The Berlin Conference

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Hello, on November the 15th, 1884, the representatives of 14 world powers arrived at the Berlin Palace of the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, for an international summit. For the next three months, they sat locked in negotiation in a grand ballroom, dominating... by a 16-foot-high map of Africa. Officially, the summit was known as the Conference on West African Affairs. In practice, the delegates were discussing the future of the entire continent and how to carve it up.

European powers had been setting up colonies in Africa for decades. Now they decided which parts of the continent they would each be allowed to treat as their own. The conference was part of the process known as the Scramble for Africa, and the decisions reached at it had effects which have lasted to the present day. Not a single African took part in the summit, and only two of the diplomats involved in these crucial negotiations had ever set foot there.

With me to discuss the Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa are Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London. Richard Rothbone, Emeritus Professor of African History at SOAS, University of London, and Joanna Lewis, Assistant Professor of Imperial History at the LSE, University of London. Richard Drayton, the main events we'll be talking about took place in the late 90th century.

But first of all, will you tell us how and in what way the Europeans started to establish permanent, semi-permanent residence in Africa? By the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Spain and Portugal pretended to divide the world between them. Portugal claimed for itself Africa. This claim was very rapidly disputed by other European powers. By the 17th and 18th centuries, Africa had become a critical part of the European global trading economy.

African slaves were critical for the production of all commodities in the New World. Indeed, we now know that between 1500 and 1800, more Africans crossed the Atlantic than Europeans. At the same time, Africa was central for the reprocessing of the profits of the East India trading companies, profits which were remitted in the form of Indian clots.

which then were sold in Africa for slaves, which then were exchanged in the Americas for specie. What this meant is that by the middle of the 18th century, Africa actually was already a zone of significant imperial competition among European powers, and that many of the phenomena which came to... a particular accelerated form in the late 19th century, were already well in motion.

by the time we look at the late 18th century. We can see there both a kind of scramble to explore Africa between France and Britain, but most clearly also a scramble to acquire particular secured trading enclaves. The British, for example... claiming the mouth of the Gambia River, the French are placing themselves at Senegal.

the British controlling bits, for example, Sierra Leone becomes a formal colony by the end of the 18th century. Of course, the Dutch had been in the Cape from the late, set from the middle of the 17th century. The Portuguese continued to claim large parts of Africa. And this was the pattern coming into the 19th century.

But the actual settlement was largely coastal, wasn't it? They were nibbling around the fringes of this great continent. It was coastal. And what changed in the early 19th century? Was there a change in the nature of European intervention? What changed in the 19th century was... To put it very briefly, the Industrial Revolution and the ways in which new technologies of transport and a particular warfare. Transport and arms. Transport and arms, I think, are probably the two most significant.

technological revolutions. The slip which goes through the breech loader. Smokeless powder, the rifle, the machine gun. The repeat rifle. The repeat rifle. By the late 19th century is generating a significant arms gap between Europeans and non-Europeans. New technologies of transport, the building of the Suez Canal.

the possibility of sending steamboats up rivers, the possibility of building railways, all of these turned the hinterland of Africa into a zone in which Europeans could begin to contemplate forms of speculative traffic. But we do have to return to these enclaves which were established in the 18th century to understand where the Berlin Conference comes from.

Because it was up the river Okue in Gabon, which was traditionally an area of French stronghold from the 18th century, that a French explorer called Bratza reached the hinterland of... the Congo, and began to treat with a man called Makoko, King Makoko, to establish a French claim to the interior. Can we develop that, Richard Rathburn? The major powers began to have...

significant interest in Africa, although they didn't have significant land holdings at that stage. Could you just develop that for our listeners? I think the key thing to grab hold of is getting the image of Africa as a very, very gigantic, it's an absolutely enormous continent, and much, much bigger than the Mercator maps present it, that it's like a huge biscuit.

