AHC: A Major eastern or African industrial power before Meiji Japan

The challenge is to have a major Eastern or African power before Meiji Japan be as strong militarily and indistrially as to be able to reasonably compete with the likes of Britain and France
 
Kill Tse tse flies a millenium before the dawn of Victorian Age. That would collossaly boost African nutrition intake and thus population. From there poeples of East Africa and Guinea Coast can build much more formidable polities to withstand European contact later. They'll still lack Japan's geographic remoteness though.
 
Muhammad Ali dinasty maintains the control of the Levant and somehow manages to further develop internal infrastructure without being chained by the Europeans. A weaker Ottoman Empire may lead to Russian power in the Med and as there are too many divergent foreign interests in Egypt (UK, France and Russia) they won't be strong enough to destabilize the country.
 
If one is interested in an ancient POD, lately Jonathan Edelstein seems to be hot on the trail of bases for high civilization in pre-Classical times in West Africa--considering whether rice, or other crucial cultivars, might be developed earlier there, and whether the OTL Nok iron-working cultural group might have begun earlier or been more extensive. I suppose soon he might combine several of these to have a West African constellation of imperial and related states antedating the rise of Classical Greece, or even the better part of a thousand years earlier. Presumably the ancient states will rise and collapse, but there will be successors.

If this were the case then it seems likely to me there would be interactions, if perhaps weak and indirect, with Classical civilization in the Med (and Egypt, and perhaps as far afield as India). How this relates to the OP depends on one's view of butterflies; by the orthodoxy espoused by many if your POD is in 3000 or 4000 BCE, then by not many centuries after that every society in the world must develop along increasingly divergent ATL lines, since "different sperm hits different eggs" thanks to the pure chaos in changed weather caused by different human choices, not to mention actual chains of social interaction. I have a dissenting opinion, that mere chaos can always be factored out if one so desires since alternate timelines do not necessarily arise from a line that would but for the POD have led to OTL--that at any time in the past one likes there are already a practical infinity of timelines, and the POD could be in another of them that would, but for the POD, have diverged from ours due to chaos--but it so happens, we pick the sheaf of timelines that have evolved correspondences to ours at some later time of interest, highlighting the logical effects of the divergence and canceling out, as much as is logically possible and to the degree we like, merely random divergences from our own.

Thus, a West African ancient civilization will cause random changes in weather, but we can suppose that but for these changes, the randomness of that ATL would have diverged from ours far away from West Africa--but here the butterflies work to cause convergence instead of divergence. Also an agricultural civilization existing where one did not OTL might cause systematic climatic shifts--attempting to irrigate accessible parts of the Sahel might change the persistent moisture balance for instance, and cause persistently different weather perhaps far from their own site. We may or may not be able to compensate for that too. Finally the ATL society will interact, as a society, with its immediate neighbors who will be affected and changed, and this will transmit a wave of changed culture, society, economics and politics. But we might also set reasonable boundaries or ranges beyond which these changes amount to merely random perturbations, and so factor them out too beyond that range.

Thus, we might reasonably imagine that despite this extra sheaf of societies and polities evolving alongside the OTL known Classical world, if it is far enough away the canon peoples of OTL still develop much as OTL, right down if we like to having the same kings and merchants and philosophers and so on--the Sahara and the indirect path via the southeast Sahel boundary to Kush and Egypt are distance enough to leave the Mediterranean world pretty much as it was.

At some point this "antibutterfly" choice of timeline must break down of course; at some time the peoples who were once so distant from ATL West Africa are no longer out of range. Thus presumably Mediterranean explorers such as the Phoenicians might venture coastwise along the African coast and visit the ATL cities and nations. They might have little impact because traveling both ways by sea is difficult; the classical story of the circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenicians commissioned by an Egyptian Pharaoh is that because coming back north from West Africa is not so easily done; the expedition found it easier to keep on pushing south until they rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and then found themselves going north again and eventually back to familiar Red Sea waters. Until someone, possibly if not indeed probably the West Africans themselves, develops the various arts of seamanship and shipbuilding that permitted Europeans OTL to survive a deep ocean crossing and have confidence they could find a way home again, the Mediterranean and West African spheres will find contact by sea chancy and difficult.

