Your challenge is simple: with any POD after the establishment of Liberia in 1847, make it considerably more successful than it was IOTL.
AHC: Wank Liberia
- Thread starter Mort the Reaper
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Deleted member 109224
Well, you'd need more people deported there for one.
If Virginia had engaged in manumission in the 1830s, as was proposed and voted upon in the legislature, the plan was that the state would buy all the slaves up and send them to Liberia (perhaps keeping them in a period of indenture beforehand so they could in effect pay for their trip over... not nice). The state had 550,000 black people in 1860, of which 89% were enslaved. More Americo-Liberians means more more opportunity (and pressure) to expand. Down the line, Virginia is followed up by Delaware and Maryland nixing slavery in the same fashion (deportation).
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BUT, you said to use a post-1847 PoD so the above would be cheating, I imagine.
The mid-to-late 19th century GOP (Seward, Blaine, Grant sort of) was pretty into expansion. Have somebody decide that the US should reassert its protection over Liberia - complete with defending Liberia's (kind of self-proclaimed) broader boundaries. The US could perhaps see advantage in having a lease on the port of Monrovia. Perhaps the US accepts the invite to the Berlin Conference that it ignored OTL and is assigned the mouth of the Congo (the US, being pretty neutral, is seen as an ideal alternative to Belgium). Later on the US nabs Rio Muni, Bioko, and Anobon from Spain. Liberia becomes an important midway point between America's Central African possessions and the US mainland... A place on the continent where English is widely spoken, the architecture and laws are recognizably American, and American businesses set up shop routinely. The US invests in dealing with issues of sanitation and malaria and other disease in the city of Monrovia.
Liberia, meanwhile, demands that a sizable portion of American soldiers present in the country be black. The Freedman's Zion ought not be bossed around by white colonizers.
As Jim Crow laws get worse, a sizable minority of Black Americans migrate to Liberia.
Liberia kind of had a Manifest Destiny notion of itself and wanted to expand north to the Niger River. Also, the westernmost portion of today's Ivory Coast was claimed by Liberia. Let's say the US/Liberia cut a deal to establish the Wassolou Empire as an American-Liberian joint protectorate. Over time Wassolou gets integrated into Liberia. Meanwhile France gets into a war with Britain over colonies and whatnot and decides to cut its losses in Ivory Coast before the British can seize the colony - Liberia (with American support) purchases Ivory Coast from France.
Liberia and the American African Possessions.
Solidified early inland Mande support creating a abrahamic coalition of Americos and Mande peoples, early industrialization in the form of machine weaving to create a West African centered market for textiles to undermine European traders along with the formation of beads, manillas and imitation western goods.
Surpress the Kpelle, assimilate the Kru, link the Eurafricans from Senegal to Nigeria (Goree to the Brazilians of Lagos) and the Krios of Sierra Leone to a more dramatic degree than Otl undermining the colonial governments that disrupted inter-regional trade.
Surpress the Kpelle, assimilate the Kru, link the Eurafricans from Senegal to Nigeria (Goree to the Brazilians of Lagos) and the Krios of Sierra Leone to a more dramatic degree than Otl undermining the colonial governments that disrupted inter-regional trade.
Interestingly, that is very similar to the powerhouse Liberia that I have planned for a TL I'm working on.
If you go to Fula Country you'll have to deal with Jihads that destroyed a number of local kingdoms and would quickly turn on Americos.
I'm not talking about the Malinka, I'm talking about the Imamate of Fouta Jallon
How many people could an ATL Liberia of that size support and in terms of percentage, what is the largest share of this ATL population that could feasibly be made up of Liberian Americans / Americo-Liberians?
....dude the Imamate was the primary source of inland slave raiding in the region
Their expansion and sphere of power was beyond the boundaries of the map and the Jihads that had it arise would continue to do so in the face of Infidel colonization and territorial expansion.
Beyond that their territory of Fouta Jallon does fall within the boundaries of your map.
Feels like a bit of an unnecessary handicap that the POD can't be when or slightly before settlement starts in 1822, since one of a more-successful Liberia's conditions would likely have to be that someone manages to better-sell the whole concept to Black Americans.
