By Okoi Obono-Obla
A lot of things that have happened in every nook and cranny of the world will never be known or even reported. Such and such events happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, only to lapse into the anonymity and labyrinth of history. This world is deep and mysterious.
We often view the scramble for colonies through the narrow lens of Africa. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, where European powers sat to carve up the African continent, has come to symbolize European imperialism. But Africa was not the only place where European powers scrambled to get a slice of the cake.
They did the same in what is today the United States of America. Long before the United States became an independent nation, its territory was a theatre of intense imperial competition.
France claimed vast swathes from eastern Canada down through the Great Lakes to Louisiana. Spain held Florida, Texas, California and much of the Southwest. England, whose thirteen colonies would eventually become the United States, was the dominant power on the eastern seaboard. The Netherlands established New Netherland, with its capital New Amsterdam, now New York. Sweden established New Sweden in 1638 along the Delaware River, in parts of present-day Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Even Denmark was part of this story, through the Danish West Indies – now the U.S. Virgin Islands – which it held until the United States purchased them in 1917.
It is often mistakenly said that Finland also colonized America. What happened was that Finns arrived as settlers in New Sweden, but at that time Finland was not an independent country; it was part of the Kingdom of Sweden.
Conclusion:
History is far wider than the parts we were taught. The scramble for Africa was only one chapter of a much longer and global scramble for wealth, territory and influence. Much of that larger story, like countless other human events, remains hidden in the labyrinth of time, reminding us that what we know is only a fraction of what has been.
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