EUROPE AND AFRICA 
CHAPTER 1 
EUROPEAN EXPANSION AND WORLD POLITICS 
DurinG the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the 
leading nations of the world engaged in a remarkable 
territorial expansion, — an expansion with an imperialistic 
tendency. The age of exploration and discovery which 
produced a Columbus and a Cortez was reproduced again 
in an era which gave forth a Stanley and a King Leopold II. 
Africa was to be to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 
what the Americas had been to the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries. Between the years 1884 and 1900, France and 
Great Britain each acquired over 3,500,000 square miles of 
territory in the Dark Continent — an amount equal to the 
whole of the United States including Alaska, — while the 
Kaiser and the King of Belgium were marking out 1,000,000 
and 900,000 square miles respectively for themselves. 
This expansion, however, was not confined to Africa; it 
spread to Central Asia, to the Far East, to the Philippines 
and the distant isles of the Pacific. There was an intimate 
connection running through the whole movement; and the 
activities of Russia in Turkestan and Manchuria, of France 
in the Sudan and Madagascar, of England in Nigeria and 
South Africa, and of Germany in East Africa and Samoa, 
must be carefully studied in order to grasp its real signifi- 
cance. At first, the European states directed their efforts 
towards the acquisition of territory and the founding of