ABSTRACT
The retirement of Ronald Robinson from the Beit Chair of the History of the British Commonwealth at Oxford University in the autumn of 1987 came almost a century after the conclusion of the West African Conference of Berlin in 1885. That gathering marked, even if it did not cause, the partition of Africa by the Powers of Europe and was a pointer to what, by 1902, was coming to be called ‘Imperialism’. In that year J.A.Hobson published his seminal book on the making of new empires as Europe, America and Japan divided up among themselves ancient and modern cultures around the world in a kaleidoscope of domination.
