Bismarck, a typical cabinet politician of the 19th century, but not an imperialist at all, found it difficult to make up his mind to compete for distant colonies. The areas to which the German Reich finally made claims – Togo, Cameroon, Southwest Africa, German East Africa and Zanzibar – were comparatively uninteresting in terms of colonial economics. Sansibar was exchanged for Heligoland in the German-British Heligoland-Sansibar Treaty (1890).
Italy conquered Eritrea in 1887 and Italian Somaliland in 1888. The attempt to annex Ethiopia failed. After the defeat of Adua in 1896, Italy had to recognize its independence. In the Italo-Turkish War of 1911/1912, the Italians conquered the previously Ottoman Libya.
EUROPEAN SPHERES OF INTEREST
Due to the simultaneous advances from the north and south, the British colonial possessions at the turn of the century extended almost continuously from the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope. It was only interrupted by German East Africa, which had fallen to the German Empire after the agreements of the European powers on the partitioning of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884/85, but was placed under the administration of the League of Nations after the First World War; The same thing happened with the other German colonies of Togo, Cameroon and South West Africa. France had a large, contiguous colonial empire in West and Equatorial Africa, and it also claimed Madagascar and French Somaliland in northeast Ethiopia.
The Congo state, conquered by the Belgian King Leopold II between 1881 and 1885, was declared private property at the Berlin conference. In the period that followed, Leopold had what was probably the most cruel of all European colonial empires built, in which the most brutal human rights violations were the order of the day and in which millions of people died. The public outrage over these “Congo horrors” was so great that the king sold his land to the state in 1908 as a colony of the Belgian Congo.
Portugal expanded its eastern and western coastal areas to include the colonies of Angola and Mozambique. When Italy conquered Tripoli in 1912, Libya was the last African territory to come under European power. For more information about the continent of Africa, please check softwareleverage.org.
