AHC: World Power Concentrated In Africa

How far back would a POD need to be so that the African continent holds most powerful nations, with Europe and most of the Americas as "third world" areas.?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Have Carthage win the Punic Wars and destroy Rome, then go on to make itself the master of the Mediterranean world.
 
Have Carthage win the Punic Wars and destroy Rome, then go on to make itself the master of the Mediterranean world.
As I said in a recent (and unpopular) post, the problem is the petty squabbling between tiny Bantu nations ("tribes" as they are inaccurately and unfairly known in most media; Bantu peoples almost always have cheifdom level, if not state-level, societies).

Example: Just look at that horrible and frankly idiotic genocide in Rwanda: The Hutu and the Tutsi spoke (along with the citizens of the neighbouring state of Burundi) the same language, looked the same (not that this should have mattered, of course) but, instead of working together to solve problems caused by a shared oppressor (the Belgians), the Hutu Rwandans decided to destroy their already unstable and impoverished country by wasting resources in an (thankfully not fully complete) atrocious genocide against their fellow Tutsi Rwandans.

If you can get a culture more like the Inka, the Ottomans or the Chinese - in terms of its capacity to unite people under a single, more or less centralized government and assimilate them into a correspondingly more or less harmonious society (not necessarily homogeneous; note the Inka and Ottoman Empires' controlled heterogeneity) - then you have some serious potential for a truly Afrocentric world.
 
Example: Just look at that horrible and frankly idiotic genocide in Rwanda: The Hutu and the Tutsi spoke (along with the citizens of the neighbouring state of Burundi) the same language, looked the same (not that this should have mattered, of course) but, instead of working together to solve problems caused by a shared oppressor (the Belgians), the Hutu Rwandans decided to destroy their already unstable and impoverished country by wasting resources in an (thankfully not fully complete) atrocious genocide against their fellow Tutsi Rwandans.

If you can get a culture more like the Inka, the Ottomans or the Chinese - in terms of its capacity to unite people under a single, more or less centralized government and assimilate them into a correspondingly more or less harmonious society (not necessarily homogeneous; note the Inka and Ottoman Empires' controlled heterogeneity) - then you have some serious potential for a truly Afrocentric world.
I honestly don't understand your point here. I do agree on your point of Bantu societies, given the only recent movement towards the study of African history beyond simply the colonial era. Yet, while the Rwandan genocide was terrible, there were systemic issues, largely stemming from post-colonial legacy and colonial power structures (Mamdani's famous decentralized despotism), none of which relate to some culture of homogeneity. Certainly, an argument can be made about the relative weakness of the state in Africa, but in the case of the Rwandan Genocide, that is fairly irrelevant. In any event, the factors that lead to the Rwandan genocide stem largely from the colonial era, and we would need to establish a PoD quite some time before that, at any rate.

I would highly recommend Mamdani's Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism and When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, the former being a cornerstone in modern post-colonial studies and African regional studies, and the latter is a fantastic analysis of Rwandan society leading up to the genocide, and the factors which lead up to it, most notably the racialization of Hutu and Tutsi under Belgian colonial rule.

But, leading back to the question, that's a fantastic question. The Tilly-ian argument, of warmaking and statemaking as central to the development of European states (a fantastically popular and groundbreaking piece of literature in sociology, you can a copy of it here) is that military innovations made war expensive, which forced states to centralize and develop new means of capital collection and development to fund its own defense and security, and the interconnected relationship between warmaking, statemaking, extraction, and protection. I've always found his comparison of the state to a protection racket to being rather interesting. I disagree with the "tone" of it, but I largely agree to the comparison in features (the state maintains a monopoly of force and works to eliminate both external and internal threats, and offers protection and other services to its citizens in exchange for taxes).

But to prevent myself from digressing, I would make the point that simply having the Roman Empire survive may also be sufficient, given the weakness of Africa in the pre-modern age stemmed in part from European intervention, be it the end of the Swahili city-states as a major trade network/force in Indian Ocean basin trade by the Portuguese, or the African slave trade (and subsequent depopulation and state decimation in West Africa), driven by American colonization. Creating an environment which promotes state development in Africa ala Europe is also essential (again, see Tilly), but in all honesty, there were already a number of emergent states in Africa at the time across the continent (keeping in mind that Africa is as wide and disparate a place as Asia, compared to Europe), whose development were stunted by the effective European power. Unlike what Guns, Germs, and Steel would leave you to believe, European development was not in any way assured (there's a reason why it's widely criticized by anthropologists and numerous other social science fields), and curbing that (like Chinese development) would be sufficient to at least allow for a more "equitable" distribution of world "power" across region, if not African dominance.
 
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I once made a map where after a harsher WWII the centre of power for France was shifted more permanently to Algiers. French West Africa was federated with France, Guiana, the Caribbean territories and Madagascar, and because of the booming resources in Africa power gradually shifted there completely and France itself become something of a backwater province.

I don't know how plausible that is. But it's an interesting idea, IMO.
 
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