Ok, basically what the title says: provide a PoD that allows for the completion of the railway for Cape Town to Cairo. Bonus points if you can list the effects of its completion.
AHC: Cape to Cairo Railway
- Thread starter Shtudmuffin
- Start date
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
This, essentially. PoD might be in the 1884 Berlin Conference, or shortly prior to that effect...
Sorry but I don't think the railway was realistic. It was faaaaaaaaaaar to expensive and practically pointless.
The Rule Brittania TL includes the construction of the railway, this is a TL in which WW1 ended in 1917 primarily due to a successful Dardanelles operation that meant Britain wasn't bankrupted by the War and remained the global hegemon. I think it's going to need something on that scale to make it happen as the cost would be staggering. Still it would be pretty cool to get off a boat in Alexandria and a few weeks later you're at the foot of Table Mountain! 
You've got a tailor made point of departure eight years before that. In 1876/77 the Sultan of Zanzibar was apparently getting a bit nervous about Khedivial Egypts expansionary moves south and east so he offered William McKinnon, a rather wealthy Scotsman that started off in shipping in the Indian Ocean region and expanded his holdings from there, a lease for the customs administration along the coast of his mainland territory and general concession/running of the interior on their own terms on the general theory that the Egyptians wouldn't be able to move against British interests and the money from a lease was better than nothing if they annexed it all. At the time this territory ran from Mozambique up to the southern part of Somalia and as far in-land as the Great Lakes and the eastern Congo although actual control away from the coastal regions was spotty at best if not non-existent. This appealed to McKinnon's and his partners in the prospective chartered company moral side by facilitating the continued suppression of the slave trade and also their ambition as they saw it as a money spinner once the area was properly run and improved. The deal however fell through when they approached the British government for approval and after a generally neutral/favourable reception on the understanding that the government wouldn't bail them out financially if things went wrong Lord Salisbury over at the Foreign Office started getting cold feet and quietly blocked the whole affair. In 1888 however after Carl Peters and his Society for German Colonisation had hoovered up treaties with the local chieftains for the Germans to declare a protectorate of what would become German East Africa the British finally woke up and issued McKinnon a charter for the Imperial British East Africa Company which went on to develop what would become Kenya and run Uganda.
So suppose Salisbury doesn't take against the whole affair and McKinnon and his associates get their royal charter, with the Imperial British East Africa Company or something similar now having claim on both Kenya and Tanzania? I figure the company could probably keep running for a while but eventually they were going to run out of money, unfortunately I don't think they'd be able to discover and exploit the gold and diamond fields in western Tanzania south ande east of Lake Victoria in time to stave it off. Whilst Kenya and Tanzania especially have quite respectable natural resources they're located away from the coasts in the interior so you'd have to set up the infrastructure to reach them.
So we now have the company going bust and the government looking at the rather annoying prospect of possibly having to pick up the pieces when a white knight enters stage left, one Mr. Cecil Rhodes. By this point Rhodes is both stinkingly rich and a major exponent of painting the map red whilst seeing the Colonial Office in London as a bunch of old women and bureaucrats that just got in the way of his running his own personal empire in Africa. He's already got form from endeavors like British South Africa Company and its activities so if he hears of a chance of buying up the rival company at a greatly reduced price, McKinnon and company seeing the writing on the wall and deciding selling out for a reduced price beats bankruptcy, he'd jump in with both feet - especially since if the BSAC goes as planned it gives him most of the land needed for his grand vision of a Cape to Cairo railway.
Ya. Going from Cape to Cairo by rail would be faster than shipping but far more expensive. I don't see what use it would really be, and it would be very expensive. A transcontinental railway (across North America, or across the width of Africa) would make a lot of sense. Along the length? Not so much.
It would make trade between different areas of inland Africa easier and cheaper. STRATFOR analysis made the point that trade between different African countries is crippled by the topography and lack of rivers equivalent to the Rhine, Danube, Ohio-Mississippi systems with their barge transportation capacity. Shipping is ok between different places on the coast but making inland trade easier would revolutionise the inland areas.
Ok, so yes I am repeating someone else's argument, and yes they are a very geopolitically oriented site but it is worth mentioning. The railroad would be done as part of the colonialists long term development plans, assuming they expected to be in control forever. Industries would develop that were not possible otherwise and the British would enjoy being in control of the transport system that makes it possible, a monopoly system with the power that implies.
We wouldn't want to create a situation like present day China, where the coastal areas are much wealthier than the inland for the same sort of reasons. Threre are a lot of tensions with that that are not safe or healthy for the society.
Except that the RR wouldn't be very good at that. What you need is rail that runs from the interior to the coast (where stuff can be shipped in and out) rather than from Cairo to Cape Town. Sure, shipping from *Zambia to the coast would be easier north or east (through Tanganyika, say) than all the way south to South Africa. But what you really need is a series of regional RR nets rather than one great linear RR.
What if they were Colonial independant inland RR? They could develop the heart of the colony, then have a line that goes N-S to connect with the neighbouring clony. An indirect Cape to Cairo. It would be more time consuming, and probably wouldn't be fully connected, until near 20thC, but wouldn't have the same cost constraints.
An idea, and would be curious to see how it could happen... if only history was like a game of Civiilzation, Africa is my prefered continent to hole up in.
An idea, and would be curious to see how it could happen... if only history was like a game of Civiilzation, Africa is my prefered continent to hole up in.
Yes, but if you have one great linear railway as a big stupid prestige thing, it will presumably be a lot easier for someone (say) in the interior of Kenya to push for a short railway to link to the Cape-Cairo. If that then leads to a benefit, others will do the same, etc.