The White Man's Task in Tropical Africa

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IN the march of material progress in the nineteenth century probably the most outstanding event was the discovery of the use of steam as a motive power, and it is of interest to note how and why it led inevitably to the development of the tropics and their control by the white races. On the one hand the oceans ceased to be barriers passable only at the cost of long delays and great discomfort. The gateways through which trade gained access to the western half of the continent of Africa were no longer the Mediterranean ports and the camel caravan routes across the Sahara, but the ports on the West Coast, while the construction of the Suez Canal opened new and shorter sea routes to its eastern shores. On the other hand the rapid expansion of every branch of industry under the stimulus of power-driven machinery gave rise to a great demand for raw materials and for markets for the products manufactured from them. These demands were moreover increased by the phenomenal growth of population and the improvement in the standard of living of every class, which was the proximate result of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.

The supplies of many of these raw materials -- vegetable oils, fibres, cotton, hides and skins, rubber, various minerals, etc. -- were wholly insufficient, unless supplemented by the wealth of the tropics, while others were obtainable only from them. Nor was the demand for human food, and the minor luxuries which now for the first time were available to the working classes less insistent -- among others sugar, rice, maize, tea, coffee, cocoa, and edible oils.

Of the great white races of the earth, the United States of America alone was for a time self-supporting, but as her population increased she too became a large importer of tropical products, both vegetable and mineral, from Africa and other tropical countries; their volume and diversity, compiled from statistical tables, would probably be a revelation to the average reader. Twenty years ago the trade of the United States with the tropics was shown by Benjamin Kidd to amount to $346,000,000 (about half that of the United Kingdom) and he sums up with the conclusion that "the development of the tropics will beyond doubt be the permanent underlying fact of the twentieth century."