When colonial expansion was at its peak and European powers were engaged in the scramble for Africa, anthropology and the study ofnon-European peoples became not only a scholarly endeavor but also a broad field for public instruction. The other was imported to Europe—in natural history museums, public exhi- bitions ofprimitive peoples, and so forth—and thus made increas- ingly available for the popular imaginary.

A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East
by James Barr
Published 15 Feb 2011

‘I think I carried the day,’ an exhilarated Sykes wrote afterwards to a colleague; ‘you will observe I did not soar beyond very practical politics.’¹⁹ The fact that Britain and France had almost come to blows over a similar territorial dispute less than twenty years before was what made Asquith and his colleagues so anxious to resolve the question of what would happen to the Ottoman Empire, assuming that they won the war. During the closing stages of the scramble for Africa in the 1890s it had been the ownership of the headwaters of the river Nile that was at stake. As a junior minister at that time, the current foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had warned the French in 1895 that the British government would interpret any move to claim the river’s source as ‘an unfriendly act’.²⁰ The French had mistakenly thought this threat was empty, because the British had lost control of the Sudan to the Mahdi²¹ a decade earlier.

When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures
by Richard D. Lewis
Published 1 Jan 1996

Dutch settlers founded the colony of Cape Town in South Africa in 1652. The slave trade flourished between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, largely from a West African base. In the late nineteenth century the discovery of mineral wealth on the continent led to the SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA 565 “scramble for Africa,” and the whole of the continent (except for Liberia and Ethiopia) was under foreign domination by 1900. The European powers met in Berlin in 1884 and agreed on boundaries and spheres of influence. The British claimed West African colonies such as Ghana and Nigeria, East African ones such as Kenya, and Botswana in the south, as well as South Africa itself.

Wealth, Poverty and Politics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 31 Aug 2015

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 is estimated to have taken more lives than the contemporary First World War, the most devastating and lethal war in all of history at that point. Diseases have also affected the course of history. Europeans knew of the existence of Africa thousands of years before they learned of the existence of the Western Hemisphere. Yet European empires were established in the Western Hemisphere hundreds of years before the “scramble for Africa” began in the late nineteenth century and led to European colonial empires that extended throughout the continent. Diseases had much to do with the differing fates of these different regions of the world. Microorganisms that most of the humans involved knew nothing about at the time were, in effect, on the side of the Europeans during their conquests in the Western Hemisphere.

Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare
by Paul Lockhart
Published 15 Mar 2021

There were the conflicting ambitions of the Romanovs and Habsburgs over the Balkan lands recently separated from the decaying Ottoman state; the mutual hatred between newborn Italy and Austria-Hungary over Italia irredenta (unredeemed Italy); and the naval rivalry between Britain and upstart Germany. The new wave of Western imperialism that escalated after 1878, above all the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the century, added greatly to the hostile climate, as well. Proponents of Western expansion into the non-Western world often claimed that imperialism was a healthy alternative to war: by allowing the European powers (and, increasingly, the United States) to jostle with one another safely distant from the civilized world, the contest for empire would actually diminish the likelihood of a European war.

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History
by Greg Woolf
Published 14 May 2020

Map 4 The Phoenician Mediterranean At one time archaeologists wrote this story in a different way, looking back from what they felt was the densely urbanized classical Mediterranean in the fifth century. That urbanized world had its roots, they believed, in the sowing of colonies by Phoenicians and especially Greeks, and the eighth and seventh centuries were presented as something like the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa when Great Powers in Europe competed to claim different parts of the continent. The creation of new cities in the west was described in terms of colonization, while the century or so before was described as an epoch of proto-colonization or precolonization, or with the phrase “trade before the flag,” another allusion to modern European imperial expansion.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

See Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 19 Meek, Land Law and Custom, pp. 13–14. 20 Colson, “Impact of the Colonial Period,” p. 202. 21 Thomas J. Bassett and Donald E. Crummey, Land in African Agrarian Systems (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), pp. 9–10. 22 Colson, “Impact of the Colonial Period,” pp. 196–97; Meek, Land Law and Custom, p. 12. 23 During the scramble for Africa that began in the 1870s, European powers sought to build administrative systems on the cheap by using networks of local leaders to enforce rules, conscript corvée labor, and collect capitation taxes. See Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 24 Vinogradoff, Historical Jurisprudence, p. 351. 25 Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, pp. 150–51. 26 These examples are ibid., pp. 150–69. 27 Bruce L.