(How exactly one would go about doing this, I'm not sure. It's hard to envisage a scenario where "hey, y'all ought to go back to Africa" would be an idea well-received from substantially larger numbers of Black Americans than those who went for it OTL; to the vast majority it was an unmitigated insult. But maybe having an extraordinarily charismatic or famous Black co-signee could have gotten more people over this hurdle.)
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Outside of the original Thirteen Colonies, no recognizable version of the United States will ever willingly annex a majority-nonwhite country as an actual State. Maybe a nonvoting Territory like Puerto Rico, but the benefits to Liberia's economy out of that would be questionable; that kind of arrangement was usually used to better-enrich the rest of the country at the territory's expense. (Added to which, not being an independent country would make it effectively no longer Liberia, really. Certainly not a Liberia "wank.")
The maximum size is rather difficult to determine, as it depends on the time as well as on the definition of support in this context. It could support a population at a subsistence level of hundreds millions eventually, but that would inevitably lead to an unstable, chaotic place with a largely devastated ecology, that would hardly ever rise to become an economic or cultural powerhouse. For a successful society, much slower growth rates and an economic equilisation among the various strata would be necessary; under such circumstances, the population of Liberia could be somewhere between ~30 million and ~60 million people by ATL today.
About the charismatic leader to establish this...
I recently got into studying Marcus Garvey and contrary to what I believed, his message was not really as well received by black Americans as much as I had believed.
It seems that his conception of race relations in America saw that the Black Americans were the most race-conscious, which was useful for the pro-black politics he was interested, but I don't think he got that this was an also a U.S centered identity forged here to better their condition as Fellow Americans. Leaving would be a sign of defeat since their blood, bones, and heritage was forged on this soil. They believe in the American dream and promise that others had the opportunity to achieve. It didn't matter that it was an uphill battle.
Garvey, on the other hand, felt that America was fundamentally too racist for coexistence, so American Blacks should use their race consciousness to uplift themselves in the less hostile environment of Africa, and boost the continent as well. There are various problems with that but that's the short of it.
For the upper-class elites, Garvey was a much more radical lunatic version of Booker T Washington making the struggle for black dignity and respectability politics into a joke. Him agreeing with White supremacists in blacks going back to Africa was the cherry on top of their disapproval.
Interestingly, Garvey's sentiments actually ended up appealing more heavily to West Indians and they were also the foundation of his movement when he could not actually find such support in his native Jamaica. Perhaps the recent immigrants found an identity they could all latch onto since they were alien to both black Americans and whites.
Anyway, my point is I actually see a wank for Liberia being fueled more so by first-gen Americans from the British Carribean/West Indies since gaining the promise of full citizenship in both spirit and law isn't as fundamental to their identity. The same racial politics are absent as well since the WI is much more heavily black across all classes of society. Not discounting blacks descended fully from Americans, just saying it's going to appeal more to Carribean immigrants in America, imo.
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Using the rough sub-30 million to sub-60 million people as a guide for an ATL wanked Liberia, would it be possible to get the Liberian Americans / Americo-Liberians and other Anglo-African diaspora communities (e.g. British Caribbean / West Indies) to make up around 1/3rd to 3/4th of the population?
It would be too much to expect the Back-to-Africa movement to be successful given it was not well received in OTL, though fascinated by the notion of significant African-American settlement / migration to an ATL Liberia of that size.
The problem with the Manifest Destiny stuff is that I don’t think it’d be good for them in the long run. If you want to keep the Americo-Liberians in power, and not having a copy-paste of the worst bits of plantation culture, you need to have them be the majority in Liberia, and expansion isn’t going to make that very easy. And it didn’t seem to work so well for the stability of the country having a larger native population while the American descendants ran everything.
Also have more skilled Americo-Liberians? I remember emigrationist Black nationalists like Alexander Crummell complaining about the quality of slaves emigrating there.
Well, I don’t think that there was an abundance of educated freedmen in the US at the time.