The Relentless Revolution by Joyce Appleby

Author:Joyce Appleby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Other European Nations in Africa

Leopold’s is the most extreme record of European rapacity, but his European neighbors lost no time joining in the plunder of Africa and its people. France, having lost New France and its holdings in India at the end of the eighteenth century, started a new empire by invading Algeria in 1830. Smarting from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War a generation later, it next sent expeditions up the Senegal River. From there France eventually succeeded in seizing the northwest quarter of Africa, four million of the continent’s some twelve million square miles, including Tunisia and Morocco.7 In addition to its holdings in Africa and Indochina, France held Tahiti, where Paul Gauguin set up his studio in 1890.

Starting de novo like King Leopold, the Germans had to cast about for a colony because they had not participated in the sixteenth-century adventures in the New World. Before pushing into Africa, Germany found a place in the South Seas sun. The drastic shortage of raw cotton occasioned by the American Civil War had hit hard the Rhine Valley textile mills and the ports that depended upon cotton exports. A prominent and imaginative entrepreneur from Hamburg sent agents to the Pacific to seek spots along the equator where cotton might be grown. He managed to get a toehold in Samoa. The German government followed up by convincing Spain to sell it the majority of the islands among the Solomons, Carolines, Marianas, and Pelews. Neither France nor Great Britain was ready to cede these luxuriant South Pacific islands to Germany, so they parceled out among themselves the remaining islands in eight different groups. Farther west, Great Britain in 1898 signed a ninety-nine-year treaty with China to hold on to Hong Kong. Meanwhile back in Africa, the Germans laid claim to Togoland, Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanganyika, located on both sides of the African continent.

Italy entered this African land rush last. It acquired Libya, Eritrea, and part of Somaliland but sustained an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Ethiopians. Only Ethiopia and Liberia, the colony that Americans established for freed slaves, held on to their independence during this European free-for-all for territory. For France and Britain, the toeholds established earlier became launching pads for further global appropriations, though with markedly different styles.

More attentive to commerce than to territorial acquisition when Leopold was finalizing his plans in 1875, Great Britain tightened its control over Egypt. Britain had acquired an interest in there after the defeat of Napoleon, who had invaded the country in 1798. Formally an Egyptian dynasty ruled the country under a loose connection to the Ottoman Empire, but practically it remained within the European sphere of influence. This humiliating arrangement became a bone of contention for Egyptian nationalists, whose agitation introduced social turmoil that threatened Great Britain’s huge investment in Egypt. On top of this, more and more of the British commercial fleets began using the Suez Canal after its opening in 1869. This hundred-mile waterway joined the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

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