The European Partition of Africa: How Imperialism Transformed the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912

Lionel(Bo): Glad I purchased this book for my collection. Great information. Knowledge is power.

United States on Nov 18, 2023

jscotdoc: An amazingly detailed and informative work. The small print and sheer amount of detailed content can make it a ‘difficult’ read but worth staying the course if you can!! Possibly best read in sections.

United Kingdom on Aug 24, 2023

Carlos Savio: Good and well written

Italy on Aug 22, 2023

Anne Mills: This classic recounts the European rush for power in Africa, which took place over a remarkably short period of time. It is a highly detailed account of European actions in Africa and of the European politics around the rush. This creates a point of view that is strongly European. That has a lot to do with the passing of time, and a lot (I would assume) about the paucity of African source material. The book is a tough read -- the amount of detail can be overwhelming -- but well worth while.

United States on Mar 02, 2023

DaisyH: I lent my old copy so many times and lost track of it, so bought another. I miss the old cover, but the content is the same - a thick read but riveting stiff, and an important reminder of how European colonial powers ravaged and exploited the entire continent.

United States on Jan 19, 2023

david canford: One of my favourite movies is ‘Zulu’ but what you don’t learn in that movie but will from this book is that the Zulus weren’t the aggressors - the Boers and British were. Like so much of history, the past has been rewritten by the victor and much of relevance has been left out or is barely known.
The book describes how Britain, France and Germany raced to carve up the African continent to enrich themselves. Belgium and Italy also joined in. They justified their actions by the three ‘C’s: commerce, Christianity and civilisation. Some saw it as a way to end the slave trade perpetuated at that time by the Arabs kidnapping people in league with local African tribal leaders to be taken to the Middle East, an evil which continued long after the abolition of slavery in the West.
At times the book reads like an adventure story but told from the colonisers point of view. At others the detailed politics can be quiet tedious. The immense suffering caused to the local population and the legacy we have left behind is largely ignored, apart from a couple of chapters at the end.
Still western corporations, and and now China too, ruthlessly exploit Africa’s resources with...

United Kingdom on Dec 27, 2021

Terry GriggTerry Grigg: I read this colossus quite a few years ago and decided to re-read it as research for a book I am writing about Africa. Thomas Pakenham presents a lengthy and very detailed tome on the European colonisation of the African continent, from the 1870s, and then leading up to the First World War. He vividly describes how the 3 Cs ... Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation, a triple alliance of Mammon, God and Social Progress would liberate Africa. Of course, there was the 4th C, Conquest, which with the aid of mechanised warfare devastated the continent. The five rival nations of Germany, Italy, Portugal, France and Britain treated the whole affair like a schoolboy’s brawl and Livingstone’s ‘Open Sore’ suppurated with more and more pus. At the centre of it all was the Belgian King Leopold with the Congo rubber trade, a slave driver if ever there was one, severing hands as punishment if quotas were unmet. The Germans were hardly any better with a policy of genocide against the Herero and Nama when they rebelled. Africans throughout the continent were treated as nothing more than Nyama (meat), with a beating by hippopotamus hide to keep them in place.

Africa brought out...

United Kingdom on Oct 28, 2018

Roderick S. Haynes: Extremely ambitious read covering many regions of African continent in last 30 years of 19th century, focusing on European imperialism; what is commonly known as THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA. This book has become one of the standard-bearers for historians and casual readers interested in that period. When I wrote BEFORE THE SCRAMBLE: A SCOTTISH MISSIONARY'S STORY I very much relied on several key chapters in this book. The book's design is as follows: the chapters are independent from each other, each chapter covering a separate region of the continent, separate European powers and their respective military and political personalities involved in those respective areas. The research is impeccable, the detail of personalities and incidents are clear and richly portrayed. This book is one of those seminal documents that will withstand the test of the time. It will be an excellent source for researchers, teachers, and students. Again, I found it extremely useful when it came time for me to write about my distant relative who was a missionary in British Central Africa in the 1880s. What was really compelling was reading about individuals James Sutherland (my relative) met, who appear in...

United States on Feb 16, 2017

hellodavey: As an informal reader of history, I found this book to be absolutely brilliant. Having watched a few films, read a few things on wikipedia and realizing I knew nothing at all about those countries I've been staring at on a globe for so long, Google and Amazon told me that this was the book I had to read as an introduction to the history of Africa.

The focus of the story is the approx 30 year period of history when Europe ended up grabbing virtually all the land of africa and divided it up into pretty much the boundaries that we see today when we look at the map. And for me - this was the main draw of the book. I was fascinated as to how and why africa looks the way it does today and in that respect the book is fantastic.

It is a story with plenty of great characters - just to name a few - the politicans, Kings and Queens in the offices and palaces of Europe. Individual explorers cutting their way through the jungle, dragging themselves through the deserts and hauling themselves upstream on the great rivers. Money grabbing pioneers turning over the land, pure hearted missionaries looking to give redemption and last but not least the African tribes... well mainly being...

United Kingdom on Jan 14, 2011

Dalton C. Rocha: I read this good book, here in Brazil.This book has many excellent parts, such as:
1-Page 433:"Their dominant themes were the threat to the lives of the Christian missionaries, the need to maintain the supression of the slave trade, and the damage to Britain's honour if the country reneged on her pledges.It was an old familiar crusade, the one for wich Livingstone and Gordon and Bishop Hannington had died - the crusade against Mulslim slave traders."
2-Page 439:"Impressed by his exploits in battle, Tippu Tip gave him back his freedom.Then for several years he served as Tippu's lieutenant in the upper Lomani, hunting slaves and ivory, like others loyal to the Arabs, with a pack of obedient cannibals.(Troublemakers were distributed as rations)".
Such as another reviewer wrote, the big problem of this book is to be very biased.It is very biased and focused in England's imperialism.About Portugal and Spain imperialism in Africa, there's almost nothing.
As I show above, this book writes the true about XIX Century's african slavery:an islamic business.At the same time, in one page, this book when talking about blacks in South Africa, describe they as "servants", not slaves,...

United States on Feb 03, 2009