Did the Europeans benefit economically from the scramble for Africa?

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A number of valid objections to the question have been raised in the comments. To summarize, many different European countries and actors participated in the Scramble For Africa in diverse ways. What exactly should and should not be measured on the balance sheet for "Europe" as a whole? Implicitly the question seems to ask for an aggregate accounting of the public and private costs and benefits associated with colonization in Africa accruing to any individuals, companies, governments, etc. based in Europe during a period of multiple decades. This is simply too difficult and broad of an exercise and I'm unable to find any serious attempt to do so.

That said, I will raise two relevant points. First, a number of studies have shown that the profitability of European enterprises in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was similar on average regardless of where they were operating. O'Niel and O'Niel (2009) show this in the case of British enterprises for the period of 1870-1913. O'Brien (2004) looks more broadly at global trade 1815-1948 and finds that whether a territory was colonized or independent had no significant effect on profitability. So on the one hand, massive and easy profits were certainly not the primary motive of all Europeans in every single African colony. On the other, colonization may have expanded the overall opportunities for European companies to profit at average (or better) rates of return where it opened opportunities to invest that would not otherwise exist due to hostility from indigenous rule. (This is particularly clear in the case of the Belgian Congo.)

Second, there may have been important hidden economic benefits that supported profitability regardless of whether colonization itself was profitable. A common argument associated with dependency theory and related schools of thought is that colonization helped to ensure that peripheral areas focused their exports on cheap raw materials required by advanced industrial economies. If African producers took a loss on rubber, ivory, cotton, etc., those cheap materials subsidized European industries in ways which are difficult to measure.

In sum, while the overall balance sheet cannot be assessed in any meaningful way, it is far from proven that imperialism in Africa was pursued at a total economic loss to Europe as a whole.

Upvote:-6

The Europeans went west to the Americas. They imported slaves from Africa for two centuries in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These European immigrants benefited immensely from the "scramble of Africa".

The Belgian Congo was immensely lucrative to the King Leopold II for rubber at the estimated cost of 10 million native Congolese under a cruelly exploitative yoke.

The list can go on and on ...

Upvote:1

To focus on a specific example, whole countries in Southern Africa were built/founded/stolen by people like Cecil Rhodes, but bands of free-booting adventurers are not to be compared to "the Europeans".

Rhodes was largely bank-rolled not by government, by commerce in general or by public subscription but by the Cecil family, which had been immensely prominent in first English then British politics since before the first Queen Elizabeth and still stands out today, but land-owners powerful enough to be running countries are not to be compared to "the Europeans."

Their home at Hatfield House remains one of the largest palaces in Europe and although it is much bigger than even any state building in the Republic of Zimbabwe that developed from the Rhodesia which bore his name, it was and remains one family's private residence. People living for hundreds of years before and since "The Scramble for Africa" in stately piles of which almost every room is larger than most people's houses are not to be compared to "the Europeans."

It's sometimes pointed out that Walmart is controlled by a billionaire family, yet huge numbers of employees are on benefits. Though not really European, isn't that the same perspective?

Between Walmart and the landed gentry sit people like John Lewis, who turned his empire into a partnership with the staff when he decided it was unfair that his family should be taking out of the business more than the entire pay-roll; that being not merely more than even the best-paid staff, but more than the entire staff combined.

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