I wish I had access to the books and journals you mentioned, but I note that you aren't providing hard numbers here.
No one does. Its incredibly hard to estimate rates of literacy in the time period given the mass economic decline and destruction of rates following colonization when sociological studies were first compiled. As an anecdote Ive looked at well over 20 papers in about 5 different journals, and no author that I know provides us. It doesn't help educated people frequently spoke and wrote in multiple languages with multiple different scripts, thus raising questions about what constitutes literacy in the first place.
However, one author estimates in 1800 there were at least 250,000 people literate in Arabic, a figure that would drastically increase over the century (and swiftly decline following British conquest. (Diallo, Ibrahima. "Literacy and education in West Africa: from Ajami to Francophonie."
Africa Review 8, no. 1 (2016): 60-70.) So, roughly at least 3% literate in Arabic by 1800 (Given the population estimates). Not counting literacy with local languages and not counting people literate in Roman characters.
OK, so there is a boom in literacy. But what is the literacy rate? If it goes from 1% to 3%, a tripling would certainly be a boom, but it would still be far less than the literacy rate in Japan. Japan had around 40-50% of all males in school just before the Meiji Restoration, and the urban population in Tokyo and Osaka had something like 80% literacy. Even in the rural areas, you had peasants (the elite peasants mind you) that had very high literacy and numeracy. Even during the early Edo Period, Japan probably had at least a 10-20% literacy rate - certainly all the Samurai were and they were 8% plus the various monks, rich merchants and tradesman, etc.
Can you stop moving the goalposts?
Last I checked Mexico, Iran, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, China, South Korea, Venezuela, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Taiwan and Thailand didn't need high literacy rates to begin industrialization.
I keep pointing out I'm not using Japan as baseline for the transformation of an industrialized state but made a vague reference to how the Meiji regime had a number of conditions that allowed rapid economic and social transformations and you keep insisting Sokoto has to be exactly like Japan in order to begin the earliest stages of industrialization by the 19th century as the OP wishes for.
You say Kura is devoted to textile production, but what was the population, what was its output?
"During the nineteenth century Kano’s textile industry reached extraordinary production levels. In 1851 the city’s annual production was estimated at about 300 million cowries."
(Lovejoy, Paul E. "The Characteristics of Plantations in the Nineteenth-Century Sokoto Caliphate."
The American Historical Review 84.5 (1979): 1267-1292.)
Here's a reference to Kano, the principle city of textile manufacturing in the region. Kura was a regional city in the emirate of Kano.
How were the textiles being made?
"The economic organization of the industry also partly explains the most distinctive characteristics of west African handlooms: their narrowness. In cotton weaving the choice of technique was not determined by ignorance of alternatives but, first of all, by seasonality of labour supply. According to Austin, the dominance of the narrow loom was at least greatly facilitated by the low opportunity cost of dry-season labour. Moreover, farmers could not increase their raw cotton production without imperilling their food security. In such a context, only a limited quantity of cloth could be produced. This amount could have been woven with much less labour had broader looms been used; but the low opportunity cost of dry season labour made it worth choosing extra labour in return for the preferred quality, in competing even at the cheap end of the markets.67"
(Candotti, Marisa. "Cotton Growing and Textile Production in Northern Nigeria from Caliphate to Protectorate c. 1804-1914’: A Preliminary Examination."
African Economic History Workshop, London School of Economics, London, Uk. 2009.)
Was there anything like the advanced machines the Japanese were using? Here is an
example of the kind of loom pre-Meiji Japan was using. And that is nothing like some of the really big looms and spinning machines the Japanese were using in actual factories - large scale enterprises. In contrast, your example mentions that the "vertical loom" was being found even in remote villages. A vertical loom is a much more primitive loom. I wonder if medieval Europe could make the same claim - I assume so (but could easily be wrong).
Sort of. Mass cotton enterprises were made in plantations that had entire facilities devoted to textile production that can be described as factories.
Have you seen the movie Princess Mononoke? Many people think it is some kind of fantasy realm since there are guns, iron works, and a lot of advanced economy there mixed with an obviously feudal society. But guess what, it takes place in historical Japan in the 16th century. The movie's Irontown is actually based on
the real prefecture of Shimane of that era. The film is fiction, but its depiction of that era of Japan is pretty accurate. I highly doubt 19th century Sokoto Caliphate had anything like that. And remember that Shimane was not an urban metropolis, it was one of the most rural and least populated prefectures in Japan.
It did. The country was capable of mass production of guns, and had the necessary metallurgy technologies to mass field entire armies of gunpowder troops since the late 1700s. Such a revolution in military and metallurgy a few decades prior was the entire reason the Fulani Jihad was able to sweep across the Sahel. This is not unique to Sokoto herself, other states were capable of doing this. Hell the reason why Samouri Toure (a warlord with similar military technologies and strategy to the Sokoto state) was able to last so long against the state is precisely because his armies were capable of combining arms and fielding mass cavalry dragoons armed with home created muskets, rifles and pistols.
(Smaldone, Joseph P. "Firearms in the Central Sudan: a revaluation."
The Journal of African History 13.04 (1972): 591-607.)
The 20,000 figure is something I saw in multiple places when I was doing online research, but it's in Wikipedia as well. I found this
PDF which on PDF page 11 (page 84 of the book) it talks about Sokoto's population both in the time of Clapperton in 1827 and of Barth in 1853. They estimate Sokoto might have had a population of around 120,000 in Hugh Clapperton's time, but confirmed by the 1850s it had severely declined to the 20,000 reported by Heinrich Barth. It mentioned that at Barth's time, the court was at another city so it's likely the huge population was a result of the political court - not because it was proto-industrial manufacturing center. If the Japanese government had abandoned Edo to move back to Kyoto, the city would have remained a very large urban area with lots of manufacturing.
Can't open the PDF.
That's odd, because other sources say otherwise, pointing to a growth by the eve of the British conquest. Besides, you're just sourcing one explorer rather than a study. Yet even should the court be the main reason for the large population the entire region's intensification of agriculture, increasing mass production of textiles, weaponry and agricultural yields (of a myriad of crops including cotton, cowpeas, groundnuts, palm oil, wheat, millet, sorghum, rice, and sugar) large and stable population growth.
(Gwadabe, Muhammadu Mustapha. “THE ADMINISTRATION OF LAND AND LABOUR IN PRE-COLONIAL KANO.”
Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, vol. 19, 2010, pp. 23–38.)
This may be unfair of me, but I'm still not convinced your description is of a society ready for rapid industrialization. The descriptions given of an empire with towns in the tens of thousands and urban artisans could also be used to describe Medieval Europe in the 14th century. I wouldn't classify Europe of that era as proto-industrial or had the ability to rapidly industrialize. 18th century Europe was, as was 19th century Japan. On the little that you've told me, it sounds more like a medieval level society building its potential, but not to the point that it had the local skills, capital, and organization to industrialize under European guidance/support (since it would have to import the essentials from Europe).
A better comparison would be late Qajar Iran or much of Latin America rather than Japan.
But thanks very much for pointing me to the research you provided.
Your welcome.