The Scramble for Africa: 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham. 2v. Introduced by Saul David. Tipped in pages of colour plates. Three-quarter bound in buckram with printed paper front. Printed slipcase. 951pp. 26.3x19xp.5cm. 

On 7 January 1876, The Times was delivered to the breakfast table of King Leopold II of Belgium. In it, he read the report of a Lieutenant Cameron, who had just finished an arduous three-year journey across the largely uncharted African interior, nearly dying in the process. At the time Africa was widely assumed to be barren and inhospitable, but Cameron described a ‘magnificent and healthy country of unspeakable richness’ ripe for some ‘enterprising capitalist that might take the matter in hand’. Leopold had been seeking a suitable colony for Belgium for over a decade, and saw his opportunity. The Scramble for Africa had begun. Within half a generation all 10 million square miles of the African ‘cake’, along with 110 million bewildered new subjects, had been sliced up between five powers Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Portugal and one individual, Leopold himself. He created the Belgian colony of Congo by stealth, under the guise of an ‘international association’, and treated the country, with its lucrative rubber industry, as his private property and its population as his slaves.

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