European Imperialism and the Partition of Africa

Ernest Francis Penrose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415761130
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136276767
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume seeks to explain the European partition of Africa between 1880-1900.

The European Partition of Africa: Coincidence or Conjuncture?

by

G. N. Sanderson*

I: The Problem

The sudden, rapid and almost complete European partition of Africa in the last two decades of the nineteenth century is interesting not only as a spectacular episode in European history and, more importantly, as a major event in African history; but also because it seems to present a crucial test of the historian’s ability to explain and interpret the events that he traces.

The partition takes place over a period so brief that the links between the detailed monograph and the synoptic survey are considerably closer and more substantial than in some comparable fields of investigation, and so recent that the documentary record has survived almost intact. The official record, in particular, is especially complete and revealing, coming as it does from a period when departmental papers were carefully and systematically preserved but just before the widespread use of the telephone began to discourage the art of thinking and communicating on paper. Virtually the whole of this material has for some time been accessible to scholars. So have the private papers of most of the European policy-makers; and the records of many, though not all, of the unofficial organisations—commercial, religious, philanthropic—which were interested in Africa before and during the partition. Moreover, much of this material had already been studied and analysed in published monographs and doctoral dissertations.

In short, the conditions for a ‘general explanation’ of the partition of Africa are just about as favourable as they could possibly be. A variety—indeed, an embarrassing variety—of such interpretations has in fact been put forward. The most stimulating of these have emerged from the detailed study of some important episode in the partition, or of the origins and development of partition in some comparatively restricted area. But to promote conclusions derived from the study of a limited field to the status of general explanations of the partition is obviously a very risky undertaking. Not surprisingly, general theories derived from special studies differ from one another not merely in nuance and emphasis, but on fundamentals.¹ Moreover, no general theory has successfully accounted for all the observed phenomena; and many of them have failed to grapple with certain problems whose solution is an essential part of any satisfactory general explanation.

Faced with this situation, some historians have abandoned the quest for a general theory, and have asserted that one cannot go beyond studying ‘each particular case of annexation as a special problem’. If this procedure fails (as it does fail) to explain why ‘cases of annexation’ suddenly and unexpectedly became epidemic in the 1880s, there is simply nothing we can do about it.²

This is a discouraging conclusion; but any serious acquaintance with the facts does suggest very strongly that the plurality of the ‘causes’ of partition is indeed irreducible. It is however possible to ask questions about the partition which, in principle at least, do not rule out the possibility of general answers in spite of the existence of special reasons for ‘each particular case of annexation’:

(i) Why did the partition begin when it did (c. 1879–80), after a long period when the European Powers had normally taken only the most languid interest in Africa?

(ii) Why, when the partition had once begun, did its pace accelerate so rapidly that within two decades it had engulfed almost the whole continent—i.e., why did the partition develop into a ‘scramble’?

Quite apart from the ‘operational’ value of these questions, any general theory worthy of the name ought to include precise and empirically verifiable answers to them. By no means all of the general theories even attempt to do this.

II: General Theories of the Partition of Africa

These are usually divided into the two categories of ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘Afrocentric’ theories; but it is also useful to distinguish between theories based more or less directly on detailed African case-studies, and the more general ‘background’ theories—some of which are indeed theories of imperialism rather than specifically of the partition of Africa.

A. Background Theories

A satisfactory general theory (whether ‘background’ or other) must be able to demonstrate that between about 1875 and 1900 circumstances in Europe, or in Africa, or in both continents, differed from those of the pre-1875 period in ways which can be directly linked with specific ‘annexationist’ decisions by the European policy-makers. General theories which rely upon broad, macroscopic, developments—socio-political, economic, ideological, technological—in the European and African ‘backgrounds’, find it especially difficult to establish this close connection. In particular, their answers to the question ‘why did the partition begin when it did?’ are usually very unsatisfactory. For instance, had the ‘technological gap’ between European and African societies been non-existent or negligible, no partition—and certainly no scramble—would have taken place. At the time of the partition this gap was doubtless wider than ever before; but it had already been very wide for at least a century. The technological gap may help to explain the pace of partition; it does not explain why the policy-makers of half a dozen different European states should suddenly and almost simultaneously have decided to profit by it, after having ignored it for so long.³

It is equally difficult to link with specific policy decisions, and in any precise way with the onset of partition, such ideological phenomena as the rise of ‘Social Darwinism’ and the aggressive racialism and nationalism which this creed tended to encourage—especially, according to some historians, among the industrial ‘masses’.⁴

Another background theory points to alleged changes in the political balance of European societies, bringing to power new ruling elites which are supposed to have been especially interested in overseas expansion. There is indeed a good correlation in time between the onset of large-scale African expansion and the success of militantly ‘bourgeois’ French politicians in overthrowing, between 1877 and 1879, the République des Ducs and replacing it by the République des Républicains.⁵ But if some Républicains were expansionists, many others were not, as Jules Ferry learned to his cost in 1885. All that can be said is that those Républicains who did support colonial expansion would have had other and more urgent preoccupations had French domestic politics taken a different course.

