In the late 1800s, English businessman Cecil Rhodes made a fortune claiming huge tracts of land in South Africa—places rich in gold and diamonds—and brutally exploiting the labor of the local population, who he considered to be members of an inferior race. Thousands died as a result of the labor practices his businesses used in Africa. In his later years, he wrote that “the world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach, I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” Rhodes was an imperialist, and to an imperialist, “expansion was everything.” Imperialism is the policy of expanding the rule of a nation or empire over foreign countries by force. In the 1800s, European nations acquired great wealth and power from both the natural resources of the lands they conquered and the forced labor of the people from whom they took the land. Imperialists used ideas from eugenics and Social Darwinism to justify their conquests. To imperialists like Rhodes, the idea that there would soon be no opportunity for further expansion was unsettling. The French held similar views. In a speech to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1884, Jules Ferry, who twice served as prime minister of France, said:
A few months later, France took part in an international meeting known as the Congress of Berlin. It was called by Otto von Bismarck, then chancellor of Germany, and was attended by 15 nations. They came to establish rules for dividing up Africa—the only large landmass Europeans had not yet fully colonized. By agreeing to abide by those rules, the group hoped to avoid a war in Europe. They paid little or no attention to the effects of their decisions on Africans or the people of any other continent. The results of their efforts can be seen in the following map. The inset shows Africa just before the Congress of Berlin; the main map shows the continent in 1914. At the Congress of Berlin in 1884, 15 European powers divided Africa among them. By 1914, these imperial powers had fully colonized the continent, exploiting its people and resources. In 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois, an African American scholar and activist, summed up the meeting held some 30 years earlier in an article in the Atlantic Monthly. In it, he revealed that the Congress of Berlin was having an impact on Africa nearly two weeks before the first group of delegates arrived in Germany.
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