Sub-Saharan Africa in the years before the “Scramble” was a place about which Europeans knew comparatively little. While centuries of European and Arab slave-trading left both West and East coasts dotted with slaving stations, Europeans seldom ventured far inland from the coasts in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, principally because they lacked detailed maps of the interior and feared the threat posed by tropical diseases. These two conditions of African exploration would remain largely unchanged until the nineteenth century. The African interior (and especially the Congo watershed, covered as it was with forbidding jungle punctured here and there by majestic rivers) would remain largely uncharted until the invention of the steamboat made upriver travel practical. And the best-known tropical disease — malaria — would remain an unmasterable threat until quinine came into widespread use during the Victorian age. For this reason, the steamboat and quinine were probably the two items of material culture most responsible for making the nineteenth-century European exploration and exploitation of the African continent possible.

Britain's role in Sub-Saharan Africa in the early nineteenth century was shaped by its position as the world's most important sea power.