If you have Information which states otherwise, I'll gladly stand corrected. (I admit my numbers only referred to germany's colonial episode)I agree with everything else you've said, but that is really not true.
If you have Information which states otherwise, I'll gladly stand corrected. (I admit my numbers only referred to germany's colonial episode)I agree with everything else you've said, but that is really not true.
If you have Information which states otherwise, I'll gladly stand corrected. (I admit my numbers only referred to germany's colonial episode)
It depends when your talking about. The economic worth of colonies changed with the global economy. While some colonies certainly were profitable the vast majority weren’t - especially by independence.Germany’s colonies were pretty unprofitable, true (although Togo was getting there), but you can’t really generalize that. The Congo was definitely profitable, as was Ghana, south Nigeria was profitable however I do not have data for north Nigeria or Nigeria as a whole. Those are just what I can think of off the top of my head, I have also read historians claim in passing that a few other areas such as Uganda were profitable but I have not looked into them.
I would say that expecting anything to spread around Sub-Saharan Africa is sort of a non-starter before the 20th-21st century created pan-Africanism.
Within regions however, I think we do see unifying cultural traditions allowing for the spread of nation-states in certain regions, and I think in an ATL one could intensify these traditions. The highlands of East Africa had a legacy of Axum and then Ethiopia, West Africa also has the legacy of Ghana and Mali. In an ATL perhaps the Nubian peoples of Sudan manage to hold on and assimilate invaders to maintain a tradition going back to Kush, however climactic factors may make that implausible. In West Africa, curiously the nation-states that one can describe as such were closer to the coast and relatively disconnected from the upper Niger river valley which had the older history, this is probably because the area didn't have a history of one ethnic group continuously dominating the others. However if instead of the OTL Mali empire you saw a continued Soninke domination of the area, we would probably have a Soninke nation arise there. The legal institutions already arose OTL. I cannot think of a likely mechanism however for nation states to arise in the Swahili coast, the Great Lakes monarchies, or Zimbabwe plateau.
Fair, although the pervasiveness of this institutional evolution is unlikely to be sufficient to prevent any large scale colonialism in parts of Africa. Would make for an interesting TL though
I'm not personally convinced that more widespread nationalism is particularly linked to colonial resistance. The Fante Confederacy was a nationalist state with an incredibly progressive constitution including universal education; but nonetheless it was forcibly dissolved in 1873. In comparison, the mostly-theocratic Dervish state lasted until 1920 (although it's anachronistically considered a Somali nationalist state in retrospect). I think military capability matters more than political organization in defending against colonialism. The Fante didn't have much of that, trapped between the British hammer and the Ashanti anvil, but the Dervishes had a bit more room due to the geography of the Somali interior and the fact that two of its main enemies, Italy and Ethiopia, struggled to project power.