Empire, Praieira revolt, Revolution in Luxembourg, Moldavian Revolution, Wallachian Revolution, Chartism, and the Young Ireland rebellion. Great power competition Inspired by the rebellions in the 1820s and 1830s against the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, the Italian unification process was precipitated by the revolutions of 1848. It reached completion in 1871, when the Papal States were captured and Rome was officially designated the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck, brought together almost all the German states (excluding the Austrian Empire, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein) into a new German Empire. Bismarck's new empire became the most powerful state in Continental Europe until 1914. Meanwhile, Britain had entered an era of "splendid isolation", avoiding entanglements that had led it into the Crimean War in 1854–1856. It concentrated on internal industrial development and political reform, and building up its great international holdings, the British Empire, while maintaining by far the world's strongest Navy to protect its island home and its many overseas possessions. The Berlin Conference of 1884, which regulated European colonization and trade in Africa, is usually accepted as the beginning of the Scramble for Africa. In the last quarter of the 19th century, there were considerable political rivalries among the empires of the European continent, leading to the African continent being partitioned without wars between European nations. As late as the 1870s, Europeans controlled approximately 10% of the African continent, with all their territories located near the coasts. The most important holdings were Angola and Mozambique, held by Portugal; the Cape Colony, held by Great Britain; and Algeria, held by France. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent of European control, with the latter having strong connections to the United States. In the Spanish–American War of 1898, the United States intervened in the Cuban War of Independence, leading it to emerge as the predominant power in the Caribbean region, and resulting in U.S. acquisition of Spain's Pacific possessions. It also led to United States involvement in the Philippine Revolution and later to the Philippine–American War. The Banana Wars were a series of conflicts that consisted of military occupation, police action, and intervention by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean following the end of the Spanish–American War in 1898, after which the United States proceeded to conduct military interventions in Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the