Of course I was talking about the mad scramble that resulted in everything being divvied up in nice straight lines and used as goods to be won in international dick-waving contests. The Americas were mostly spared that idiocy.
No they weren't. Perhaps you never heard of New Sweden, or New Netherlands, or how many flags have flown over the Gulf Coast States, or of the arguments between the 13 British Colonies/States over just what their royal charters covered and who really owned what. As I said, it was only a shift in Great Power status combined with what is pretty much a quirk of history that prevented North America from ending up just as patchwork as Africa. That effect would have been redoubled without the massive deaths and social collapses from disease that preceded the British colonization by a mere 100 years due to the arrival of the Spanish.
Meanwhile where there wasn't the U.S. or Canada or Spain or Portugal, namely the Caribbean, there was and is a massive patchwork of island statelets, with representation from France, the Netherlands and Denmark on top of the British, Americans, and Spanish, with a succession of waves of colonization and transfer of ownership. There are even two islands that are partitioned!
Compared to that, Africa underwent virtually no transfers of colonial territory due to European intra-murals.
The Americas proper pretty soon consolidated to British influence in the north (then independence came in), and Spanish/Portuguese in the South. In largely contiguous blocks.
Only as gross outlines on a map.
On the ground, functionally, they were just as much as patchwork. I went over the U.S. above, for the counterpart to that look at how the Spanish bloc in Central and South America fractured on independence. While they were administered as a few large masses they were never so politically, and that could easily have been the fate of the U.S. and Canada.
The only truly exception to that is Portuguese Brazil, which can claim a number of special cases.
Africa became a total mess between every European power wandering in. British Empire, France, Germany once it formed, Belgium, the Netherlands... all splitting things in boxes.
Not really. You are looking at a current map. Look at a map of the full colonial era, say this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa#/media/File:Colonial_Africa_1913_map.svgLet's see . . .
An almost solid French bloc from the west to the center plus Madagascar.
A British block in the east that barely misses being solid with a few random slices of the French sector.
Two notable Portuguese possessions (with a few smaller ones barely visible).
A few scattered Spanish bits (most of which are barely visible as well).
And finally the Germans filling in most of the empty spaces with the Belgians getting the last available chunk that nobody else thought would ever be profitable.
Oh, and then what the Italians grabbed at the last minute, including a large chunk given to them by the British.
By the by, where exactly are all the boxes and straight lines in that? I see zero boxes and maybe a dozen straight lines.
That didn't have the ethnic consequences that the Americas did.
I'd offer to list some of the ethnic wars that have devastated Africa since the 1950s and decolonization, and list some of the ethnic groups that are split between countries due to random borders, but the lists are so long I'm afraid any sampling wouldn't do them justice.
The ethnic consequences in Africa have been several orders of magnitude more significant than the ethnic consequences in the Americas. I'm stunned anyone would even suggest otherwise.