There is the overland route over the Sahara, but that is controlled by middlemen, desert dwellers who live in part off of the trade across the desert. With more people living in a more developed set of societies south of the Sahara, presumably trade along those routes will be increased and this will somewhat raise the fortunes of those desert peoples; it may also attract the attention of strong states north or south, such as the Romans if we don't butterfly them away. Or, if the basis of high civilization in West Africa is strong enough, maybe an African high king or republic or something of the sort intrudes via conquering or co-opting the desert folk into Mediterranean politics and history.

I've followed a timeline which supposed the Romans could have been motivated to conquer West Africa and capable of doing so, by overland movement mainly. I think here the motive for contact would be greater than OTL, but the strength of West African peoples in their own homelands would deter any Roman projects of conquest, or stop them if attempted--the Romans might get lucky and stumble in during a warring states interregnum and find local allies enough to establish themselves as imperial overlords, perhaps. Or they might merely open the door for a strong West African political entity to intrude on the disintegration of Roman power in North Africa west of Libya.

Given the distances, the desert, the insular interests of the desert peoples, we might call it a push and simply settle for the two regions having some knowledge of each other and limited trade. If we assume the Christian religion is not butterflied away, I suppose missionaries would head there and probably make some kind of progress--perhaps the West African lands become anciently Christian, perhaps like Persia they largely decline to do so, perhaps very interesting synergies of Christian and West African belief systems emerge.

Given all this, we could well have Western European civilizations develop much as OTL even though these West African lands and peoples are rather well known to medieval scholarship and indeed to visitors who voyage there by land or perhaps sea, all the way to the point where the Portuguese start perfecting their navigation with the ambition of sailing around Africa.

At that point, I'd say that we have to cast aside what remains of the butterfly net and consider that beyond it, European civilization must develop differently. The Portuguese, and other Europeans who come down the African coast after them, probably cannot act just as they did OTL. To be sure by the fifteenth century of OTL there were some remarkable civilizations there and they were nevertheless drawn, largely by European hunger for slaves to use in the plantations of the Caribbean and South America, into a comprador relationship where warlords gained strength with European firearms in return for becoming reliable slave sellers; depending on the general level of technology in the region this might still happen. But it also might not, if there are strong states and a somewhat higher level of technology; they would not be dependent on Europeans for as much and might be more advanced in some respects, very likely having their own well-developed gunpowder weapons and a high level of metallurgy in particular. A local potentate or even a set of rival states might insist on more favorable terms of trade.

Having contact with Europe right as it is on the cusp of modernity, and being itself a peripheral region to the centers of world civilization just as Europe is, the region might well be drawn, either by semi-integrating with the expanding European system or (if for instance the region had long ago converted to Islam, or holds staunchly to a third religious system that the Christian Europeans consider hostile) in rivalry. They might pre-empt the oceanic trade routes themselves, or anyway participate in them on their own hook.

Indeed, an ancient set of civilizations in that region seems rather likely to me to at some point develop their seafaring abilities on the Atlantic rather earlier than the Europeans do, and being quite close to the easternmost extension of the Americas, to have stumbled at some time long before 1500 on the western continents and to be in continual contact with them. I can see the possibility, if they can learn how to travel to eastern Brazil and return reliably to West Africa, that they will explore and trade up the Amazon and thus gain crops and techniques to develop the Congo using Amazonian methods. The disease exchange will probably still be devastating in South America but perhaps more drawn out over time, allowing some Terra Prieta civilizations in the central continent to survive and interact.

Thus there might not merely be a West African potential for co-evolving with a greatly diverted capitalist system, but a whole equatorial Atlantic system to interact. The odds seem pretty good to me that somewhere in there, in old West Africa itself, or in the Congo, or Amazonia, or a transformed Caribbean, for nations fully equal with the most advanced European nations to arise and participate, as members of an expanded European system or as rivals of it, in the rise of industrial civilization.

