I mean parity in the coastal areas. There were ~3.6 million Muslims in 1870 in Algeria as a whole. If we say half are in the thin coastal strip, then that's 1.7 million colons for parity. If France had closed half the population growth disparity with Germany at this time, there's an extra 10 million Frenchmen by 1870. If just 15% migrate to Algeria, you've closed the gap.
Can a France without demographic decline keep the Maghreb?
I mean parity in the coastal areas. There were ~3.6 million Muslims in 1870 in Algeria as a whole. If we say half are in the thin coastal strip, then that's 1.7 million colons for parity. If France had closed half the population growth disparity with Germany at this time, there's an extra 10 million Frenchmen by 1870. If just 15% migrate to Algeria, you've closed the gap.
Here is the academic paper I previously mentioned:
http://people.qc.cuny.edu/Faculty/Neil.Cummins/Documents/France TSA MAY_2011_BODY.pdf
http://people.qc.cuny.edu/Faculty/Neil.Cummins/Documents/France TSA MAY_2011_BODY.pdf
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Why would only half of Algeria's population be concentrated in the Mediterranean? Algeria's population, in 1830 as in 2017, is overwhelmingly concentrated on the Mediterranean coast simply because that territory is easily the most habitable.
The rest of Algeria's national territory is, at best, only marginally inhabitable. We know for a fact that the Algerian Sahara did not suddenly become inhospitable to life upon the French conquest.
Algeria's population, then as now, was overwhelmingly concentrated on the coast. Your presumption that half of the population lived away from the coast--half, when even now something on the order of 5% of Algeria's population lives in desert areas!--is ill-founded. The Algerian territory that France would be colonizing would already be densely populated, unless the French chose to make it much less so.
Why would French migrants be any more likely to go to Algeria than German migrants were to go to Prussia's Polish provinces?
Algeria in almost every scenario is going to be densely populated. The sort of colonization that would work in such an area, the sort that was echoed elsewhere in French North Africa and that was more successful in South Africa simply because South Africa was richer, would involve the relatively limited migration of relatively elite populations. Wholesale population replacement is not possible.
Different models become possible if Algeria's indigenous population is somehow made to disappear, this is true. It's difficult to imagine circumstances in which France would do this. None of France's regimes OTL would have been interested in committing genocide or mass ethnic cleansing against Algerian Muslims, save maybe Vichy if things went the right way. For that matter, the Algerian colons would not have wanted Algerian Muslims to go away: their economy depended on the exploitation of Arab and Berber labour.
My thanks for sharing that very interesting paper. I'm not sure what relevance this has to OTL, or to the ATLs being discussed. Consider that Algeria was colonized at a time when populations along the northern rim of the Mediterranean, from Spain through to Italy, were booming and becoming major sources of migrants to destinations around the world, including France and Algeria. Why wasn't Algeria overwhelmed by European migrants OTL? It's certainly not as if France tried to keep out migrants from the non-French Mediterranean. Why would having a larger French population that might potentially provide more migrants change things?
German share of population in Posen grew from 17.5% in 1819 to 38.5% in 1910. That´s not the biggest change ever but also Prussia and Silesia were affected.
Didn't part of these 38.5% include military and civil servants, along with Yiddish-speaking Jews?
Why wouldn´t you include the first 2? About the third one I think they included German speaking Jews but I don´t think they included Yiddish speaking ones(not sure).
Moving the conversation from just increasing the population from European France to the Maghreb to the wider question of whether France could adequately integrate the Maghreb into France proper, I have always wondered if the solution is a more aggressive push towards conversion away from Islam. The Arab and Berberine populations are not black. Intermarriage and integration is much more plausible here due to this. The religious differences are a big barrier to this kind of integration.
And before the Sixties?
There is that, but the statistics are apparently questionable. It seems as if German settlement was concentrated particularly in certain demographics, and in certain regions within Posen (the western regions ceded to Weimar, frex). The core of the old Polish territory does not seem to have been particularly Germanized.
That was pretty much an ideal scenario. Why are French supposed to be more likely to go to Algeria?
If you want a French Algeria, then you're going to have to convince the people who are always going to be the majority population that they should want to be French. More and more intrusive French settlement would hinder this.
