The Scramble for Southern Africa, 1877-1895: The politics of partition reappraised

The Scramble for Southern Africa formed one of the most dramatic episodes in the more general European assault on Africa by the forces of the New Imperialism in the later nineteenth century. This book offers a fresh reappraisal of the complex sequence of events that surrounded the Partition of Africa south of the Zambesi in the years 1877-95. The Scramble for Southern Africa was, as Professor Schreuder powerfully argues, really a scramble for mastery of the land and its resources - both physical and human - and not merely a diplomatic strategy. The era of the Scramble made the white man master of Southern Africa; it was left to the years of the ‘South African War’, 1899-1902, and the decade of Unification to 1910, to decide which white men were to be the ultimate masters.