I suppose this is not quite what the OP gets at, since it assumes that modern Wesphalian industrialized nations arise first in Europe, and some overseas region belatedly catches up to it Meiji style. West Africa is far enough from Europe and its ancestral civilizations that I can imagine the latter arising as per OTL up to 1500, but as it is the first step taken on the road to world trade and dominion by the Portuguese OTL, it has to strongly influence what happens from that point on, and if the early centuries of the interaction do work out to correspond to OTL I'd say the potential for a radical difference would be preempted. Odds are, given how disadvantageous the terms the Europeans eventually imposed on the region were, that things will necessarily go differently from early on, which involves the West Africans in the rising European system at the very beginning, as central participants. They might, instead of industrializing themselves, prevent the Europeans collectively from having that potential, by blocking their routes eastward and preempting their colonies westward.

But I'm rolling here with the idea they wind up being an integral part of the Atlantic meta-society and involved in everything the Europeans did OTL, taking their place as one (or more) of the capitalist powers, perhaps changing many details of just how the general process of incorporating the world in a global capitalist system happens.

It would be interesting if they refuse to allow the trans-Atlantic slave trade to arise, anyway on European terms--they might do something like that themselves in the Americas, putting their own criminals or other Africans captured in warfare to work on plantations they own in colonies they operate, and yet refuse to sell such workers to European would-be buyers. They might even take it upon themselves to pre-empt or dislodge European strongholds on the coast of Africa, moving down south past the Congo to secure Angola and Namibia, or anyway their coasts, depriving Europeans of all practical options of getting African labor except on voluntary terms.

If the European powers want the wealth that went OTL to the owners of the plantations, they'd have to use European labor to get it--as they did for a while OTL. Indentured and more strongly bound convict labor from the slums of London or Paris would be more troublesome than African slaves, due to their ability to act within the established social and political systems; the danger of slave rebellion is higher and to have them working at tropical plantations is to remove them from their OTL labors in Europe or settler colonies; even if the European capitalist system is not aborted completely its growth must be slower--on the other hand the West African-connected peoples will bring more total population into the mix. They too might grow more slowly per capita because they won't have the advantage of "alien" slaves they can work to death without internal repercussions either, but the total base from which it grows more slowly is larger.

I wonder if it could happen that while Africans sell their undesirables or third party captives to Europeans to work their plantations, the Europeans also sell their criminals, "surplus," or captives in wars from weak European nations to Africans to work them on their plantations, and the Atlantic economy rises on the basis of slavery as per OTL--but with whites enslaved just as blacks are, and the whole system emerging as one where polarization is seen directly and simply as a matter of wealth and social position, and race is never seen as a strongly relevant factor.
 
Kongo or Ethiopia would be the easy choices, really.

But, let's be clear, a Kongo or Ethiopia opened up by the Portuguese. Say Ahmad Gragn dies before he can do too much damage but late enough in his attacks that Ethiopia has centralized. The trick would be to avoid the Ottomans coming down hard on them though. If Ethiopia gets too uppity then there will definitely be conflict in terms of a sphere of influence, and that that may be before Ethiopia industrializes enough to hold it's own.
 
Do either Kongo or Ethiopia have a range of resources that could be broad enough to serve to feed an industrial revolution?

To be fair, Japan certainly doesn't! The islands can, by intensive agriculture, feed themselves (their pre-industrial population anyway) supplemented with a lot of fishing. But no coal, no oil, as far as I know just about every resource they needed had to be imported, and in the actual Meiji reign this was not fostered by any significant conquests either--their first big territorial gain being Taiwan.

Ethiopia strikes me as too much out of the way (as West Africa may be too much in the way!)

If somehow the Terra Prieta jungle cultivars of the Amazon region could be introduced into the Congo region, I daresay the result might be a large increase in population and perhaps associated state development. But that's cart before the horse, because first someone has to cross the Atlantic and get to know the Amazon region peoples before Old World diseases kill them off; whoever could do that would already be well on the way to being an additional power that European development would confront early on. West Africans seem more likely to do this than Central Africans, but if they introduce a range of Amazonian cultivars, then the Congo region, as part of a larger advanced West African sphere, would probably be quite important indeed.