and there have been nibbles out of it for a very, very long time indeed. The enclaves... Nibbles round the rim. Nibbles round the rim. European mice have been at the biscuit in a big way. And those are quite substantial in some cases. Some of them are real colonies, perceptible colonies, particularly that, for example, at the mouth of the Senegal River, a French colony, in which the four communes, Saint-Louis, Rufisque, Gorée and Dakar, are...

substantial colonial towns with a rather beautiful architecture, inhabited as is Cape Coast, for example, in Ghana, by a mestizo elite, an elite of people of mixed race. Mestizo being mixed... Excuse me. These are being mixed race. People of mixed race whose essential...

economy, an essential lifestyle, is based upon the Atlantic economy. They buy and sell, and they also become professional, they also become intellectuals, they become the first novelists, the first translators of the Bible, and so on. They're fascinating. group of people, and you can trace them around these enclave bits of colonialism with distinctive architecture, with distinctive lifestyles all the way around the coast of West Africa.

When we get into the Indian Ocean, those enclaves are matched by a Swahili elite who are partly Omani Arab, Muslim by faith, using a hybrid language by then. partly Bantu languages, partly Arabic, who are themselves trading into Africa and selling into the Indian Ocean markets. So that's the picture of it. And I think that the extent of the expansion of this...

has everything to do with something we've not mentioned so far, which is basically this takes place during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The rolling back of the Ottoman Empire is a major explanation of the timing of this. It's not just technology, but it's also the fact that by the late 19th century, it's clear that the Ottoman Empire is on its knees. Hence, the French have taken Algeria.

in 1830. The Italians have got their eyes on what will become Libya. The British are already trying to control Egypt and so on. That's over. The Mediterranean is becoming a northern European power. The Italians are talking once. again like their ancestors Marie Nostrum the French R.C. with their eyes on that this is a fantastic transformation in terms of

balance of power. And that's represented in Berlin in that the Ottoman Empire is invited. I don't know what role they actually play in the Reich's Chancellor's Boerum. But they're invited to this. But we're watching... picking up the pieces in a very tense moment, I think, in European history too. But from what you say, the Ottoman Empire leaves a power vacuum along a crest of northern Africa.

the north of Africa, there's all the rest, which is about 11, 12. What grip is held by other European powers? The other European powers are, in a sense, Johnny come lately. They're two major players.

in Africa before the conference. France and Britain. France is already expanding up, as I said, the Senegal River, but also across what we now call the Sahel, across the shores of the Sahara and into the Sahara. By the end of the century, they've conquered, physically conquered by a military force, an area from the Atlantic Ocean at its most westerly point of Africa, right the way across to Lake Chad, and then down, as Richard Drayton mentioned before. all the way down to the Congo River.

De Bratza's instigation. And then all the way up to Algeria. So it's a huge extent of land, a massive extent of land. to me by a filmmaker in Senegal is Beaucoup de Sable, a great deal of sand. And I think there's something in that. So there's a very big hitter. that I think many people are used to from childhood, of those little red blobs in the midst of the French holdings, the Gold Coast, historically now a British holding.

The Nigerian, the mouth of the Niger, the Delta area, major area of oil palm trading towards the end of the 19th century. The Gambia, which Richard Drayton has already mentioned, and Sierra Leone, of course, a fascinating freed slave. set up in what is today Sierra Leone, but not as extensive as it is today. So that's the British holding in West Africa. And then there's a southern part of Africa, isn't there? Then there's a southern part of Africa with the ancient holding.

by the Portuguese of Angola and Mozambique, again dominated by a mestizo elite, people of mixed race, both in Mozambique and Angola, farming, in the case of Mozambique, an extensive... Latifun, the extensive plantation farms called Palazzo, and in South Africa, of course, the merchant capital, Coaling Station. by port for originally the Dutch East India Company, but after the first decade of the 19th century for the East India Company of Cape Town.

