ABSTRACT
African history appears to provide a textbook case of modern European imperialism: virtually an entire continent became colonial booty. This seizure of land, people, and resources happened very quickly-most of it happened during the space of a single generation, between 1884 and 1914. On its surface, African conquest is a story of competition among European powers, with Africa itself merely a backdrop for this saga. As shown most obviously at the Congo Congress in Berlin (1884-1885), European states frequently ignored African views and judged African precedents to be irrelevant. New maps of the continent featured colonial borders drawn in ignorance (or defiance) of pre-existing population distributions, geographical features, and economic trade patterns. Yet this European success was possible only during a very brief window of military and technological superiority-taking advantage of African vulnerabilities produced by environmental conditions and the prior depredations of centuries of slave trading, which had enriched coastal areas at the expense of inland groups. The economic exploitation of African resources after 1880 could thus take a particularly crude form, and
2 C H A P T E R
modern empires subjected Africans to intrusive forms of surveillance and control. Nonetheless Africans fought back against these colonial states-and even when they suffered military defeats, local societies set about reworking the imperial order. Over time this system became a characteristically complicated hybrid-one that was brought to an end, soon after World War II, by a new breed of anti-colonial activists.
