What was the significance of the 1884 Berlin Conference? A. European countries subdivided Africa for colonial rule. B. European countries established a timeline for granting independence to African colonies. C. Germany signed a treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War. D. England and Germany allied to usurp African territory that was held by France and the Netherlands.

The Berlin Conference was an international conference convened on November 15, 1884 in Berlin to discuss the division of Africa between the European powers in the context of a fierce fight for Africa. It lasted until February 26, 1885.

The initiator of the convocation of the conference was the Portuguese government, which presented to the attention of other colonial powers their plans to unify their possessions in Angola and Mozambique into a single colony. The plans of the Portuguese were blocked by Great Britain, which regarded all of Africa south of the equator as its own sphere of interests.

France and Germany hoped to raise at the conference the problem of demarcation of spheres of influence in the Sahara. The main issue, however, was the status of the Congo Free State, which served as a screen for Belgian colonial expansion in the Congo Basin, which had recently been explored by pioneers such as Henry Morton Stanley and Pierre de Brazza. The activity of the Belgians and the French in the Congo basin led to the squeezing of the Portuguese from the region, who for several centuries collaborated with the Congolese rulers.

The general act adopted by the conference at the request of Chancellor Bismarck, who presided over it, not only recognized the legitimacy of the colonial seizures, but also for the first time fixed in writing the duties of the powers imposed on them by the presence of spheres of influence. In particular, the principle of effective occupation was proclaimed, urging countries to extract raw materials in their colonies and put them into circulation, and if they were unable to independently exploit the wealth of the colony, to allow other powers and their cartels to operate on its territory.

Having spurred the rivalry of the imperialist powers in Africa, the principle of effective occupation proclaimed by the conference led to an unprecedented intensification of the colonization of the continent. Already after 10 years, in 1895, Liberia and Ethiopia remained the only sovereign states in sub-Saharan Africa.