Then the East African, it's a big continent, I did warn you. No, I'm intrigued. This is an area dominated, of course, by... basically Arab traders from places like Oman, and particular places like Oman, they come to dominate Zanzibar, interested in both the ivory trade and the slave trade, and also increasingly in the clove trade.

crisis being very, very important. And then, of course, we've got the wonderful thing in the horn of a great independent African empire, namely that of Ethiopia, which fends off for century after century, attempts at incursions on its sovereignty, ending, of course, in the most magnificent defeat of the Italians, which the Italians, of course... You shouldn't be smiling so much. I'm not smiling at all.

And certainly the Ethiopians weren't smiling because the Italians returned for a second round in the mid-1930s where they used, as we all know, weapons of mass destruction on people basically with primitive weaponry.

Well, that's a brilliant rounded map of a very complicated continent, which in a sense, Joanna, these European powers meeting in Berlin wanted to simplify. They wanted to simplify all this, which you describe in detail, which was... rich and lovely to hear but can we just go into that process and one simplification go in by King Leopold of the Belgium, Leopold II, who he wanted a large, big chunk of Africa for himself, 78 times bigger than Belgium, he wanted, and he said about that, can you...

Tell us how he pursued his ambition. Absolutely. Here we've got a monarch who takes power in 1865. A very, very small kingdom. Definitely got kingdom envy, empire envy. His first cousin is Queen Victoria, about to be made empress of India. And there he is with virtually no territory overseas at all. He tries to do something about it. He actually tries to...

the Philippines, as you do, but that didn't work. So he pursues his ambition, desperate to have some imperial real estate so he can take his seat alongside all his cousins because he's... related to most of the royal families in Europe. And he does this in a very ruthless, deadly, brilliant way.

He's always, as a child, been fascinated with geography and explorers. And, of course, one thing we haven't talked about is this is the age of exploration in Africa, where you have figures like David Livingstone and then Henry Morton Stanley, who's going to be very important to our story, who've been marching...

over Africa and been delighting the world's press with stories of their exploits. Leopold loves the Times and the Telegraph. He loves reading proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. So he learns that actually central... Africa is an area that's up for grabs. Nobody seems to be interested in it. It's pretty wild, it's pretty scary. And he also discovers something else, that if you want to really get into Africa, you need to use the zeitgeist, and that is, you need to be into anti-slavery.

because when David Livingstone dies in Africa in 1873, it's alleged that he dies on his knees as a sacrifice. praying that Africa will be delivered now from the evil serpent of slavery. And at that time, a mark of civilisation in that period of European history was that you were anti-slavery.

Absolutely. That is the gold badge. You get sort of gold card membership to the high club if you are an anti-slaver. So he understands that, learns that lesson very, very well. It's going to have deadly effect later on. across Henry Morton Stanley, who famously found Livingstone, but then goes back to Central Africa after Livingstone has died to try and solve the mysteries that Livingstone failed to solve. Where was the headwaters of the Nile? And Stanley also maps the Congo.

and it makes him one of the greatest, the greatest African... explorer of all time. So Leopold has been following this avidly and is one of the first people to congratulate him when he returns and he tries to then, in effect, buy his services. And this is the second part of his... his strategy because he set up the African international

which is a total front for his aims to try and dominate the Congo. And you said the aim of the international was to civilise, humanise, humanitarian, everybody could come there. He was doing this for them. Unblemished motives, yes. In fact, he was buying it for himself. Everybody bought into it. He was so devious and so clever. He said he was doing it from the heart. He was putting his own money behind the Institute. He got philanthropists, anti-slavers to support it.

it and he gets Stanley to go back to Africa and to start making treaties with chiefs up the Congo River. And that's the basis of his later push and extraordinary, successful and extraordinary push for power.

