Pakenham The Scramble For Africa

A Practical Guide to Working With Pakenham's The Scramble For Africa

If you're reading Patrick Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa cover to cover expecting a straightforward chronological narrative, you will be frustrated. The book is not structured like a typical history text. It moves through the colonial partition in thematic chunks rather than strict timeline order, which means certain periods get repeated treatment across different chapters. I learned this the hard way when I was trying to cross-reference dates for a personal research project on the Congo Free State. The index is decent but not comprehensive, and page references jump around depending on which edition you're using. The core value of this book is in its sheer breadth. Pakenham pulls from primary sources across multiple European languages — French, German, Portuguese, and English — and synthesizes them into a narrative that covers nearly every major power's activities on the continent between roughly 1870 and 1914. That's useful because most single-source histories of the period only address the British or French angle. The German colonies, the Italian failures, the Belgian atrocities, the Portuguese holdouts — they all get coverage here. One thing beginners miss is that the book's greatest strength is also its bottleneck. At over 900 pages in most editions, it functions better as a reference work than a beach read. The best approach is to pick a specific region or power you want to study, read the relevant chapters thoroughly, and use the rest as secondary consultation. Trying to absorb everything linearly will cause you to lose track of which treaty applied to which territory. I keep a rough map open next to me while reading — it prevents the confusion between the Berlin Conference outcomes and the later bilateral agreements that signed away entire regions without much regard for existing populations.

Another counter-intuitive point: Pakenham's treatment of King Leopold II's Congo Free State, while detailed, is not the most critical account available. If you're researching that subject specifically, supplement with Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost. Pakenham covers the facts but sometimes defers to the official Belgian records in ways that downplay the scale of violence. Hochschild is more forceful about it. For everything else — the Scramble itself, the diplomatic maneuvering, the military campaigns — Pakenham remains one of the best single-volume treatments. The practical downside nobody mentions is the dating inconsistency. Some events are dated using the Gregorian calendar, others using the Julian calendar, and Pakenham doesn't always flag the switch. If you're doing precise archival work, always double-check dates against the source material. I spent about two hours once reconciling a disagreement between two dates for the same battle simply because one was listed under the old calendar and the other under the new. A quick note at the front of the book about this would have saved me the trouble. If you're looking for a digital copy, the book is widely available through major retailers and library lending platforms. The hardcover and paperback editions vary in formatting quality — the ebook versions tend to have worse map placement, which matters because the maps are essential for following the territorial negotiations. I'd recommend getting the physical copy if you can, preferably the 1991 edition which has more complete cartography than the later reprints.

For academic citation, be aware that some of the primary source attributions Pakenham relies on have been disputed by later historians. The British Foreign Office papers he references are generally solid, but his use of certain German diplomatic archives is less rigorous. If you're writing a paper and plan to cite specific claims, trace them back to the original documents rather than relying on his secondary references alone. This applies especially to the sections covering the French and Italian colonial efforts, which tend to be thinner on primary sourcing. The index is alphabetical by topic but not by person, which makes tracking individual figures like Siegfried Marinus Marchand or George Curzon somewhat tedious. I usually just bookmark the pages where they appear rather than using the index for that purpose. It's a minor inconvenience but it adds up over a read that long.