Scramble for Africa

The Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 was a meeting of fourteen countries that ended with the signing of the General Act of Berlin, an agreement regulating European colonisation and trade in Africa. No African countries were invited to the conference. Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar, the only African head of state to ask to send a representative, was refused. European powers were also driven by economic motivations, and raw materials such as rubber, minerals, ivory and cotton made Africa highly valuable. The General Act can be seen as formalizing the ongoing Scramble for Africa, and by 1914 about 90% of all the land that makes up Africa was under European control. Some scholars warn against overstating the conference's role in the colonial partitioning of Africa, drawing attention to the many bilateral agreements concluded before and after it, though the historians Louis and Gifford conceded that the Berlin Act did have a relevance to the course of the partition. A 2024 study found that the only borders set at the conference were those of the Congo region, which were later revised, and that most of Africa's borders did not take their final form until over two decades later.