No Atlantic Slave Trade

For whatever reason, early Portuguese experiments in importing slave labour to the Americas from West Africa are a failure. Individuals may survive and often thrive, rising in social and economic status, but so many die or become debilitated on the voyage or shortly afterwards that within a generation or so it is a commonly accepted fact that using Africans for field labour makes less economic sense than either indentured or convict Europeans or natives who have been 'contracted' by whatever means.

Without that extra labour, what are the effects on the colonisation of the Americas and the development of West Africa?

If attempts at importing west African slaves fail, I think the next step would be for colonizers to look for other old world sources of slaves. Enslaving new world natives never really worked out otl due to disease, so diseases resistant slaves from the old world are necessary. I also don't think there would be enough European indentured servants to meet long-term demand. I think the possibilities are:

(1) a relaxation on the prohibition to enslaving other Christians so that it only applies to Catholics. Protestants would be enslaved in large numbers and shipped to the Americas, although I think in this situation many of them would choose to convert beforw being shipped across the altlantic.

(2) attempts to enslave non-christian Caucasians from the ottoman empire and the middle east. This would likely lead to ongoing conflicts in the Mediterranean between christian and Muslim powers and would prevent anything like otl's franco-ottoman alliance.

(3) voyages further afield in Africa to aviable "higher quality" slaves. Maybe from southern Africa???

The fourth option is that colonizers don't find a better source of labour and plantation agriculture never gets off the ground in the new world. I think in this case you'd see new world settlement proceed at a much slower rate as fewer colonies would be economically viable, although you'd still see smaller settlements for fur trade, fishing, wood harvesting, military outposts, etc

Maybe Spain imports Filipinos?

How on earth do you get black workers to be a failure? Them failing to thrive in the New World seems a touch ASB, or requiring massive evolutionary changes. Or something.

Lowering the chances of ANYONE surviving a crossing of the Atlantic (slowing ship building tech, say) might prevent the TransAtlantic slave trade - but it likely also prevents (much) European colonization.

Anyway, a PoD far enough back to prevent effective ocean going ships is going to massively change European (and world) history.

So... Not going to happen unless the world is a very different place.

Sugarcane grows in West Africa. What if some kingdoms decided to try exploiting it themselves on a large scale?

Lycaon pictus said:

Sugarcane grows in West Africa. What if some kingdoms decided to try exploiting it themselves on a large scale?

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I wrote about that once with a surviving Songhai Empire. The growing sugar industry there made them less inclined to export slaves. As a result, European colonies went back to relying on indentured servants.

telynk said:

(1) a relaxation on the prohibition to enslaving other Christians so that it only applies to Catholics. Protestants would be enslaved in large numbers and shipped to the Americas, although I think in this situation many of them would choose to convert beforw being shipped across the altlantic.

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How about enslaving Slavic and Greek schismatics? OTL, in 1500s Cuba, there were Greek slaves.

And could convicts be sent there, ad intentured servants?

The Kiat said:

I wrote about that once with a surviving Songhai Empire. The growing sugar industry there made them less inclined to export slaves. As a result, European colonies went back to relying on indentured servants.

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Interesting. Was sugar cane grown at this period in OTL West Africa? The problem I see is that wind and currents mean that once maritime trade is established between Europe and West Africa, it's almost inevitable that South America will be discovered. That means that an (at least) triangular trade is desirable, and OTL slaves are the obvious choice for the Africa-Americas leg - so cheap that the Portuguese in Brazil didn't start hunting native slaves for another hundred years. I don't see those economics being matched by importing slaves from elsewhere.
Once the plantation system gets going there will be a massive demand for labour from somewhere because both sugar and tobacco are highly addictive. This is the start of the international drugs trade and either you get extensive native slave hunting, or a lot of very unhappy European indentured labourers, convicts and POWs.

Or, sugar remains a luxury in Europe and tobacco a mere curiosity, and the whole of North America looks a lot more like either Mexico or Canada.

In either case, absent slaves, what if anything will be imported from West Africa?

Judging from the names "Gold Coast" and "Ivory Coast", I would venture to say that those can be imported from West Africa. I know that they have gold, but for all I know the name Ivory Coast could be a misnomer, like Greenland... Otherwise, they have a lot of salt and good sugar/cotton growing regions.

Palm oil could be a major export from Africa to Europe, particularly a version of Africa where the population is much higher and the economy is geared more towards agriculture than the export of slaves.

The problem with using Europeans as slaves in tropical climates is the climate is literally hazardous to the health of Europeans. If you can somehow butterfly away the introduction of Malaria and Yellow Fever you might be able to even the scores somewhat, but that seems unlikely, given they were endemic not only in Africa, but in Europe at the time.

The next best source of labor to Africa for New World plantations were other tropical countries with similar epidemic diseases - India and Southeast Asia. That said, the transportation would by definition be much more expensive. There's a reason the use of Indian contract labor on British plantations didn't take off until the late 19th century.

and, exported at least later on IOTL, palm oil.