Why was there seem to be a crisis point? briefly in the early 1880s. The crisis point comes because he's been very, very successful, Leopold, in appointing key people to go into the Congo for him and to get all these treaties with the chiefs. So he then... embarks on a series of diplomatic manoeuvres. So he gets his agent to go over to America and get the Americans to recognise that his Africa Association, and nobody really knows what it is, actually has...

sovereignty now in this large area of the Congo. We're talking about an area of 1.3 million square miles. But his agents have got treaties with the chiefs. America... says, yes, OK, we recognise your flag. He then goes to the French and says, look, will you recognise us? And the French don't...

initially want to, but then they say, OK, yes, if we have first rights in the Congo... And he says to them, if I fail, you can have it, not the Brits. Exactly, so playing one off each other. Also does the same with Bismarck, who's quite keen. Bismarck.

works him out actually, calls him a swindler and a fantasist but nevertheless goes along with it. Exactly, goes along with it nevertheless and the crisis point is really that Britain has done a treaty with the Portuguese to recognise Portuguese control over the sort of Congo mouth.

region but Germany refused to ratify this so who is going to have sovereignty over the Congo that's now been opened up by Stanley in the context of this scramble for Africa for coasts as we've heard where it is perceived that Britain is in a position of decline and looking slightly wobbly. There's a sense, Richard Rayne, isn't there, that Leopold, although he wasn't there, was one of the people more responsible for the bringing together of the Berlin Conference.

Well, he was in a way, but the momentum for this really comes very clearly out of Bismarck's diplomacy from the 1870s onwards, and the link with the various attempts to solve, in inverted commas, the Ottoman question. extremely strong. It's not just simply the... Bismarck just brought about, let us say, the unification of Germany. He wasn't particularly interested in Africa, but he wasn't very keen on other people getting hold of it either.

He was concerned essentially to maintain Germany's place within the European state system. And in particular, he was concerned about his France to his left, which he knew wanted to recover Alsace-Lorraine. And he was concerned to a certain extent about Britain. which Britain sought to possess a kind of commercial monopoly. But the real roots of the conference actually lay in...

Franco-British competition. That's actually the nub of the matter. And the ways in which free trading Britain had locked up... bits of the palm oil trade along the Niger through a cunning device called the trust, which restricted Africans' abilities to trade freely over the Europeans. There are always these weasel words, aren't they? Trust.

all that stuff. And the French, of course, would do exactly the same, using tolls and tariffs and other forms of protective contracts. So when the French arrived with Bratza, attempting to find this back way into the interior of Africa in Cirque... they set off panic in the Foreign Office. And the Foreign Office then quickly decides, well, the way to solve this problem is to quickly recognize that Portugal owns everything. And so the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty is...

pushed in by February of 1884 and sets up the context in which the other European powers say, wait a minute, Portugal now has all of this? This is quickly... Portugal earns everything and we the Brits... Can trade freely because of our privileged relationship with Portugal. So a bit of perfidious Albion showing its skills once again. The response of Berlin, as with Paris, is that this treaty should not be recognized. And indeed, Bismarck very quickly...

decides to recognize one of his adventurers, a man called Ludovitz, who has created a little trading port in Namibia called Angrapekenia in April 1884. So the tempo of things is growing. Now the point is that Leopold certainly has various... and he's very much in the background. But the stage which he was given was one that was given to him by the really important players at the conference, which were France, Britain and Germany.

Bismarck gave a grand speech about the conference. He wanted it in Berlin basically because he didn't want it to be in Britain. So he grabbed it for Berlin and he made a grand speech. We're doing this for civilisation for all the best reasons in the world and that's why we're all gathered here.

He got everybody there. Most of them hadn't a hope in anything of getting any bit of Africa whatsoever. But he wanted them all there because it looked terrific. He wanted them all there for a very specific reason. Denmark, Norway. This is linked to the logic of the Congress of Vienna.

Because the point of this particular settlement... That's what he's trying to do, but it's only four of them in the battle, really. Well, exactly. And so these are high words. What did he hope really would come out of this conference, distinct from what he said? Well, I think the reason why you have all these other European powers there is also... have a kind of counterweight specifically against Britain or France to be able to appeal to King Oscar II of Sweden to appeal to...

to play one power off against the other, which was Bismarck's great skill. Richard Rothbone, how did they manage to get through the rhetoric, the humanitarian front? to these four or five real powers who were going to do the business. It took three months. It must have been an immense amount of manoeuvring. How did these four identify themselves and come through as the powerful contenders?

