From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the global depression of the 1930s, the different regions of Africa experienced gradual but monumental change. The centuries-old transatlantic slave trade declined and practically disappeared by the late 1860s. In the early nineteenth century Islam expanded its influence in a long belt south of the Sahara, but Africa generally remained free of European political control. After about 1880 further Islamic expansion to the south stopped, but the pace of change accelerated as France and Britain led European nations in the “scramble for Africa.” Africa was divided and largely conquered by Europeans, and by 1900 the foreigners were consolidating their authoritarian empires.