Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism

By Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher

Categories: History

Africa and the Victorians (1961), by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, rethinks Britain's late nineteenth-century scramble for Africa. They argue that expansion was driven less by commerce than by the strategic worries of the "official mind" in London, above all the security of the route to India through Egypt and the Suez Canal. Territorial claims, in their account, often came before economic development.

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• Fareed Zakaria: “[1:00:57] there was this wonderful book called Africa and the Victorians by Robinson and Gallagher in which they talk about how, why the British annexed Fashoda in the south of Sudan.”