At the turn of the twentieth century, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois prophesied in “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind” (1897), as well as in “Address to the Nations of the World” (1900), and, most notably, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the color line – the relation of the “darker to the lighter races of men” – was the defining problem of the era. The onset of World War I gave these insights credence: the imperialist rivalry for the booty on offer from Africa not least drove the conflict, he argued in “The African Roots of War,” as Berlin sought its place in the sun and aimed to displace London in particular.