rivalry produced acute friction, which grew in intensity until it reached its culminating point in the crisis of Fashoda in 1898, and was not removed until the settlement of 1904 solved all the outstanding difficulties.  It would be quite untrue to say that Britain deliberately endeavoured to prevent or to check the rapid colonial expansion of France.  The truth is that British trading interests had been predominant in many of the regions where the French were most active, and that the protectionist policy which France had adopted stimulated into a new life the ancient rivalry of these neighbour and sister nations.  Towards the colonial ambitions of Germany, and still more of Italy, Britain was far more complaisant.

It is difficult to give in a brief space a clear summary of the extremely complicated events and intrigues of this vitally important period.  But perhaps it will be easiest if we consider in turn the regions in which the strenuous rivalries of the powers displayed themselves.  The most important was Africa, which lay invitingly near to Europe, and was the only large region of the world which was still for the most part unoccupied.  Here all the competitors, save Russia, Japan, and America, played a part.  Western Asia formed a second field, in which three powers only, Russia, Germany, and Britain, were immediately concerned.  The Far East, where the vast Empire of China seemed to be falling into decrepitude, afforded the most vexed problems of the period.  Finally, the Pacific Islands were the scene of an active though less intense rivalry.

It is a curious fact that Africa, the continent whose outline was the first outside of Europe itself to be fully mapped out by the European peoples, was actually the last to be effectively brought under the influence of European civilisation.  This was because the coasts of Africa are for the most part inhospitable; its vast interior plateau is almost everywhere shut off either by belts of desert land, or by swampy and malarious regions along the coast; even its great rivers do not readily tempt the explorer inland, because their course is often interrupted by falls or rapids not far from their mouths, where they descend from the interior plateau to the coastal plain; and its inhabitants, warlike and difficult to deal with, are also peoples of few and simple wants, who have little to offer to the trader.  Hence eight generations of European mariners had circumnavigated the continent without seriously attempting to penetrate its central mass; and apart from the Anglo-Dutch settlements at the Southern extremity, the French empire in Algeria in the north, a few trading centres on the West Coast, and some half-derelict Portuguese stations in Angola and Mozambique, the whole continent remained available for European exploitation in 1878.