History II / The Extra-European World
Practice question · True or false

By 1870 the European powers already administered most of the African interior, and the decades after 1880 merely formalised what existed.

Hints
  1. Ask how much of the continent any European state actually governed in 1870.
  2. Roughly a tenth of Africa was under European control at that date, and it was mostly coastal.
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False

Why

False. Around 1870 something like a tenth of Africa was under European rule, overwhelmingly at the coast; by 1914 it was close to the whole continent. That the change took roughly three decades is what makes "scramble" an apt word and what makes explanations resting on slow accumulation implausible.

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