What trade was carried on, except in Egypt, in Algeria, and in the immediate vicinity of the old French settlements on the West Coast, was mainly in the hands of British merchants.  Over the greater part of the coastal belts only the British power was known to the native tribes and chieftains.  Many of them (like the Sultan of Zanzibar and the chiefs of the Cameroons) had repeatedly begged to be taken under British protection, and had been refused.  During the two generations before 1878 the interior of the continent had begun to be known.  But except in the north and north-west, where French explorers and a few Germans had been active, the work had been mainly done by British travellers.  Most of the great names of African exploration—­Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Baker, Cameron and the Anglo-American Stanley—­were British names.  These facts, of course, gave to Britain, already so richly endowed, no sort of claim to a monopoly of the continent.  But they naturally gave her a right to a voice in its disposal.  Only the French had shown anything like the same activity, or had established anything like the same interests; and they were far behind their secular rivals.

But these facts bring out one feature which differentiated the settlement of Africa from that of any other region of the non-European world.  It was not a gradual, but an extraordinarily rapid achievement.  It was based not upon claims established by work already done, but, for the most part, upon the implicit assumption that extra-European empire was the due of the European peoples, simply because they were civilised and powerful.  This was the justification, in a large degree, of all the European empires in Africa.  But it was especially so in the case of the empire which Germany created in the space of three years.  This empire was not the product of German enterprise in the regions included within it; it was the product of Germany’s dominating position in Europe, and the expression of her resolve to create an external empire worthy of that position.

Africa falls naturally into two great regions.  The northern coast, separated from the main mass of the continent by the broad belt of deserts which runs from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, has always been far more ultimately connected with the other Mediterranean lands than with the rest of Africa.  Throughout the course of history, indeed, the northern coast-lands have belonged rather to the realms of Western or of Asiatic civilisation than to the primitive barbarism of the sons of Ham.  In the days of the Carthaginians and of the Roman Empire, all these lands, from Egypt to Morocco, had known a high civilisation.  They were racially as well as historically distinct from the rest of the continent.  They had been in name part of the Turkish Empire, and any European interference in their affairs was as much a question of European politics as the problems of the Balkans.  Two countries in this area fell under European direction during