What was the scramble for africa for kids

Africa, especially, was rich in resources. European nations competed to build their empires and supply their industries. They did this by colonizing Africa. These colonies supplied raw materials. They also provided new customers for European businesses. Laws were made for using direct rule on a colony, backed up by military power. Many of the indigenous populations dropped dramatically in Africa at this time.

Some were put into slavery or died though "indiscriminate war", starvation and diseases brought by the Europeans. Africa, especially, was rich in resources.

European nations competed to build their empires and supply their industries by colonizing Africa. These colonies not only supplied raw materials, they also provided new customers for European businesses. This practice of acquiring more lands, establishing colonies, and controlling those colonies is called imperialism. Among the greatest of the European explorers was David Livingstone , who charted the vast interior and Serpa Pinto who crossed southern and central Africa on a difficult expedition, mapping much of the interior of the continent.

By the end of the century, the source of the Nile had been charted by Europeans, the courses of the Niger , Congo and Zambezi Rivers had been traced, and the world now realized the vast resources of Africa. However, on the eve of the New Imperialist scramble for Africa, only ten percent of the continent was under the control of Western nations. In , the most important holdings were Algeria , administered by France ; the Cape Colony , held by Britain; and Angola , held by Portugal.

David Livingstone 's explorations, carried on by Henry Morton Stanley , galvanized the European nations into action. But at first, his ideas found little support, except from the Belgian king, Leopold II , who in had organized the International African Association.

Technological advancement facilitated overseas expansionism. Industrialization brought about rapid advancements in transportation and communication, especially in the forms of steam navigation, railroads, and telegraphs.

Medical advances were also important, especially medicines for tropical diseases. The development of malaria treatment enabled vast expanses of the tropics to be penetrated in the first place. Sub-Saharan Africa , the last region of the world largely untouched by "informal imperialism" and "civilization," was also attractive to Europe's ruling elites for other reasons.

During a time when Britain's balance of trade showed a growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets, Africa offered Britain an open market that would garner it a trade surplus: a market that bought more from the metropole than it sold overall.

Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to run an unfavorable balance of trade which was increasingly offset, however, by the income from overseas investments. As Britain developed into the world's first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly more important sector of its economy. Invisible financial exports, as mentioned, kept Britain out of the red, especially capital investments outside Europe, particularly to the developing and open markets in Africa, predominantly white settler colonies, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific.

In addition, surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap labor, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement to imperialism, of course, arose from the demand for raw materials unavailable in Europe, especially copper , cotton , rubber , tea , and tin , to which European consumers had grown accustomed and upon which European industry had grown dependent.

However, in Africa exclusive of what would become the Union of South Africa in , the amount of capital investment by Europeans was relatively small before and after the Berlin Conference. Consequently, the companies involved in tropical African commerce were small and politically insignificant, exerting only a tiny influence on domestic politics. These observations might detract from the pro-imperialist arguments of Leopold II , Francesco Crispi , and Jules Ferry , who argued that sheltered overseas markets in Africa would solve the problems of low prices and over-production caused by shrinking continental markets.

But later historians have noted that such statistics only obscured the fact that formal control of tropical Africa had great strategic value in an era of imperial rivalry. While tropical Africa was not a large zone of investment, other regions overseas were. The vast interior — between the gold- and diamond-rich southern Africa and Egypt, had, however, key strategic value in securing the flow of overseas trade.