2 - The European Partition of Africa: Origins and Dynamics

Summary

SEEING AFRICA WHOLE

In 1873 Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days celebrated the spectacular conquest of distance, especially since about 1860, by the adaptation of the steam-engine to trans-continental and trans-oceanic transport. To the suggestion that the world was still ‘assez vaste’, Verne's hero retorted laconically: ‘Il l'était autrefois’ (‘It used to be’). The terrestrial globe had indeed suddenly contracted; and its finite dimensions had now become of practical, and not merely of ‘philosophical’, interest to the industrialised societies of the West. The planetary stock of markets and resources was evidently none too large; it seemed already possible in principle to foresee the day when its saturation and exhaustion might impose an absolute limit upon the growth of industrial economies. This ultimate catastrophe seemed indeed to be foreshadowed by the onset in the early 1870s of the so-called ‘Great Depression’, essentially the effect of the failure of domestic and foreign demand to keep pace with the productive capacity of increasingly mechanised industries. Existing markets seemed to be satiated. Prices, profits and interest-rates fell, apparently inexorably, until the mid-1890s. The overall effect was a sharp retardation in the growth-rate of the industrial economies after some twenty-five years of unprecedented acceleration, and, for some of these economies, an especially severe recession between 1878 and 1884. Moreover, the existing overseas outlets for European capital now no longer seemed sufficiently safe or remunerative. British capital export between 1875 and 1879 was negligible by comparison with the previous five-year period; and from 1880 to 1904 the average annual export of British capital was little more than half that of the period 1870–4.