So, unlike in New England, they didn’t bring their families with them, settle down and build institutions in the image of their home country. Rather, the Europeans who colonized Africa in the last decades of the nineteenth century created “extractive institutions” that used violence and the threat of violence to coerce the population into mining natural resources and transporting them to the coast, where they were shipped to Europe. The ultimate aim of this brutal endeavor was not to build a new and better society, but to enrich a small group of Europeans by draining wealth from the region.
It's interesting that disease prevented Europeans from colonizing Africa. The risk of dying was so high that settlement couldn't be achieved. With the realization they'd likely die within a year (or as the author states, 4 months) they needed a quick means of extracting resources. Therefore, they needed to be brutal in their methods and cut as many corners as possible. If the African interior had not been so dangerous, I wonder how different Africa would be today...