I think that there are things that lie behind what the power was about, which we haven't really discussed. And that, of course, is the fact that Britain is still the major maritime power in the world. Germany is coming up very fast on the outside track. that the animus between powers varies. In the case of Britain and Germany, it's certainly the case that as the palm oil trade in West Africa grows, for example, one of the major beneficiaries...

beneficiaries of that, is Hamburg. And it's the Hamburg merchant shipping companies, particularly Wilmen Linear, a very, very famous shipping line, that is carrying a great deal of these very valuable cargoes back. So there's real competition. for goods but also competition for access to ports and this massive expansion that's taking place before the Berlin Conference of access to...

These ports, something like, I can't remember, something like 30 ports are shipping palm oil in about 1850 or 1860. By 1875, it's something like 300, and this is growing enormously. It's the major commodity. So there's a competition between Britain and Germany at the level of...

mercantile interests. So when we talk about France and Germany and Britain, I think we need to break that down a bit and talk about the interests behind these. The Foreign Office is a tiny agency in all of this. The interest actually... I don't think there isn't a Secretary of State for the colonies at the time who sits in Cabinet, for example. It's a minor post.

and the colonial office is a tiny little instrument in Whitehall. What's going on here, I think, very often is a world of pressure politics, pressure group politics, in which major ports like Liverpool, like London, like Hamburg... like Marseille and like Bordeaux are playing big roles in pushing their governments to sometimes I think rather unwillingly go along with it. In the case of Bismarck, Bismarck has to follow.

the Hamburg line, because they're crucially important to his electoral politics. He's got to be nice to these people, but he himself is not very much interested in Africa, and he says, you know, I'm not.

much concerned with this. Can I come to Joanna first, Richard? Can you just take on the negotiations a bit further? Is this where the doctrine of the effective occupation came in? Absolutely. And what is that? Can you explain that? Bye. Powers argue, especially somebody like Leopold and his representatives that are there, and Stanley has the treaties there, for example, that because they have treaties with chiefs that have said, look, we will hand over the...

rights to trade, to the rights for waterways, that in effect you are going to be in charge of everything. You are in effect the recognised government. So this is effective occupation, even though you don't have people all over the place? Absolutely. And Leopold has been very, very crafty, because previous to the conference, he's taken the advice of an Oxford scholar called Sir Travis Twiss. It's actually a real name.

has told Leopold how he can convert his sort of company, his shady association, into being recognised as a formal state by doing certain things. So this is why he gets Stanley, who initially won't do... to up the ante with making treaties with the chiefs. And the treaties are quite shocking. For example, two chiefs are told that they will get a piece of cloth every month if they hand over all the rights to their kingdoms and will always give...

labour for various projects when they're asked for, will give over the rights to fisheries, to all the sort of natural goodies. For a piece of cloth every month? Yeah. Wow. Somebody got a good deal there. Yeah. Richard Wrighton, you were going to say something. There are two responses. The principle of effective occupation actually emerged...

already by the 17th century. It was essentially the basis on which the French, the British and the Dutch pretended to establish their colonial spaces. So it's a very old doctrine. It draws on the Roman law. But it's certainly something which the French are pushing particularly hard. And we see...

that the ambassador of France writes to Jules Ferry in December of 1884 saying this has got to be our strong card and we must occupy and prove that we occupy and are in a position not only to keep what we claim but to administer or at least to govern the country. So this idea of essentially that the proof of sovereignty would be found in government comes to be the card which is pushed particularly by those powers like France, which have a stake in...

establishing themselves in particular places. Now, to go back to the earlier point, I think Richard's absolutely right, that we need to look at what was happening not just inside the council chamber, but surrounding it. When figures like Vormann... Goldie, the African Lakes Company, missionary and railway promoters, Baron Lambermont, the Dutch...