Nor can this theory be easily generalised. In England, the link between socio-political changes and specific annexationist decisions is tenuous until the emergence of Joseph Chamberlain as a key policymaker in 1895; but in 1895 the scramble was entering its final phase. In Bismarckian and post-Bismarckian Germany it seems even more tenuous until, at the earliest, the opening of the Biilow-Tirpitz era in 1897. In Portugal, and probably in Italy, the theory fails because its premise of significant political change is not satisfied. And Leopold II puts this theory completely to rout. Leopold’s imperialism was, both constitutionally and in every other way, his own private and personal policy; while the dominant bourgeoisie of his model bourgeois kingdom greeted it with indifference and even hostility.

Outside the ranks of non-Marxist professional scholars, the most popular background theories are perhaps still those derived from the theses put forward by Hobson and Lenin, which attribute the partition (and fin-de-siècle imperialism in general) to the alleged economic necessities generated by the development of capitalism. For Hobson, under-consumption due to the maldistribution of purchasing power in a capitalist society led to ‘over-saving’ by the rich, and to the search by this politically powerful group for profitable investments and speculations overseas. When in due course the rich demanded the protection of the flag for these investments, their voice rarely went unheeded by the policy-makers. For Lenin, the formal political institutions of capitalist states were mere façades behind which the real holders of power—bankers in control of monopolistic cartels—engrossed the raw materials of the world and, by the export of capital, promoted and controlled the exploitation of its inhabitants.⁶

During the last twenty years non-Marxist historians have demolished these models almost to the point of ‘overkill’. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that ‘investors’ and ‘bankers’ were far less influential in policy-making than Lenin or even Hobson supposed; that in the relevant period capital exports to tropical Africa were insignificant; that some very active imperialist Powers (Italy, Portugal) had no surplus capital to export but on the contrary suffered from a chronic shortage; and that throughout the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the markets and the raw materials of tropical Africa were alike of almost negligible importance to the European economy.⁷ It has indeed been suggested that the whole concept of economic imperialism is baseless—a ‘mythological beast’.⁸ But the Hobson-Lenin theories of capitalist imperialism do not exhaust the category of economic theories possibly relevant to the partition. Other such theories should not be relegated, unexamined, to the mythical bestiary merely because of guilt by association. They may turn out on investigation to be real live animals. Indeed, in a story where Cecil Rhodes and Leopold II—to name only two—loom so large, the attempt to exclude or trivialise the economic factor must seem a little perverse. Tamen usque recurret.

B. Eurocentric Theories

Economic theories of the partition have however attracted very few academic supporters of late, though there are recent signs that they are now beginning to make a come-back. By far the strongest Eurocentric contender has been:

I. The Strategic Theory: This forms one leg (the other is the Afro-centric ‘local crisis theory’) of the powerful and attractive thesis developed by R. Robinson and J. Gallagher.⁹ In this model, the process of partition begins when a European Power (Britain) reluctantly saddles itself with new territorial responsibilities in Africa in order to defend the strategic security of older imperial possessions. But this move injures the interests of another Power (France) which retorts by counter-annexations, some of them merely as ‘compensation’, but others intended also as a strategic threat to Britain’s new African acquisitions. Britain then seeks security for these new acquisitions by yet further strategic annexations. Meanwhile, other Powers exploit the rivalry of France and Britain to make annexations of their own, some of which are also strategically dangerous to Britain.

This model seems at first sight to work admirably in the Nile Valley, where in 1882 the British occupied Egypt primarily to safeguard the Suez route to India, thereby provoking (but surely rather belatedly?) a French strategic challenge to the security of the waters of the Upper Nile and so to the security of Egypt itself. To this challenge, in both its potential and its actual phases, the British responded by a variety of diplomatic and military expedients designed to halt the French at Egypt’s ‘new frontiers of insecurity’ in the remote fastnesses of East and Central Africa. Meanwhile, in the early stages of the Anglo-French dispute, Leopold II and Bismarck had seized the opportunity to stake their claims. It will be seen that the model is not that of a static situation; it incorporates a very plausible dynamic factor to cover the ‘scramble’ element in the partition.

The model can also be made to work, up to a point, in South Africa. Here the strategic threat—to the security of imperial maritime communications at the Cape, ‘the true centre of the Empire’—came from the ‘Revolt of the Afrikaner’, itself a reaction to the ‘confederation’ policy of the Earl of Carnarvon (Colonial Secretary 1874–8).¹⁰ It was indeed largely strategy that kept the ‘imperial factor’ in play in South Africa after the fall of Carnarvon. But until the final act under Chamberlain and Milner, imperial strategy as a factor in the Southern African scramble played second fiddle to the local rivalries which long pre-dated the European partition. Indeed, the ‘imperial factor’ sometimes (as in 1881) sought security by reducing rather than by extending its territorial commitments, and from 1880 to 1895 it was always a ‘reluctant imperialist’. When under Chamberlain and Milner it at last ceased to be reluctant, it was playing for far higher stakes than mere maritime security at the Cape.¹¹

In West Africa, however, British policy can only be fitted to the model on the assumption that Britain was willing to make territorial sacrifices here in order to buy security in the Nile Valley. But this assumption seems very doubtful. Britain’s major concession to France in West Africa was the ‘light land’ conceded in the Agreement of 5 August 1890.¹² But Salisbury then sacrificed little ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The European Partition of Africa: Coincidence or Conjuncture?
• 2. General Hanotaux, the Colonial Party and the Fashoda Strategy
• 3. The Imperial Factor in South Africa in the Nineteenth Century: Towards a Reassessment
• 4. Vigné d’Octon and Anti-Colonialism under the Third Republic