A conference in the German chancellery, opened in November 1884, that set rules for claiming African territory (1884–85)
Fourteen states attended; its General Act required notification and effective occupation.
History · Revolutions & empires
The Scramble for Africa
c. 1881–1914
European powers partition a continent in a single generation
In little more than thirty years, European states moved from a handful of coastal footholds to control of almost the entire African continent. A conference in Berlin in 1884–85 set the ground rules, requiring effective occupation rather than mere claims, and touched off a race of treaties, gunboats and railway concessions. By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent, and the borders drawn in European capitals still shape African states today.
How to spot them
- ▸A conference convened by Bismarck in the winter of 1884–85, with no African representatives present
- ▸A rule that a claim must be backed by effective occupation to count
- ▸A Belgian king's private domain in a river basin, run for rubber and ivory
- ▸A confrontation between French and British columns at a fort on the Upper Nile in 1898
What happened
A river basin held as the personal property of a Belgian king, its rubber quotas enforced by mutilation (1885–1908)
Leopold II never visited; E. D. Morel and Roger Casement's exposures forced annexation by Belgium in 1908.
A tense stand-off between Marchand and Kitchener at a fort on the Upper Nile (1898)
France backed down; the crisis helped clear the way for the Entente Cordiale of 1904.
A diamond magnate and Cape premier who dreamed of a railway from one end of the continent to the other
Two territories were named after him; the 'Cape to Cairo' line was never completed.
The 1896 defeat at which an African emperor destroyed an Italian army and kept his country independent (1 March 1896)
Menelik II's victory over Oreste Baratieri's forces was the decisive check to the partition.
A war of 1896 said to have lasted under forty minutes, the shortest on record (27 August 1896)
Usually given as 38 minutes.
The 1904–08 campaign in South West Africa now widely recognised as the century's first genocide (1904–08)
Germany formally acknowledged it as genocide in 2021.
Key ideas
- 'Effective occupation': the Berlin rule that a power must actually administer a territory to have its claim recognised, which turned paper claims into expeditions, treaties and garrisons
- Technology made it possible: quinine prophylaxis against malaria, steam gunboats on rivers, the telegraph, and from the 1880s the Maxim gun
- Hobson's Imperialism (1902) and Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) argued that surplus capital drove the partition; later historians stress strategy, rivalry and local crises
Quick-fire facts
- •In 1870 European powers held roughly a tenth of Africa; by 1914 they held about 90 per cent
- •The Berlin Conference was convened by Otto von Bismarck and chaired in Berlin from November 1884 to February 1885
- •No African ruler was represented at Berlin, and the conference did not itself partition the continent — it set the rules by which powers did
- •Only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent in 1914; Ethiopia was invaded again by Italy in 1935
- •Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Italy and Spain were the main claimants
- •Leopold II's Congo Free State was recognised at Berlin as his personal possession, not a Belgian colony
- •Hilaire Belloc's couplet ran: 'Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not'
- •Roughly a third of Africa's modern borders are straight lines drawn on European maps
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Sources
- National Army Museum — Explore the collection: empire and colonial campaigns
- British Library — Learning collections on empire and Africa