Mercantile Association of Rotterdam. These were parties that were circulating around the conference chamber and were lobbying the delegates. And, of course, their negotiations are no part of the final record, but their interests would, of course, have been fully represented.

Richard Rathburn, I said, I think, in the introduction, or in the trail, the conference agreed to a final text in 1885. There were no Africans there at all. Did that strike anybody at the time as being... rather than an omission. I think Africans who knew about it thought it was a very serious mission, as we all would. No, I don't think it did. I think the paternalism that lurks behind this is a very, very powerful bit of 19th century reasoning. This was good for Africans.

Africans were going to be saved from themselves, saved from the darkness, by the combination of Christianity, commerce, and civilization, as it was seen. That notion of civilizing mission lurks behind as a kind of mystical goal, a holy grail issue behind the liberal and left supporters. This is, of course, cynically driven over in incredible ways by people who are much more savvy. And I think that to pick up the point that Richard has been digging in very well, I think.

of the extraordinary things about this period, is the way that it brings back into major significance the chartered company. Now, we thought we'd seen the end of that in 1857, the Indian mutiny and the takeover, ultimately, of the Indian possessions of the East India Company. by the British Crown. It was a disgraced company in that sense. It couldn't administer its Indian territories. But here, nearly all of these territories are administered not by the European states, but actually by...

work that's put out to companies. So big business, really? Well, not quite little business in many cases. Only 5% of British trade is with Africa by the mid-1880s. It's not a big deal.

are small and very often very unscrupulous companies, as, of course, Leopold's company proves beyond any doubt whatever. So I think this is a very important issue. But on the point of effective occupation, it seems to me that... one of the very, very significant things about what the conference does is it permits a colonial world in which there are very powerful centres, metropolitan centres, capital cities, where rule.

is conducted from and incredibly weak peripheries which seems to typify and to a certain extent modern african states and you can see this in the cartography very dense well mapped southern areas, bits that butt onto these ruling areas, and a virtual absence of detail the further north, the further into the hinterland you get. Joanna, briefly, can there be seen major winners and losers at these negotiations?

Absolutely. Leopold, as you rightly mentioned at the beginning, ends up with territory 78 times the size of his own kingdom, which is quite shocking. So he's a winner. He's a major, major winner. He takes it over and 10 million people are killed. in no time at all. Yes, he's going to be responsible for one of the major humanitarian disasters of the modern age and he takes his seat alongside great powers to...

international acclaim. He's applauded at the end by Bismarck and says, you know, sort of, well done and thank you very much for upholding these great principles. And the worrying thing now, of course... Why are they taking him so easily? I mean, why does Bismarck say that when in his notes on Leopold's submission he says...

calls him a swindler and a fantasy. The British as well. It's a duplicitous to the rest of them, isn't it? There is that. I think maybe they also feel it'll be all right on the night, but actually they don't know the extent of what's actually going to happen.

He has huge support from anti-abolitionists, from Baroness Baudet-Coutts. I mean, you know, he is the toast of all humanitarians, virtually, although there is just some scepticism. But he's been very, very canny. He's had supporters in a number of cases. Who, briefly, are the losers? Well, Congolese people. All that. Portugal hasn't done that well. Britain was going into the conference slightly worried. There was some...

worry that Bismarck was going to, quote, attack her sort of vital parts. So she's gone into the conference a bit worried, but actually comes out of it all right. She's managed to protect her interests, her trade interests in West Africa. has stopped France getting the Congo, so, you know, hurrah for that, and has had some...

lack on an anti-slavery measure, although Foreign Office officials feel that it's very watered down and milky. Richard Drayton, how did the outcome of this conference affect activity in Africa? in the immediate period afterwards. Can I just quickly follow up on a couple of points? I've got to get a move on. You follow up now. I think it's interesting to note that the precedent is set by the Second Berlin Conference of 1880, which excludes the Ottomans from any...

negotiations about their own territory. And that's actually quite important. for understanding what happens in the exclusion of Africans in 1984. Another point of Richard's about the chartered companies is a very odd back-to-the-future institution. So we might note in general a kind of Arnaud Mayer...

persistence of the old regime theme in the presence of these crown sovereigns negotiating this kind of settlement. Oscar II appeals to the Swedish constitution of 1809 for his own diplomatic prerogatives in negotiating in Berlin.

