Africa on the Eve of Partition: States, Trade, and Explorers

Around 1870, on the eve of the great colonizing acceleration, only about 10 percent of African territory lay under effective European control, concentrated almost entirely in coastal enclaves of commercial origin and in the settler colony of the Cape. The interior was anything but empty or ungoverned: it hosted numerous complex, consolidated states, among them the Ashanti Empire in present-day Ghana, the kingdom of Buganda in the Great Lakes region, the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria — founded through the jihad of Usman dan Fodio between 1804 and 1808 — the Zulu kingdom in southeastern Africa, and the Ethiopian Empire under its Solomonic dynasty. Egypt, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, had achieved under Muhammad Ali (ruler from 1805) considerable autonomy and military modernization. The Atlantic slave trade, formally abolished by Britain in 1807, had gradually been replaced by so-called "legitimate commerce" in palm oil, peanuts, ivory, and rubber.