AHC: African Industrial Revolution

  • Thread starter Deleted member 67076
  • Start date
Ethiopea, specifically at Aksum, perhaps in 1250-1350 with a stable Solomonid dynasty.

The POD? Move the House of Wisdom from Baghdad to Ethiopia once the threat of the Mongols is noted. Or just have it located there across from Mecca in the first place as a parallel development. Aksum was known as a safe place for Muslims even permitting the refuge of the early faithful during the First Hijra (spelling?). Gold could be used to purchase products abroad while building a maritime commercial network, creating sort of a super-Venice that would eventually expand into modern Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, eastern Sudan, Djibouti, Eritrea, Uganda, and South Sudan. Orthodox Christianity and the avoidance of Imperialism elsewhere might be an impetus for local cultures to join, education and development within a federation-type structure might also be the road to development. Chemistry might be of interest as synthetics could replace dyes (especially for purple or other exotic colors) while metallurgy would be of interest to maintain a maritime/martial edge. Wootz steel and crucible techniques could be brought over and Song dynasty technology might lead to a Bessemer process evolving over a century. Without other large land-based empires in the area until the Ottomans in the 1500s and a chance to develop gunpowder-based weaponry over two centuries, their future could become very interesting.

Eventually this nation might become an African version of the Ottoman Empire or Austria-Hungary, falling apart or divesting into a half-dozen countries perhaps even leaving one a dominant power. But the beginnings will be done and knowledge will spread, ironically the United States might find its beginnings thanks to aid from Ethiopia or whatever name it takes.
 
Yeah, the only resource I think Mali might want is salt, and I think it'd be a lot easier to source that in the Old World, especially considering the only major occurence of salt I know of in the Americas is in the North, under Michigan and parts of New York and Ontario.

Salt farming is a major industry in the Caribbean, but I'm not sure how feasible it was with pre-industrial technology, since most of the sites I know about involve digging massive pits and letting the sun dry out the water in them...
 
Unfortunately a lot of this is wild speculation, as I haven't done a huge amount of research into this - this is just what I, with my admittedly limited knowledge, would guess would happen. If someone else knows more about these subjects than me, please do weigh in and tell me how wrong (or right) I am. :eek:

Your speculations take me back! I tried to do a similar scenario to this with the Ghana empire discovering Brazil. Alas, I had trouble finding enough background about West Africa in the middle ages to actually make a TL of it...

One thing to remember is that the Mali Empire was a savannah empire - it did not penetrate the jungles, since the jungles were the main disease belt, bad for horses and heavily populated by advanced peoples. So that means the savannahs of Brazil would be grade-A land for them to settle, and the jungles would be much more friendly in disease terms (at least at first). So the new world offers alot in terms of land for settlement and tropical goods that are difficult to get in Africa (or indeed, impossible to get in Africa - Brazil has Brazil wood - which was the reason the Portuguese settled there as well).

Also, the Amazon was home to sophisticated farming cultures - which means lots of new crops to try out back in Africa.

And keep in mind that while the Mali empire isn't in the main disease belt, they still have alot of diseases that Europe didn't have. Most importantly, the Sahel is home to a nastier variety of malaria. Those diseases are going to spread very quickly through the Americas, and cause devastation just as the European diseases did.

That devastation will mean that the Mali will not be able to exploit the resources of the new world for long before the local labour runs out - which just as it did with the Spanish and Portuguese, both of whom INTENDED to exploit local labour as slaves and only have trade colonies in the region - means that Mali will need to settle the territory with their own people.

And if the Mali find the Americas before the Spanish get a foothold, then the Europeans could be shut out of the new world by the nasty disease environment (in OTL, the disease invironment stayed favourable for a critical century or so after Columbus found the West Indies - meaning the Spanish had time to find the gold and develop a reason to stay when the disease environment worstened).

Mali discovering the Americas first thus probably means a much slower - if any - European expansion into the new world, which means the Colombian exchange moves through Mali, rather than Western Europe.

Since the balance of evidence is that the Colombian exchange is what catalysed European mercantile development and sparked the agricultural revolution, this means that it is very possible that west Africa is the first region to become industrialized.

A world with an industrial west Africa, and who knows what happening in Europe! It is very different to OTL certainly.

I don't think it is likely that Mali would be able to reach the Indian Ocean and plug themselves into the trade routes there though. Or at least, not before they find and develop Brazil extensively. Mainly because they already have a better trade route from the horn of Africa and across the sahel. The Mali have a few limitations on their seafaring technology you see, 1) the strip of coast that they have is far from the core of their empire, 2) the coast doesn't have many good port sites, and the winds in the area are pretty difficult (why it took the Europeans so far to get past that part of the African coast) 3) as far as I am aware, they don't have any hard tack, which means that feeding crews for long sea voyages is impossible. So to overcome those limitations, you need a prologed period of seafaring in which they can develop their infrastructure, technology and technique - so it is most likely that they would start with Brazil and develop sea trade with Europe and Asia much later.

fasquardon
 
Top