ABSTRACT

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often referred to as the "Age of Imperialism." In this period, European countries, led by Britain and France, exploited their military, technological, and economic superiority over non-Western peoples to build the largest colonial empires the world had ever seen. European powers had a long history in Africa. Western science was not merely imposed on African reality. New sciences, such as tropical medicine and "ethnopsychiatry," were also born out of the colonial encounter. Exploration of the African interior was the culmination of a process that began with the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the fifteenth century—the project of making the world known to European science. Once European control over African territories had been established, European powers wanted to know how to most efficiently exploit their newly acquired resources. An aspect of the economic exploitation of colonial resources was the development of the science of acclimatization.