Answer:
Mark as brainliest
Explanation:
symbolic presence in international legal accounts of the 19th century, but for historians of the era its importance has often been doubted. This article seeks to re-interpret the place of the Berlin General Act in late 19th-century history, suggesting that the divergence of views has arisen largely as a consequence of an inattentiveness to the place of systemic logics in legal regimes of this kind.
Issue Section:
Articles
INTRODUCTION
The Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885 has assumed a canonical place in historical accounts of late 19th-century imperialism 1 and this is no less true of the accounts provided by legal scholars seeking to trace the colonial origins of contemporary international law. 2 The overt purpose of the Conference was to ‘manage’ the ongoing process of colonisation in Africa (the ‘Scramble’ as it was dubbed by a Times columnist) so as to avoid the outbreak of armed conflict between rival colonial powers. Its outcome was the conclusion of a General Act 3 ratified by all major colonial powers including the US. 4 Among other things, the General Act set out the conditions under which territory might be acquired on the coast of Africa; it internationalised two rivers (the Congo and the Niger); it orchestrated a new campaign to abolish the overland trade in slaves; and it declared as ‘neutral’ a vast swathe of Central Africa delimited as the ‘conventional basin of the Congo’. A side event was the recognition given to King Leopold’s fledgling Congo Free State that had somewhat mysteriously emerged out of the scientific and philanthropic activities of the Association internationale du Congo . 5
If for lawyers and historians the facts of the Conference are taken as a common starting point, this has not prevented widely divergent interpretations of its significance from emerging. On one side, one may find an array of international lawyers, from John Westlake 6 in the 19th century to Tony Anghie 7 in the 21 st century, affirming the importance of the Conference and its General Act for having created a legal and political framework for the subsequent partition of Africa. 8 For Anghie, Berlin ‘transformed Africa into a conceptual terra nullius ’, silencing native resistance through the subordination of their claims to sovereignty, and providing, in the process, an effective ideology of colonial rule. It was a conference, he argues, ‘which determined in important ways the future of the continent and which continues to have a profound influence on the politics of contemporary Africa’. 9