Oh, and Kola nuts of course...

Simreeve said:

Oh, and Kola nuts of course...

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And an introduction of coca from the Andes to the highland parts of Cameroon, East Africa and Madagascar could merge with that in interesting ways

English settlement of New england & later British Canada went on apace without plantation agriculture, or a slave economy. I'd think to look at that model for at least some settlement elsewhere.

eschaton said:

The problem with using Europeans as slaves in tropical climates is the climate is literally hazardous to the health of Europeans. If you can somehow butterfly away the introduction of Malaria and Yellow Fever you might be able to even the scores somewhat, but that seems unlikely, given they were endemic not only in Africa, but in Europe at the time.

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Well.... if you butterfly away the African slaves, you butterfly away the African diseases. Yellow Fever and Malaria are both from the Old World (mostly Africa, although enough of Europe had Malaria that THAT would come over at some point).

Carl Schwamberger said:

English settlement of New england & later British Canada went on apace without plantation agriculture, or a slave economy. I'd think to look at that model for at least some settlement elsewhere.

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Yeah, I think there would be more focus on the northern regions of North America, while the Spanish colonies would still be profitable because of the mining and high population. In contrast, the Caribbean, the southernmost of Britain's mainland colonies, and Brazil would be sparsely settled and unimportant. A big improvement for the Native Americans living there. Slavery was so important to the Caribbean plantations that they were described as "useless" without having access to a slave-trading port in west Africa.

There may be some limited plantations tried with convicts, but generally I think the whole region would just be underdeveloped and of little profit. In North America attention would concentrated entirely on the fur trade. And the northern mainland colonies would be much less prosperous due to no longer being a link in European-North American-Caribbean trade. They'd still expand regardless due to the land availability on the same pattern that New England initially expanded, but would be almost entirely agricultural in nature. A good place to emigrate to, but not internationally profitable.

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

Well.... if you butterfly away the African slaves, you butterfly away the African diseases. Yellow Fever and Malaria are both from the Old World (mostly Africa, although enough of Europe had Malaria that THAT would come over at some point).

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Malaria is inevitable and OTL really messed up the Native Americans, although preventing African slavery will keep American malaria less diverse (and therefore less lethal).

Of course, malaria strains from Europe killed Europeans pretty well, so without any slave trade much of the Americas would be very sparsely populated barring some other change. It's really the rub of this challenge: there are many parts of the Americas that are going to be inimical to a large white population, so what will be done to exploit these areas if not African slavery?

twovultures said:

Malaria is inevitable and OTL really messed up the Native Americans, although preventing African slavery will keep American malaria less diverse (and therefore less lethal).

Of course, malaria strains from Europe killed Europeans pretty well, so without any slave trade much of the Americas would be very sparsely populated barring some other change. It's really the rub of this challenge: there are many parts of the Americas that are going to be inimical to a large white population, so what will be done to exploit these areas if not African slavery?

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Yeah, you can speculate on what the two continents would be like without African slavery, but coming up with a plausible explanation for why it doesn't happen is a lot harder.

Hmm, but what if attitudes towards slavery were radically different, and Africans were imported as indentured servants and poorly paid laborers instead, like Indians would be in Guyana centuries later? Now that I think about it, that seems more likely than the regions in question just being undeveloped backwaters for several hundred years. Though I would expect there to be less emphasis on sugarcane, since the way it was grown and harvested created massive death tolls requiring a steady importation of slaves.

Sucrose said:

Hmm, but what if attitudes towards slavery were radically different, and Africans were imported as indentured servants and poorly paid laborers instead, like Indians would be in Guyana centuries later? Now that I think about it, that seems more likely than the regions in question just being undeveloped backwaters for several hundred years. Though I would expect there to be less emphasis on sugarcane, since the way it was grown and harvested created massive death tolls requiring a steady importation of slaves.

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You would end up with far more of African culture surviving in the New World. Likely many groups of indentured servants would be "ethnically streamed" to some degree, where people from one tribe in Africa would be recruited to travel to one plantation. As a result, African languages would jump to the New World fairly intact in places. Elsewhere you'd have a creole language develop because the labor pool would be so diverse that the European tongue of the plantation owners would be the only common bond, but there would likely be more African influence because there wouldn't be as much force behind the immediate expunging of African languages as there was IOTL.

I do think that Europeans would for the most part ask for their indentured servants to be at least nominally Christian during this time period. This would mean relatively little except there would not be a recruitment of laborers from Senegal and similar areas which had already become strongly Islamic.

New Englanders would be a force to be reckoned with. Without extreme economic opportunity, New England might encompass all of America like it was always meant to.
I do agree with those earlier comments that the only way to make the trade unprofitable would be to stop the Africans from selling.