I really do want to move on. Can you tell us what happened after the conference in Africa? Very, very rapidly. By early March 1885, literally within days after the conference settlement, the Germans proclaimed... a protectorate over East Africa, the space which we now know as Tanganyika, based on hastily executed and legally dubious treaties between the German Empire and chiefs conducted by an adventurer called Karl Peters.

of months, the British are also attempting to enforce more effectively their control over the Niger. By 1887, King Jaja of Opobo, for example, is sent away on a gunboat to Barbados because he had interfered with trade in the Niger. The most striking things happen in the Congo, where Leopold decrees very quickly that all vacant lands belong to the Congo Territory, that he creates a force publique to drive corvée labor. He reduces the population to serfs.

he installs this regime. So, I mean, if we look at the actual general act of the Berlin Conference, essentially every single one of its articles was very quickly uprooted and turned upside down within a decade. Richard Rothburn. You talked about 5% of trade with Africa from this country. Did trade increase? We've got the ivory trade. Lots of pianos and billiard balls having a massive effect on African people.

I think fundamentally we ought to be looking at slavery as the major commodity going out over the Indian Ocean. The Arab traders. Well, they're called Arab traders. There are all sorts of conditions of traders. Well, why are they called the Arab traders, then? because that's the shorthand and a rather racist shorthand indeed, as, of course, deployed by Joanna's hero, David Livingstone.

Very many of them are, of course, people of mixed race. They're very often from places like Madagascar, which the French have held for some time, going to do things like pearl diving and plantation labour in the Indies, but also as far afield as Macau. So there is that. Palm oil and palm kernel trade increases enormously on the West African side, largely because there are no elephants left.

All of that is of some significance. The great break point, of course, comes in the 1880s onwards with the discovery of gold in South Africa. And suddenly, it seems to me, that the imperial... The imperial justification occurs in the discovery at long last of real wealth, not just a small basket of commodities, but a big commodity. And that has huge implications for capital markets, huge implications.

for the geopolitics of southern Africa, which, you know, are with us to this day. And would you... Are there more discoveries of that nature joining us? Well, one significant discovery which affects the Congo dramatically and increases the enslavement of peoples that's going on there, ironically, under the banner of getting rid of slavery, is the discovery of the inflatable tyre.

by Joseph Dunlop in 1890. So that means that Leopold has got another lease of life in order to try and clear his debts and make oodles of cash, in that he now turns to the rubber vines that are growing in the trees. because of course Congo is mostly forest. So that's going to lead to... this awful, awful story that Joseph Conrad will eventually write about in Hearts of Darkness because he's gone there as a captain and goes upriver and will...

based the character of Kurtz on this evil Belgian officer in the Force Publique, Captain Leon Rom. And then, of course, we've got the heroism of Edmund Morrill, who was just a shipping clerk, and saw that there were actually... all these guns going out to Leopold's Congo, no actual goods being traded. As he said, it was all about...

going to be all about commerce to get rid of slavery. And then we have this fantastic Congo reform movement that does actually show the power of the individual in journalism to get governments to do something about what was happening.

