Berlin Conference 1884-5

The Berlin Conference, also known as the Berlin West Africa Conference, was held between November 1884 and February 1885. Imperial powers, notably Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany, met to thrash out their competing claims for control of certain territories across the African continent. The conference, although it did not actually divide the continent, provided a framework by which Africa could, in the future, be partitioned into European areas of effective control and so is widely considered the beginning of a distinct acceleration in imperialist acquisitions known as the 'Scramble for Africa'. Imperialism in Africa long pre-dated the Berlin Conference, but the rest of the 1880s and 1890s would see imperialist powers move from the coasts to inland territories so that by 1914, the whole continent of Africa, with the exception of Abyssinia and Liberia, came under European control.