Berlin Conference - Early History of The Conference

Early History of The Conference

Prior to the conference, European diplomacy treated African indigenous people in the same manner as the New World natives. By the mid-19th century, Africa was considered disputed territory ripe for exploration, trade, and settlement. With the exception of trading posts along the coasts, the continent was essentially ignored. This changed as a result of King Leopold of Belgium's desire for glory.

In 1878, King Léopold II of Belgium, who had previously founded the International African Society in 1876, invited Henry Morton Stanley to join him in researching and 'civilizing' the continent. In 1878, the International Congo Society was also formed, with more economic goals, but still closely related to the former society. Léopold secretly bought off the foreign investors in the Congo Society, which was turned to imperialistic goals, with the African Society serving primarily as a philanthropic front.

From 1879 to 1885, Stanley returned to the Congo, this time not as a reporter, but as an envoy from Léopold with the secret mission to organize what would become known as the Congo Free State. French intelligence had discovered Leopold's plans, and France was quickly engaging in its own colonial exploration. French naval officer Pierre de Brazza was dispatched to central Africa, traveled into the western Congo basin, and raised the French flag over the newly founded Brazzaville in 1881, in what is currently the Republic of Congo. Finally, Portugal, which already had a long, but essentially abandoned colonial Empire in the area through the mostly defunct proxy state Kongo Empire, also claimed the area due to old treaties with its old proxy, the Kingdom of Spain, and the Roman Catholic Church. It quickly made a treaty with its old ally, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on 26 February 1884 to block off the Congo Society's access to the Atlantic.

By the early 1880s, due to diplomatic maneuvers, subsequent colonial exploration, and recognition of Africa's abundance of valuable resources such as gold, timber, land, markets and labour power, European interest in Africa had increased dramatically. Stanley's charting of the Congo River Basin (1874–1877) removed the last bit of terra incognita from European maps of the continent, thereby delineating the rough areas of British, Portuguese, French, and Belgian control. The powers raced to push these rough boundaries to their furthest limits and eliminating any potential local minor powers which might prove troublesome to European competitive diplomacy.

France moved to occupy Tunisia, one of the last of the Barbary Pirate states under the pretext of another Islamic terror and piracy incident. French claims by Pierre de Brazza, were quickly solidified with French taking control of today's Republic of the Congo in 1881 and also Guinea in 1884. This, in turn, partly convinced Italy to become part of the Triple Alliance, thereby upsetting Bismarck's carefully laid plans with Italy and forcing Germany to become involved. In 1882, realizing the geopolitical extent of Portuguese control on the coasts, but seeing penetration by France eastward across Central Africa toward Ethiopia, the Nile, and the Suez Canal, Britain saw its vital trade route through Egypt and its Indian Empire threatened.

Under the pretext of the collapsed Egyptian financing and a subsequent riot which saw hundreds of Europeans and British subjects murdered or injured, the United Kingdom intervened in nominally Ottoman Egypt, which, in turn, ruled over the Sudan and what would later become British Somaliland.