Empire of Guns
by Priya Satia
Published 10 Apr 2018

British diplomats opposed British sales in the Balkans and South America, but the British dominated the naval arms trade all over, remaining the most powerful force in the global arms market. The most valuable part of the British arms trade gravitated toward the Indian Ocean, including East Africa. Ottoman tensions spilled into East Africa, where Ethiopia clashed with Ottoman Egypt. Britain futilely opposed French and Italian arms sales in the region; the ensuing scramble for Africa exacerbated Great Power rivalries. British complaints about arms sales met with unanswerable French reminders that Britain had only recently led arms sales to the Continent. Rebels in British territories had French rifles. After the Ottoman Empire’s failure to pay caused collapse of American rifle firms, arms companies obtained banking partners that gave loans to client states.

Winds of Change
by Peter Hennessy
Published 27 Aug 2019

The last great imperialist, during whose peacetime premiership not a single territory was granted independence. It was as if Macmillan and his Commonwealth and Colonial Secretaries wished to revert to a late-twentieth-century version of the empire of free trade, rather than territory, which dominated what Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher called the ‘official mind’ of imperialism before the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the late nineteenth century.15 On top of this modified version of ‘the imperialism of free trade’16 lay the ever-pressing perspective of the global Cold War. As Macmillan had stressed in his ‘Wind of Change’ speech, preventing their former colonies from slipping into the communist bloc was – or should be – a primary purpose of the European decolonizers and a factor linking the old imperial powers in a common purpose with the United States, for all Washington’s traditional distaste for other people’s empires.

Gnomon
by Nick Harkaway
Published 18 Oct 2017

My friend Tamirat had designed this sideroglyph and was the toast of our little circle for his wit – and, to be fair, for his execution, because it isn’t easy to convey ‘mmm’ so clearly with just a single impression of a mouth, but he had. My city was making its way in the world, becoming for the first time in hundreds of years a de rigueur stop on the travels of the powerful and the scholarly. This was the nation that had fought off the Scramble for Africa; that had its roots in the line of Solomon and now saw its modernity rushing outwards to a time of space ships and orbital colonies: the upwelling, rising, dawning Ethiopia of Haile Selassie. Our very existence, obtruding upon the consciousness of the US of A, was changing the vexed discussion of race in that country, and if our footballers had not delivered in the Cup of Nations for a decade, well, we had promising youngsters, and their coach was the sublime Mengistu Worku.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen
Published 26 Jul 2021

With the European slavery legacy soon forgotten, this continent was now portrayed by missionary-discoverers like David Livingstone as the continent not so much of the Enslaved Victim as of the Enslaving Tyrant, with an accusing finger pointed towards both African rulers and Muslim slave merchants from the Middle East.42 This provided the legitimation for the scramble for Africa and for the missionary zeal to convert the Africans to (various forms of) Christianity. The Paris, Berlin and Brussels conferences of 1867, 1884 and 1890 concentrated on the African traffic, leaving enough space for the old and new colonial powers to continue slavery and other forms of unfree labour for decades to come.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Published 30 Apr 2012

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Gallagher, Kelly Sims. Acting in Time on Energy Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2009. Gellman, Barton. Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Ghazvinian, John. Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil. New York: Harcourt, 2007. Goldman, Marshall I. Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Gore, Al. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Hale, William E., Robert H. Davis, and Mike Long.

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton
Published 1 Jan 2001

The unexpected collapse of the Ottoman empire, however, stirred up old dreams and old rivalries. The bickering, which dragged on through 1919, was about more than territory. It was about Joan of Arc and William the Conqueror, the Heights of Abraham and Plassy, about the Crusades, about Napoleon in Egypt and Nelson’s destruction of his fleet at the Battle of the Nile, about the scramble for Africa, which had so nearly led to war over Fashoda, Sudan, in 1898, and about the competition for influence between French and Anglo-Saxon civilization. Lloyd George, a Liberal turned land-grabber, made it worse. Like Napoleon, he was intoxicated by the possibilities of the Middle East: a restored Hellenic world in Asia Minor; a new Jewish civilization in Palestine; Suez and all the links to India safe from threat; loyal and obedient Arab states along the Fertile Crescent and the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates; protection for British oil supplies from Persia and the possibility of new sources under direct British control; the Americans obligingly taking mandates here and there; the French doing what they were told.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

The Middle East: 2,000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lewis, Colin M. 1985. “Railways and Industrialization: Argentina and Brazil, 1870-1929,” in Abel and Lewis, eds., Latin America, pp. 199-230. Lewis, David Levering. 1987. The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lewis, Gwynne. 1994. “Proto-industrialization in France,” Econ. Hist. Rev., 47, 1: 150-64. Lewis, Paul H. 1990. The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. Lewis, W. Arthur. [1969]. Aspects of Tropical Trade 1883-1965.

Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Published 2 Mar 2019

Where civil liberties do not exist, the void where they should be is often occupied by national pride. And wounds to national pride – wounds inflicted by outsiders – can be made to hurt out of all proportion to the deaths they cause. KINGS AND CARPET-BAGGERS Following their successes in the earlier scramble for Africa, Britain and France had now emerged as joint winners in the scrummage for the Near East. This did not mean the end of Arab nationalism; on the contrary, it energized the movement. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s protests and revolts fizzed and rumbled against the imperial occupiers, at times violently.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
by Scott Anderson
Published 5 Aug 2013

Equally dramatic was the new image and prowess of Germany abroad. From a dizzying mélange of squabbling fiefdoms—a mélange that Europe’s established imperial powers had adroitly played off against one another for centuries—Germany was suddenly becoming an empire in its own right. Despite being a latecomer in the European “scramble for Africa,” by the mid-1880s it had established colonies in western, southern, and eastern Africa; in a fit of grandiosity, it even planted its flag in the South Pacific island of Samoa, almost precisely the farthest spot from Germany on the planet. But if Bismarck created the modern German state, it was another man who would truly catapult it onto the global stage, and fire the passions of young Germans like Curt Prüfer in the process.

A Pipeline Runs Through It: The Story of Oil From Ancient Times to the First World War
by Keith Fisher
Published 3 Aug 2022

Herbert Weinstock (London: Methuen & Co., 1965). Casserly, Gordon, The Land of the Boxers, or China under the Allies (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1903). Challener, Richard D., Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). Chamberlain, M. E., The Scramble for Africa (London: Longman, 1974). Chandler, Alfred N., Land Title Origins: A Tale of Force and Fraud (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1945). Chandler, Jr, Alfred D., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Chaqueri, Cosroe, The Russo-Caucasian Origins of the Iranian Left: Social Democracy in Modern Iran (Richmond, VA: Curzon Press, 2001).

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

The persistent macho and deadly notion that power will cause plenty is popular among historians. But the truth is the other way around: plenty can budget for repeating rifles and ironclad ships, which lead to dominion over palm and pine. Yet such dominion, like war itself, makes for scarcity, not plenty. As the British Foreign Office kept warning during the scramble for Africa, guns are expensive in housing and education forgone. The “domination” on which Ferguson, Diamond, David Landes, Charles Kindleberger, Samuel Huntington, Ian Morris, and Paul Kennedy focus confounds empire with enrichment, violence with mutual benefit—the privilege of insulting the southern subalterns confused with high incomes for the Europeans back home.

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans
by David Abulafia
Published 2 Oct 2019

Meanwhile the Danish West India Company, like the African kings, expected its share of the proceeds from the Guinea trade. A ‘recognition’ had to be paid, taking the form of a percentage of profits. For instance, Portuguese Jews based in Holland were permitted to pay a 2 per cent ‘recognition’ if they sailed under the flag of Denmark to the Danish bases in Africa.28 IV The great scramble for Africa took place in the nineteenth century; but the seventeenth century also saw a scramble, this time for Guinea and the West Indies. Part of the impetus to develop colonies in the West Indies came from an unexpected quarter, soon after the Thirty Years War came to an end with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

Missionary explorers such as David Livingstone could still be lost in the 1870s for years on end. Contrary to European belief, Africa was devoid neither of organized government nor of ordered religion; and a huge variety of languages and cultures belied the idea that all Africans were Stone Age savages. However, the ‘scramble for Africa’ took place on the assumption that the land and the peoples were there for the taking. Such was the discrepancy in military technology that even the venerable kingdoms of West Africa could offer no more resistance than the Aztecs and Incas. Abyssinia was the only native empire to maintain its independence, perhaps because it adhered to Coptic Christianity.