The Private State: A New Perspective on the European Partition of Africa

Abstract

In the 1880s there was a race on among Europeans in Africa, spanning virtually the entire continent from Tunisia in the North to the Orange River in the South. Some European nicknames for this race are familiar: the Course au Clocher in France; the Scramble in England. What is less known is that this was a race, not necessarily to conquer or take land by force - most of that came later, in the 1890s -- but to claim paper deeds that nominally sold to whites the titles to govern various territories.