The “Scramble for Africa” / Berlin Conference (1884–85)
The organizing event of modern colonialism
At the Berlin Conference (Nov 1884 – Feb 1885), fourteen powers agreed rules for the “effective occupation” and partition of Africa, accelerating the “Scramble” in which nearly the entire continent was brought under European colonial control. It is the clearest single symbol of colonialism as a coordinated European project.
What happened
Rivalry over the Congo and West Africa led Bismarck to convene the conference. The resulting General Act set out rules for European powers to claim and be recognized as sovereigns over African territory. No African ruler was a party.
All the Powers exercising sovereign rights or influence in the aforesaid territories bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes… (General Act, Article 6)
Under each definition
The coordinated assertion of foreign sovereignty over African territory is classical colonialism at continental scale.
Some resulting colonies were settler colonies (Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia, South Africa), others purely extractive; the Act itself is agnostic.
The Act concerns formal colonization, not post-independence control.
“The Scramble for Africa” is shorthand for colonialism itself.
The case that the label applies
European states negotiated among themselves the terms on which they would exercise “sovereign rights” over African territory — the definitional act of colonial partition, with Africans as objects rather than parties.
The case against
Historians caution that Berlin did not itself draw most borders or “divide Africa on a map” (a popular oversimplification); it set procedural rules that legitimized a scramble already underway. This refines how Berlin mattered, not whether the era was colonial.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Colonialism has no treaty crime, so no application is a legal “finding”; every characterization is attributed to the person or body that made it. The lenses diverge most on two questions — whether there is a “metropole” and who counts as “indigenous” — and on the difference between a historical judgment and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.