African colonisation was significantly different from all other forms of European invasion. At the end of the 19th century, the continent was divided up into multiple relatively small nation-states. As a result, each state has found the processes of moving towards industrialisation difficult. The story of the colonisation of the continent is how this situation came about.

The so-called National Charter companies were innovative at the time. They were financed from private sources, allowed to arm themselves for protection, and they set out to control the trade they could muster. The East India companies avoided the Ottomans, sailed around the Cape to India, and began to set up local agreements and build forts. Each of the new European companies rapidly discovered that the Indian and Chinese governments did not want to obtain what Europe had to offer, rather they felt themselves to be self-sufficient.

Racial chattel slavery, as practised in the North and South Americas over four centuries, represented bondage not seen before at new levels of human inferiority and violence. European chattel slavery required two elements which on the whole was not present in earlier forms of slavery; private ownership and racism. Only under the ideology of European racism could chattel slavery exist in the extreme from that it took. Chattel slavery was the ownership of one person by another as a form of property; it became prerequisite for plantation settlement for sugar and coffee - the beginnings of industrial capitalism.