AH Challenge: Colonial Empire Spanning Africa

That never stopped anyone in Central America, India or Southeast Asia though. But your main point still stands.

In areas not suitable for European settlement, empires were ruled mostly using native troops. Once national awareness reaches a certain point, that becomes impossible, and the empires disappear. That's not going to change because the Nazis win WWII. Hence, puddles of goo.

And also, European predominance was primarily due to technological superiority, an edge that was diminishing, and would likely disappear once Germany's (or whomever's) enemies began fighting her by proxy by arming African resistance movements.
 
Good, as they say, God...!

That map would explain most postwar US policy and its naivete.

Is it genuine or is it a modified item? Roosevelt must have been away with the fairies!
 
Controlling all of Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Cape is not exactly as easy as it looks. One of the most obvious challenges would be taking over the interior, and while the stronger coastal states are present no European state of the Early Modern era would be able to muster the forces needed. The Ottomans, with an early standing army would be in a better position, but they had limited supply lines and would be fighting a mostly overland campaign.

Not to mention that Africans could defeat colonial armies from Industrial states in the 19th Century, the Tuareg and the Zulu are two examples I can name offhand, along with Ethiopia gaining the distinction of doing that and keeping their would-be evil overlords out. If we're talking an Early Modern European state, much of the interior is uninhabitable due both to hostile natives and to disease. If religious motivations underline it, the Muslims and Indigenous religions would both have reason to start kicking ass. If profit....either Europe or the Ottoman Empire would have to be *really* low on salt to start embarking on crusades into the interior Sahara. The jungle country even today can't support a number of people, and this with much greater transportation and things like air conditioning. And with the technological bases available to Early Modern societies, nothing of the resources there are discoverable or financially viable for Christians or Muslims.

And conquerors don't tend to conquer just for the Hell of it.
 
Controlling all of Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Cape is not exactly as easy as it looks. One of the most obvious challenges would be taking over the interior, and while the stronger coastal states are present no European state of the Early Modern era would be able to muster the forces needed. The Ottomans, with an early standing army would be in a better position, but they had limited supply lines and would be fighting a mostly overland campaign.

Not to mention that Africans could defeat colonial armies from Industrial states in the 19th Century, the Tuareg and the Zulu are two examples I can name offhand, along with Ethiopia gaining the distinction of doing that and keeping their would-be evil overlords out. If we're talking an Early Modern European state, much of the interior is uninhabitable due both to hostile natives and to disease. If religious motivations underline it, the Muslims and Indigenous religions would both have reason to start kicking ass. If profit....either Europe or the Ottoman Empire would have to be *really* low on salt to start embarking on crusades into the interior Sahara. The jungle country even today can't support a number of people, and this with much greater transportation and things like air conditioning. And with the technological bases available to Early Modern societies, nothing of the resources there are discoverable or financially viable for Christians or Muslims.

And conquerors don't tend to conquer just for the Hell of it.

The Ottomans did occupy salt-producing oases - Bilma had a garrison. The biggest issue isn't the Sahara itself; the French had trouble because they had no idea what they were doing.

The Ottomans could penetrate the Sahel easily through the Sudan, and it would be easy to build a narrow-gauge railway down that belt, facilitating control, but it doesn't really solve the problem of disease, or the difficulty and expense of trying to subdue the tropics, for little return.

Even if somehow they managed this, and maybe leveraged religion, and absorbed the Zanzibari polity, and ejected the French from Algeria, and conquered Morocco (all of which is approaching ASB), you'd have to find a way to conquer White-run South Africa. Not Going to Happen. I suppose it could if 90% of the population of Western Europe got depressed and committed suicide or something.
 
You could have an earlier EEC, with colonies as part of it, like before Suez, possibly shortly after WWII. Britain, France, Spain and Portugal owned most of the continent between them...
 
Hence, puddles of goo.

I really disagree with this. People can adapt, people have adapted. There is no reason why a white population couldn't live in equatorial Africa, or India. Look at Singapore for example; there are plenty of white people living in Singapore today and a lot of that stems from the colonial times. Not to mention the thousands of English speakers not in England and America (or white colonies). I'm talking Hong Kong and Shanghai, Singapore, some cities in India; these places didn't just decide to know English. English people lived there and the influence spread.

I agree that native troops were used in plenty of places, but that was often because the 'mother country' didn't have the manpower needed to sustain military control on its own. For instance, India; the sepoys wouldn't have been used if Britain had a couple of million more soldiers capable to keeping a billion strong population down. Or they would've been used in smaller numbers. Eurocentrism would have gladly replaced every brown soldier with a 'superior' white one.
 
I really disagree with this. People can adapt, people have adapted. There is no reason why a white population couldn't live in equatorial Africa, or India. Look at Singapore for example; there are plenty of white people living in Singapore today and a lot of that stems from the colonial times. Not to mention the thousands of English speakers not in England and America (or white colonies). I'm talking Hong Kong and Shanghai, Singapore, some cities in India; these places didn't just decide to know English. English people lived there and the influence spread.
:confused:Can we say modern medicine and mosquito control? Hong Kong isn't so bad healthwise. I suspect that Singapore is intermediate, and does a LOT of mosquito control. Tropical Africa requires constant vigilance on your anti-malarials and hope that you don't get bitten by a mosquito carrying parasites resistant to the drug(s) you're using.
 
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