Richard Rathbone. I think one of the things that's rather a pity, we've left Africans out of this. I was going to come to that. Okay, give me. My next question. But you ask it for me. I was going to say that I think the notion that this is all... is a very mistaken view, and it's not one that I hope we've propagated today, but that basically all sorts of things have been going on in Africa throughout the 19th century, which are predisposing issues so far as the eventual...

for Africa is concerned. Certainly the tremendously debilitating effects of the importation of firearms is a very noticeable thing right the way across the continent, almost without exception. Africa, the breakdown of law and order, which of course helps the slave trade. And the denuding of the food stock by things like the killing of elephants for pianos and billy balls. That's certainly the case. There are things that balance this out, the importation of new food crops from the Americas.

both the population at a time when population was being bled out by the slave trade and by the violence occasioned by the slave trade. But these massive movements going on within Africa, a whole range of things that occur as a result of these. disturbances like civil wars. And the idea that somehow colonialism comes in and imposes itself as a kind of blanket over these situations I think forgets the fact that for many...

people in Africa, these are divided polities, and the arrival of Europeans is the arrival of allies on the grounds that my enemy is enemy, etc. That is being worked out in a very big way in Africa. So Africa... and Africans are, as it were, agents in this process every bit as much as they are victims. They're not just people having their hands chopped off because they aren't producing enough rubber. They're also very much involved as politicians, as military dictators.

as founders of new states, and so on, in a very exciting and dramatic fashion. So the scramble for Africa itself is a very dynamic process, and not just an imposition.

And it's not just European imperialism, but also Muslim imperialism as well, with the importation of guns, the spread of slavery, the East African slave trade is increasing in the 1870s, 1880s. Richard Rayton. Oh, yes. What we see certainly by the end of the century is the attempt throughout the continent to transform what had previously been forms of collaborative relationships in which it was not at all clear that Africans, in fact, were in a subordinate position.

into positions which were, in fact, more strictly. So many of our understandings of European imperialism essentially involve a kind of retrospective application to the early 19th century of a kind of white dominance which didn't really exist.

in the earlier period. And in fact, we could see the scramble for Africa from another perspective as having to do with what we might call the crisis of the middleman states, the states which had emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries on the coast of West Africa and which had actually become quite...

strong and wealthy, dealing in slaves, first of all, and then later on in palm oil and gum and other commodities. And in some ways, the European advance is also linked to this particular crisis within these African policies.

Can we stay for the Last Battles programme on... Are there any ways... We know about these terrible murders, 10 million people. Is there any ways... Because you're suggesting, Richard Rathbone, that the Africans... put more in and got more out than we've alluded to in this conversation. They're winners and losers. And one of the real problems, I think, with the whole question of...

The scramble is the counterfactual problem. What would have happened if there hadn't been a scramble for Africa? And I think Africa is a wonderful place from that point of view in that we do have a place where the scramble didn't occur, namely Ethiopia. What would have happened if Africans had been in control of their...

own destinies to a certain extent in control of the nature of modernization and then in terms of their relationship with the global economy and I think one can see in the case of Ethiopia a form of modernization which is autonomous, autonomous, and quite deliberate in terms of the creation of a very, very powerful military state, for example. A shaking of the head is going on. Well, I think it's, from my perspective, it's really difficult to attempt...

disaggregate regions of Africa and say well this is the Belgian case whereas this is the British case and this is the Ethiopian case. The point is that the forms of modernity which emerged in Ethiopia as in Liberia under American protection were forms which were encompassed by a world dominated by European norms, and in which Europeans had acquired this kind of disproportionate...

If one looks at the kinds of options that were available for African sovereignty, they were all constrained by the particular... balance of power, what in Bordieu's terms would be the field of imperial power in this period. When we look certainly at the kinds of possibilities for... decolonisation, which emerged later on. They all are extremely constrained by the kinds of structures set in place. So what would you say is the legacy, Joanna Lewis?

The legacy of the Scramble for Africa is that Africa gets divided up. by countries who produce states that are too greedy, too rushed and too racist to live up to any of the humanitarian ideals that were on the books in Brussels. conference in 1889 on anti-slavery and empire and Berlin. And so at independence they were then passed over states and not nations.

Thank you very much. I'm sorry it's been a rush. Well, actually, I've enjoyed it. It's been a terrific rush. Thank you, Joanna Lewis, Richard Drayton, Richard Roth. Next week, we'll be talking about ordinary language, philosophy, and Wittgenstein. Thank you for listening. Thank you.

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