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A Time Of Colonization Of The African Continent By European Power

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A time of expeditious colonization of the African continent by European power is better known as ‘the scramble for Africa’. The European nations involved in the scramble were Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Portugal, and Italy. The economic, social, and military evolution Europe was going through at the time allowed for this to happen. In 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under European control. However, over time European rivalries intensified which caused a mad scramble to rule as much of the continent as possible. By 1914 the only states European nations did not control were Ethiopia and Liberia. (1) (Robert R. Edgar, George F. Jewsbur, Neil J. Hackett, Barbara S Molony, Matthew Gordan, Civilizations Past & Present - 12th Ed. - Vol. II (New York: Longman, 2007), 738) The scramble for Africa cannot be explained by just one cause. It looks indisputable that although the specific reasons that set forth the scramble were wide ranged throughout the continent the action was determined by a state of the expanding international economic and political rivalry caused by the unequal growth of industrial capitalism.
The discovery of large deposits of diamonds in 1868 and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 led to a vast influx of White settlers from Britain and other European states into South Africa and gave further motivation to the ‘Scramble for Africa’ among the European powers. (4)(Hilton, J.L, 2014). This “complicated the Afro-European for political sovereignty by

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