Today, something like 80% of the population is along the Meditteranean, but this is after vast population growth and urbanisation as the cities boomed along the coast. Today, there's some six to seven million people living in (mostly) the mountains and (less so) the desert, so I don't think it's unreasonable to suppose that the more arid parts of the country could support a couple million back in the 1800s. I imagine the population growth as the country moved from four million to 40 million has been disproportionately along the coast.
Densely populated compared to the rest of Algeria? Sure. That's why I'm supposing half the population lives in 5% of the land area. Compared to European cities of this time period? Less so.
I think you are underplaying how many Germans moved to Poland. Places like Posen and East Prussia rapidly Germanised. But in this case there are extra push factors of a revolutionless France ITL likely being a more authoritarian, feudal place with fewer opportunities for economic advancement compared to western Germany in our timeline. I would imagine Algeria here would function more similarly to Portuguese Angola in OTL: much more cosmopolitan and less-class based than the homeland. In addition, German Protestants were much more welcome in Canada and the USA than French Catholics would be.
It also seems like in our timeline the vast majority of French emigration went to Algeria. In a place with more crowded rural areas, more second sons and less economic opportunity in France itself, I can see emigration being a lot larger proportionally. An extra 10 million people in France itself by 1870 might mean four or five million more emigrants. If half of these go to Algeria, that gives you the numbers needed.
Thus seems to have parallels to 20th Century South Africa. They want the natives close enough to be exploited as cheap labour, but moved out of the cities and some nearby land, which become white only areas.
Do you have any sources for how much Spanish and Italian emigration there was during 1800-1950 and where it went to? That would be helpful to judge.
Thank you for the ongoing pushes by the way. It is helping keep my thinking rigorous.
You'll need to provide cites for these claims.
You're suggesting, in other words, that the population of the Algerian Sahara has been stagnant since 1830, that the population has remained in the range of two million since then.
You don't think that the Saharan areas grew more rapidly as technology made living in the desert more possible?
Well no, I don´t understand why one wouldn´t count civil officiers and the military for the population, more so in peace time. There is the issue of German speaking Jews but frankly it would not change much given it would be detracted from both 1819 and 1910.
Algeria is not a desert, north of the Atlas mountains is livable for Europeans and that´s why in a century 10% of the population of Algeria was European/French. Also there is not that much difference in those 2 scenarios given both the zone to be settled had a normal population density so not a lot of unused land.
I agree that you need assimilation of locals though to get a majority or even a third of the population of Algeria in general.
Some of these civil servants are there only for work (for exemple, a Munich postmaster could be affected to Posen and return home once discharged), thus giving a distorted picture of the permanent population.
But that´s a stretch because at that point no real permanent population can be found, personally outside out of ordinary military presence it´s counterintuitive to not include other government workers into it.
By the 1820s there were already Italian fishermen in Algeria, with Neopolitans, Sardinians, Corsicans and Sicilians fishing in the region, by 1821 they established a church in Bona (Annaba). These were mostly coral fisherman, an activity that would predominate until the 1860s. Between 1833-1846 nearly 10,000 Italians settled in Algeria, mostly along the coast, with half settling between 1841-1846. The breakout of several epidemics of cholera made Algeria (1850, 1854, 1855, 1859, 1865) unattractive and as a result Italian immigration fell with a mere 400 arrivals between 1851 and 1861. Another issue was the agricultural settlement was not encouraged among non-French during this period, along with the 25% tax on foreign fishermen.
The construction of railways, ports and other infrastructure attracted Italians in the 1860s with 5,000 arriving between 1861-1866. During the 1875-1885 period Algeria and Tunis attracted some 500 to 900 immigrants per year. Many were labourers attracted by the railways and mines (iron ore). In these mines the Italians were preferred over both natives and Frenchmen for certain tasks. Between 1881 and 1886 some 10,000 migrated to Algeria.
By 1920 some 100,000 Europeans in Algeria were thought to have Italian origins.
Below is a detailed table of Spanish emigration in 1913 by destination for people over age 9. Algeria, after Argentina was the second destination for Spanish emigration that year, and what is notable was that 74% of emigrants had been farmers or were unclassified according to their profession in Spain. This was much higher than not only any of the other major destinations, but a contrast to Morocco where two-thirds were engaged in commerce and transports.
Maybe, after the WWII, a more instable Fourth Republic emerges, causing strices and a Communist takeover, causing refugees to flee to the colonial Empire (see Taiwan) - is this realistic?