In addition to the slave trade, one danger Africa suffers is that hegemonic Europeans seem likely to take the resources they want by force; unless Atlantic coast African societies are more advanced, populous and integrated than OTL it seems likely to me any African region is going to be suppressed. Rubber harvesting for instance seems to be inherently exploitive in a brutal fashion. Perhaps an established regional power in the Congo region will have invented less disruptive ways of acquiring large rubber harvests, and offer the stuff on world markets at a fair price (that is to say, higher than Africans got for it OTL, perhaps higher than buyer's market prices OTL). OTL rubber was first noticed as a possibly useful substance as a natively harvested resource in Amazonia, but I believe species of rubber-producing plants are native to the Congo region, so an early and strong Congo river civilization might invent uses for the stuff themselves.

But selling a single commodity, however valued, is generally not a route to becoming a balanced industrial power. It is helpful to have a wide range of resources that can be used in complex machinery or traded for whatever the nation lacks. And as I've suggested, having one resource to sell on the global market tends to attract unwanted attention and ambitions from one's potential customers, who might want to move in and take what one nation has--unless that nation is strong enough to defend itself, not only against invaders but attempts at co-opting the leading groups at the expense of the local population generally--a syndrome familiar today as the "Oil Curse."

As I said in my previous post, any African candidate on the Atlantic coast will not so much follow a Meiji sort of path but rather confront European global imperialism in its moment of birth; either they get integrated into the larger European system or they perhaps pre-empt it.
 
I've been reading up on Central Asian history and I've been batting this one around in my head for a bit...

...What about Afghanistan?

:eek:

Okay before you call me crazy...Afghanistan's had some real shit luck over the past 2 centuries but it didn't have to be that way. On paper they've got some pretty impressive mineral resources that might have led them on a different path if events had been a bit different.

For our POD let's say that Ranjit Singh dies a few years earlier, in 1837 instead of 1839. Now in OTL the British decided to reject Dost Mohammad's offer of an alliance in favour of backing Ranjit Singh. However with Punjab embroiled in civil war in TTL, Dost Mohammad's offer looks a hell of a lot better and the British take it. This results in an earlier Anglo-Sikh war which ends the same way that OTL's did, only in TTL the British have a new ally in Dost Mohammad who is able to further increase his legitimacy by conquering Peshawar and a considerable portion of the Trans-Indus regions containing ethnic Pashtun tribes.

By all accounts there were some pretty capable rulers in the Barakzai dynasty, in particular it would be interesting to see what Dost Mohammed does with a MUCH more stable situation. Rather than fighting a bunch of Anglo-Afghan wars, in TTL Britain and Afghanistan are free to focus on other things, the latter choosing to focus mostly internal development as their foreign policy is largely dictated by Great Britain as a result of Dost Mohammad's OTL offer of alliance.

Now with a friendly Afghanistan, the British *might* be able to project slightly more power into Central Asia, but not much. In all likelihood, little changes border wise, other than Afghanistan likely being bigger. Russia's conquest of the area probably takes longer and costs more but it happens nonetheless. Assuming a gradual movement of Russian borders towards Afghanistan, and assuming that Dost Mohammad is succeeded by one of his capable sons and not one of his idiot ones, I could see Afghanistan leveraging it's position to gain significant British investment.

Even before railways begin to reach the region, Afghan minerals will likely begin seeping into British India. I could definitely see the British building some "just in case" railways to the region and then "helping" the Afghans build their own. With massively improved infrastructure, Afghan coal, iron, copper, and other resources suddenly become viable.

Now, why didn't this happen in OTL? Those somewhat familiar with the region will rightly point out that Afghanistan reached a similar arrangement in the aftermath of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Yet the industrialization most certainly did not occur in OTL. What makes TTL different? I would argue that the following make my scenario a possibility.

1) The added agricultural capacity of the Trans-Indus regions around Peshawar and further south.

2) No legacy of distrust between the British and the Afghans due to the Anglo-Afghan wars. In fact the opposite might occur where both look upon the other as a mutual benefactor.

3) Greater stability within the Barakzai dynasty.

Now, I don't know if this satisfies the conditions of the OP as Afghanistan would only really become an industrial power at best around the same time Japan did, but it's certainly worth considering.
 
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