Maxim Force

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World • Season 1 • Episode 5

About this episode

The 'Scramble for Africa' by competing European nations during the last years of Queen Victoria's reign is the compelling tale of this programme. We learn how 10,000 independent African kingdoms became 40 European colonies over the course of two decades, in a drastic redrawing of the map. Indeed, by 1900 Britain owned half of Africa. No longer dominated by moral and religious concerns, this new era was about power and the economy as the battle for raw materials progressed. Power was in the hands of bankers and industrialists such as Rothschild and Cecil Rhodes, as illustrated by their use of the new Maxim guns to keep any opponents in check. By this stage it was businessmen doing the colonising and not governments.