However, the immediate result of Gladstone’s failing government was the return of the Conservatives, who were far less troubled than the Liberals by doubts regarding the use of power overseas.
In the early 1880s, to European imperialists, Africa became a factor in international politics, as can be noted when Lord Salisbury recorded: “When I left the Foreign Office in 1880, nobody thought about Africa. When I returned to it in 1885, the nations in Europe were almost quarrelling with each other as to the various portions of Africa which they could obtain.”
As Lord Salisbury records, not only …show more content…
The “scramble for Africa was the most drastic manifestation of the late-nineteenth century imperial expansion. While the occupation of Egypt in 1882 has been thought to have provoked the continental wide scramble for colonial territories, the majority of the evidence points to the reasons differing from region to region. In West Africa, French German and Dutch activity seem to have persuaded the British that their traders could be cut off from producers and markets unless the lay formal claims to the territory. These claims consisted of the Oil Rivers Protectorate (1885), which covered Southern Nigeria (the north would be added in 1900); the Northern Territories Protectorate (1886), a predecessor to the Gold Coast (Ghana); and the Sierra Leone Protectorate, incorporating the heartland to the earlier colonial settlement in