Informal Empire and Africa

Abstract

The lines between formal and informal empire in nineteenth-century Africa were abstract, even wistful. While maps were often inaccurate and overlapping zones of influence impossible to trace, trade nonetheless radiated from the coasts deep into the interior and played a decisive role in the transformation and modernization of Africa. When Europeans first began to trade on the coastal cities, and as penetration moved steadily inland up the shallow rivers and over the trails of high plateaus and rainforests of the interior, African elites traded with outsiders and new economic structures arose. The quest for guns and other Western commodities by African elites stimulated slave-trading, while European farming methods and the introduction of new crops like corn and wheat and of new livestock-grazing practices, notably for cattle and sheep, changed eating habits and the very landscape of the continent. Missionaries like David Livingstone (1813–73) and the many thousands who followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries propagated Christianity, further promoting economic change. As Africans began to eat European food so they also exported these foods through port cities, particularly south to the Cape Colony — a growing economic powerhouse. Hunting for export spurred a change in traditional society. Africans sold elephant tusks that Europeans made into billiard balls and ivory piano keys.