ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there is a more reliable explanation of European success in the African colonial wars than the thesis of triumphant technology: the ability of Europeans to recruit large armies of African troops. Henry Meredith, a British official on the Gold Coast, wrote in 1812 that Europeans in that part of Africa could "claim no right of conquest pay ground-rent and water custom at most of their setdements. Often at parity with European troops in the age of the muzzle-loader, they fell behind with the coming of the "breechloader revolution". Careful archival research has uncovered a significant influence on French imperial policy of representatives of what might be called "municipal imperialism". Accordingly, in 1884 he called an international conference in Berlin to try to introduce some order into the looming scramble to carve up Africa. There is a note of fatalism in views like those of African historians such as Boahen that is not justified.
