Imperialism, War, and Revolution, 1881–1920 535The scramble for Africa had repercussions in Euro-
pean diplomacy, chiefly the reopening of the colonial
rivalry between Britain and France. After General
Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman, his troops con-
fronted a small French exploratory mission, the Mar-
chand mission, which had camped on the upper Nile at
the Sudanese town of Fashoda. Kitchener and Mar-
chand both claimed Fashoda, but the size of Kitchener’s
forces obliged the French to leave. The Fashoda crisis
showed that France remained vulnerable in 1898.
In the following months, however, the vulnerability
of British diplomatic isolation was exposed by Britain’s
involvement in the Boer War (1899–1902). The Boers,
white settlers of mixed Dutch and Huguenot descent,
had created a republic, the Transvaal, in Bantu territory
north of the Britain’s Cape Colony in South Africa. The
British annexed the Transvaal in 1877, but a revolt in
1880–81 earned the Boers autonomy under the strong
leadership of President Paul Kruger. Tensions remained
high, however, especially after the discovery of vast de-
posits of gold in the Transvaal. An Anglo-Boer war
broke out in 1899. The Boers won initial victories, be-
sieged the British at Mafeking and Ladysmith, and
earned international sympathy, especially after the
British placed 120,000 Boer women and children in
concentration camps (the first use of this term) to limit
support for Boer guerrillas and twenty thousand died,
chiefly from disease. Massive British reinforcements un-
der General Kitchener reversed the course of the war in
1900, lifting the siege of Mafeking, capturing the Boer
capital of Pretoria, and again annexing the Transvaal.
The Boer leaders continued resistance in two years of
guerrilla fighting before accepting the British victory in
the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902.
The Boer War was the largest imperial war in
Africa, but it should not distract attention from the
wars of African resistance to imperialism. The British
annexation of the Transvaal, for example, led them into
the Zulu War of 1879, which showed that a poorly
equipped African army could defeat Europeans. The
Ashanti tribes of West Africa, in what is now Ghana,
resisted the British in four wars during the nineteenth
century, three of them fought between 1873 and 1896.
The Ashanti, too, won battles against the British. The
French likewise experienced defeats in fighting two Da-
homeyan wars (in today’s Benin); the Mandingo tribes
(in today’s Ivory Coast) resisted French occupation of
the interior for thirteen years (1885–98) making a great
hero of their chief, Samory. The Hereros (Bantu tribes
of southwest Africa) and the Hottentots withstood the
German army for nearly six years (1903–08). They did
not capitulate until the Germans had reduced the
Herero population from eighty thousand to fifteen
thousand. The Ethiopians threw out European invaders;
Emperor Menelik II resisted an Italian occupation in
1896, and his forces annihilated an Italian army in the
massive battle (more than 100,000 combatants) of
Adowa.
Europeans eventually won most imperial wars. The
advantage of modern armament is sufficient explana-
tion, as Kitchener demonstrated in the bloody engage-
ment on the plains of Omdurman. In the blunt words of
one poet, “Whatever happens we have got/The Maxim
Gun, and they have not.” Europeans also held a numeri-
cal advantage whenever they chose to use it; defeats
usually summoned reinforcements that Africans could
not match, as the Bantus, the Zulus, and the Boers
learned. The Italian army was outnumbered by eighty
thousand to twenty thousand at Adowa. If Italy had
wanted Ethiopia badly enough to obtain a four-to-one
advantage (the Italian army and militia of the 1890s
numbered nearly three million men), they, too, might
have won. Europeans also succeeded in imperial con-
quests because of biological and medical advantages.
Westerners had an advantage in nutrition that trans-
lated into larger, healthier armies, and invaders carrying
smallpox, whooping cough, or the measles sometimes
carried a biological weapon better than gunpowder.
Conversely, African diseases (especially malaria) had
long blocked European penetration of the continent.
When the French occupied Tunis in 1881, malaria took
twenty-five times as many soldiers as combat did. Euro-
peans knew that quinine, derived from the bark of the
cinchona tree, prevented malaria, and scientists isolated
the chemical in 1820, but not until the late nineteenth
century did they synthesize quinine in adequate quanti-
ties to provide an inexpensive daily dose for large
armies. Such scientific conquests made possible the mil-
itary conquest of Africa.Imperialism in Asia and the ‘Opening of China’
Europeans began their conquests in Asia in the early
sixteenth century. By the late nineteenth century (see
map 27.3), Britain dominated most of south Asia (to-
day’s India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh) and
Australasia (Australia and New Zealand). They had be-
gun to expand into Southeast Asia, annexing much of
Burma (now Myanmar) in 1853. This led them into
competition with the French who landed troops in An-
nam (Vietnam) in 1858. Most of the East Indies had
been claimed by the Dutch (the Dutch East Indies,