Reason why Africans was
partition by the European in nineteenth century
Answers
the dynamic Scramble for Africa squarely in Eurpoe, attempts to pay due regard to changing conditions in the periphery contigent on the manner of capital's penetration of Africa itself. While the African dimension was important, the crucial changes took place because of capitalism's markedly uneven development after l870. The changing balance of economic power between the advanced industrial nations caused the weakest of them, France, and to a lesser extent, Britain, to embark on programmes of colonial expansion. This suggests that scholars should pay particularly close attention to the political economy of France in the last 30 years or so of the nineteenth century. If the partition of British Africa was less a gigantic footnote to the Indian empire than it was to the City of London, the Scramble as a whole may owe more to French commercial calculations and the Quai d'Orsay than it ever did to the "official mind of British Imperialism."