Europe's expansion overseas had two faces. During the first phase, between 1500 and 1850, the impact of that expansion was limited as Europeans were unable to penetrate Asia and Africa, while their incursions into the New World might have been far more extensive but were still mainly confined to areas along the coast. All that changed after the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Europeans conquered large parts of Asia and virtually all of Africa, in addition to marginalising the areas in the hands of the Amerindians in the New World. The reasons for this change are not difficult to identify: quinine, steam engines, machine guns, increased buying power and the industrialisation in the West.

Quinine enabled the Europeans to finally conquer the tropical parts of Asia and Africa that had been impenetrable for centuries because of the high mortality among the European explorers without immunity against malaria. The steam engine enabled gun boats to sail up rivers that had been impossible to navigate before. ‘Whatever happens we have got the Maxim (= machine) gun and they have not’ as Hilaire Belloc aptly pointed out in explaining the sudden military superiority of the Europeans. Finally, the growing prosperity and industrialisation in the West explain why the colonisers expected to turn the newly conquered areas into suppliers of precious metals and tropical cash crops as well as into important outlets for European industrial goods.

These two distinct phases in the expansion of Europe are nicely reflected in the two books under review. Collecting across Cultures contains a number of contributions regarding the European fascination for the overseas world during the early years of overseas reconnaissance and conquest. The volume contains 14 essays and an introduction with topics ranging from collecting parasols and Aztec regalia to a discussion of the roots of antiquarianism comparing ancient Europe and native America, of the images of Capuchin missionaries of Central Africa and of the fascination of Europeans for visiting Native Americans.

Unfortunately, there is no contribution on Africans in early modern Europe, be it as visitors, temporary migrants or – more common – as servants and slaves. Instead, one of the contributions discusses the slave inventories of plantations in the British Caribbean. True, in a roundabout way the plantation owners in the West Indies could also be typified as collectors, but with a completely different meaning. Buying slaves for the capitalist plantations in the West Indies was a strictly economic activity governed by the drive to maximize profits. The other essays in this volume all use the words ‘collector’ and ‘collecting’ in the usual way, i.e. as a cultural, didactic and sometimes propagandistic phenomenon.

The second book under review, The Killer Trail, is a detailed account of a military expedition during the apogee of the ‘scramble’, that nervous, feverish, and competitive crusade of Britain, France, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Germany between 1870 and 1914 to conquer as much of Africa as possible. During this period, the colonial policies of the Belgian king Leopold II in the Congo and of the Germans in Namibia have earned some notoriety. In the Congo, those Africans refusing to perform forced labour as a tax in kind were severely punished by cutting off their hands; the images of those mutilated Africans found their way to the West and aroused widespread indignation. The same is true for the gruesome suppression of the Herero rebellion in Namibia, amounting to a virtual policy of genocide by the German colonial government in what was then called Deutsch Südwest Afrika. Later, the use of poisonous gas by the Italians under Mussolini during the conquest of Ethiopia in the years 1935–37 is also well known. These crimes against humanity seem to suggest that in creating their African empires the imperial newcomers hardly paid attention to Western values, in contrast to the established colonial powers that were Britain and France.

The Killer Trail belies this hypothesis. The book tells the story of a French expedition undertaken in 1898–99 in an attempt to delineate the French sphere of influence in the Sudan. While the British imperial drive in Africa was summed up by the words ‘from the Cape to Cairo’, the French had their eyes on an African empire that would stretch from the West to the East. These divergent ambitions clashed, but in 1898 Paris and London decided to stay out of one another's way and signed a convention to that effect. Right after the agreement was signed, Paris ordered three military expeditions to trek to Lake Chad. The author tells the story of one of these in all of its shocking detail.

No doubt the two leaders of the expedition, Captain Voulet and Lieutenant Chanoine, were faced by innumerable difficulties. They headed a force mainly consisting of African soldiers, while the bulk of the train was made up by carriers and women, all in all amounting to around 1500 persons. Over time that number increased even more as many women from villages pillaged on the way were taken along as slaves. As was usual for such expeditions at the time, the soldiers and their followers had to live off the land. Africans who refused to provide food and water (30,000 litres a day!) were summarily shot and their villages burnt. Obviously, the men in charge felt that none of this excessive violence would ever become known back home. However, one of the French officers had fallen out with his superiors and wrote about the many atrocities to his fiancée in France, who in turn showed these letters to the deputé of her district, who in turn alerted the minister for the Colonies. A scandal erupted and Voulet and Chanoine were relieved from their command. The former decided to sever all ties with France and to use his African troops in order to establish his own personal republic near Lake Chad, but in the end his soldiers mutinied and he was murdered.

The book clearly confirms that during the scramble for African colonies the European military had a very low opinion of the Africans and their societies. That is why anti-colonialists, including those in France and Great Britain, warned against the conquest of African territories as it would corrupt the men on the spot and their Western values. Unfortunately, no comparison is made to European conquest in Asia. Were the Western administrators and military more impressed by Indian, Indonesian and Indo-Chinese civilisations and thus less inclined to view Asians as an aberration of the human species, not worthy to be treated with a minimum of decency?