Africa
Continent subject to European partition and post-war decolonization
Also known as: Africa, African
The continent subject to European partition in the late nineteenth century and to decolonization after 1945 — a major secondary theatre throughout T&H (T&H 121).
Quigley's Framing
Quigley treats sub-Saharan Africa as, civilizationally, a separate case from the Mediterranean basin and the Near East: a zone whose pre-colonial state forms were largely tribal or proto-imperial and which entered the modern world system as the object rather than the subject of great-power competition. The late-nineteenth-century 'Scramble for Africa' is read as the imperial system's terminal expansionary phase — territorial appropriation in pursuit of raw materials and prestige rather than of integration into the global economy.
Strategic Role
In the twentieth century Africa is the principal theatre of decolonization. T&H tracks the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the wartime North African campaigns, the post-war withdrawal of the British, French, and Belgian empires, and the emergence of a tier of post-colonial states whose boundaries followed colonial rather than ethnic-civilizational lines. Quigley reads the resulting political instability as a predictable structural cost of the decolonization timeline — independence granted before viable state apparatuses had been built — and as a recurring vector for Cold War proxy conflict.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 121 Quigley
The Scramble for Africa was the imperial system's terminal expansionary phase — territorial appropriation rather than integration.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1245 Quigley
African independence was granted before viable state apparatuses had been built, generating a permanent structural source of instability.