Berlin Conference

[citation needed] However, some scholars warn against overstating its role in the colonial partitioning of Africa, drawing attention to the many bilateral agreements concluded before and after the conference.

[citation needed] Seven of the fourteen countries represented – Austria-Hungary, Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden-Norway, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States – came home without any formal possessions in Africa.

Prior to the conference, European diplomats approached African rulers and the French leaders had already invaded some parts of Lagos in the same manner as they had in the Western Hemisphere, by establishing a connection to local trade networks.

[8] In 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium, who had founded and controlled the International African Association the same year, invited Henry Morton Stanley to join him in researching and "civilising" the continent.

Stanley's charting of the Congo River Basin (1874–1877) removed the last terra incognita from European maps of the continent, delineating the areas of British, Portuguese, French and Belgian control.

Italy became part of the Triple Alliance, an event that upset Bismarck's carefully laid plans and led Germany to join the European invasion of Africa.

[12] In 1882, realizing the geopolitical extent of Portuguese control on the coasts, but seeing penetration by France eastward across Central Africa toward Ethiopia, the Nile, and the Suez Canal, Britain saw its vital trade route through Egypt to India threatened.

Because of the collapsed Egyptian financing and a subsequent mutiny in which hundreds of British subjects were murdered or injured, Britain intervened in the nominally Ottoman Khedivate of Egypt, which it controlled for decades.

Hoping to quickly soothe the brewing conflict, Belgian King Leopold II convinced France and Germany that common trade in Africa was in the best interests of all three countries.

Under support from the British and the initiative of Portugal, Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, called on representatives of 13 nations in Europe as well as the United States to take part in the Berlin Conference in 1884 to work out a joint policy on the African continent.

That principle became important not only as a basis for the European powers to acquire territorial sovereignty in Africa but also for delimiting their respective overseas possessions, as effective occupation served in some instances as a criterion for settling colonial boundary disputes.

[citation needed] That logic caused it to be generally assumed by Britain and France that Germany had an interest in embarrassing the other European powers on the continent and forcing them to give up their possessions if they could not muster a strong political presence.

The Belgians originally wanted to include that effective occupation required provisions that "cause peace to be administered", but Britain and France were the powers that had that amendment struck out of the final document.

[26] Before he died in 1873, Christian missionary, David Livingstone, called for a worldwide crusade to defeat the Arab-controlled slave trade in East Africa.

[5] However, the countries that ultimately participated in the Final Act ignored requirements set forth within it to establish their satellite governments, rights to the land, and trade for the benefit of their national, and domestic economies.