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Africa in 1914, When 90% of the Continent Was Colonized
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Key Takeaways
- This infographic map shows Africa in 1914, on the eve of World War I, when 90% of the continent was controlled by just seven European empires.
- Many of today’s national borders took shape in this era, as European powers carved up the African continent amongst themselves.
- While Germany ceded all of its African colonies at the conclusion of the war, all of the European empires would come to lose their own colonies in the decades to follow.
In just a few decades, European empires redrew the map of Africa.
In the span of roughly 40 years, European powers had carved up nearly the entire continent, transforming Africa into a patchwork of colonial territories administered from London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, Rome, and Madrid.
This map captures that moment at its peak, on the eve of World War I, when imperial control stretched across almost the whole continent before the war began to unravel Europe’s overseas empires.
Many of Africa’s modern national borders trace directly back to this period, reflecting colonial-era agreements rather than preexisting cultural or political boundaries.
Data used here leverages diverse sources including UNESCO (1990), Eric Hobsbawm (1987), Henk Wesseling (1997), EBSCO (2023), and the Library of Congress.
The Scramble for Africa
European empires had been making incursions into Africa for centuries, as seen through the Dutch settlers who arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition in 1798.
However, the era of New Imperialism which began in the second half of the 19th century saw significantly more complex colonial efforts by the European great powers, especially the British, French, and Germans.
The “Scramble for Africa” saw these three great powers partition the African continent amongst themselves, with the process perhaps best represented by the 1885 Berlin Conference.
Some of the active colonial powers, such as Belgium or Portugal, were smaller countries without extensive military power, while some European great powers like Russia and Austria-Hungary did not participate in the Scramble for Africa.
A Tale of Two Colonies
The British Empire was the most successful of the European empires in Africa, ruling over nearly uninterrupted lands across the eastern half of the continent.
London’s dreams of a Cape to Cairo railway linking their dominions in Egypt and South Africa were dashed by geographic and political concerns, as the eastern Belgian Congo was inhospitable for railway construction while German East Africa was a possession of the leading British rival of the era.
Following the end of the Great War, the British would take control of the latter territory, in what is today the country of Tanzania, although economic concerns during the Great Depression led to the dreamed railway never coming to fruition.
While the British were dominant in eastern Africa, the Maghreb and much of West Africa fell under French control. There were of course nuances between cases: Algeria was annexed to the territory of metropolitan France, while Morocco and Tunisia were each protectorates ruled by leaders loyal to the French Empire.
Nor did Morocco remain solely French-administered, as a 1912 treaty gave Spain dominion over northern parts of the country, near the Straits of Gibraltar, as well as a southern component bordering its Spanish Sahara colony.
By this point in history, Spain, much like neighboring Portugal, was holding on to its final few colonies following major losses of control in the Americas in the preceding decades. The two Iberian countries’ lack of involvement in the world wars led to them keeping their African colonies longer than most other European states, with independence and decolonization only coming in the 1960s-1970s.
Belgium and the Independent States
Owing to great-power ambivalence over the Congo Basin, Belgium’s King Leopold was able to establish a single vast colony, far larger than his own country, over which to rule. Belgian Congo, with its vast rubber extraction, has been cited as one of the most brutal and damaging colonies within the continent.
Meanwhile, further north only two countries managed to avoid colonization during the Partition of Africa: Ethiopia and Liberia.
The former, also known as Abyssinia, successfully repelled Italian colonization during the prewar partition, although it was eventually occupied by Fascist Italy during the interwar period. Liberia, meanwhile, was founded by freed U.S. slaves and was never colonized, helping it become Africa’s longest-lasting independent state today.
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