Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
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Interesting couple of updates, the development of the copperbelt is quite different from OTL. It's quite funny that the companies that came to exploit the region end up developing it, however, some monarchies might not be for long in this world, not adapting to changing conditions.
How does the rest of the German empire fare? Are people from Cameroon influenced by the Coasters?
The first years of the twentieth century in Africa look quiet but it feels like it is the calm before the storm.
And nice touch with Nguyen Thanh, does France still have much contact with Asia, because I believe they don't have anything east of Reunion (which it might even have lost to England in the war).
How does the rest of the German empire fare? Are people from Cameroon influenced by the Coasters?
The first years of the twentieth century in Africa look quiet but it feels like it is the calm before the storm.
And nice touch with Nguyen Thanh, does France still have much contact with Asia, because I believe they don't have anything east of Reunion (which it might even have lost to England in the war).
What Gwench'lan said. In the 1900s, conflicts are somewhat muted as people rebuild from the war and enjoy good economic times, but the 1910s will be turbulent in several parts of the world.
Half-baked, maybe. He'll overreach during the 1910s, and he'll be beaten on the same issues that Merriman was in OTL. Southern Africa still has a long path ahead of it.
In OTL, there is a large and culturally influential West African diaspora, and there are a fair number of Caribbean islands that could plausibly be called African colonies. The thing is that both the diaspora and the colonies were involuntary.
The difference between OTL and TTL is that the freedmen's republics are taking a third bounce - their ancestors were kidnapped into slavery, their parents and grandparents returned to Africa, and now they're returning to the New World as investors and patrons. The Coaster network and the partial industrial development of TTL's West Africa has greatly increased the capital available to the coastal peoples, which means they can now be a voluntary merchant diaspora.
BTW, the Somalis and Igbo probably qualify as merchant diasporas in OTL. At least two of them will also succeed in TTL.
So Buddhist-Islamic Baganda, Afro-Mormons in the eastern Congo and Senegalese sailors in Kamchatka aren't good enough for you?
Never fear, though, the twentieth century will see cultural hybridization beyond your wildest imagining.
The mining companies' motives aren't pure - they're developing the Copperbelt in order to exploit it, and they're taking a lot of money out. The fact that some Africans are benefiting is beside the point as far as they're concerned.
Something similar happened in OTL Zambia, BTW - it had good physical and educational infrastructure by colonial standards, because the mining companies needed educated workers and roads to get the copper out. In TTL, the German side is getting more of this kind of development than the Portuguese side.
And the monarchies won't handle the change very well - like the Great Lakes kingdoms, they're getting modernity thrown at them all at once, and unlike the Great Lakes states, they aren't able to deal with it on their own terms.
Conditions in German Central Africa (the German Congo, Ubangi-Shari and Kamerun) are quite a bit worse than in southern Africa and Madagascar - these colonies are rubber and timber country, so there's a lot of concessionaire exploitation and forced labor. The Africans there don't have a share in the cash crop economy like those in the protectorates do. The African elites do have education available to them, and some (as in OTL) are civil servants or army officers, but they're a small group compared to the overall population.
The Coasters have a presence in Douala, and a few of the elites who don't want to play ball with the colonial administration have joined them.
France still has Reunion, and the Comoros, but not any of the Asian or Pacific colonies. However, it still has a consulate and trading rights in Cochin-China due to the number of Vietnamese who had French citizenship under the Latin Right. Some of the Catholic Vietnamese and Cambodians have emigrated to France or Brazil since the war, with a community of about 10,000 in Paris in 1910; a few Buddhist Vietnamese with French citizenship have also emigrated.
Wow that nexus at Lagos sure must be something!
I would love to see how that has developed, because with a trade network like that, it could easily be a world class city in the twentieth century
again amazing as always
I would love to see how that has developed, because with a trade network like that, it could easily be a world class city in the twentieth century
again amazing as always
Lagos will be a busy and cosmopolitan city - it's already growing into that by this point in TTL - but it's likely to be a smaller one than OTL. Our Lagos has a hinterland that includes one sixth of the population of Africa and that has been united since the early twentieth century; in TTL, that region will continue to be split into many colonies, protectorates and quasi-dominions. There will also be at least two other cities in the lower Niger that will rival or exceed it for commercial dominance. Lagos might be a city of two or three million in 2013 TTL, but not a megacity of 10 or 20 million.
The interesting thing about Lagos (in the Chinese sense) is that it's a potential weak point for both the British Empire and the Malê. The coastal strip that includes the city is under direct British rule, as is the Niger delta, meaning that London can shut down the Malê sea trade at a moment's notice. On the other hand, the center of British administration in the region is a crossroads for radical ideas and home to many rich African businessmen who don't push around easily. The late 1910s and early 1920s could be a tumultuous time there.
In any event, the map should give a pretty good notion of how ideas travel in TTL, and which cities are likely to be major business and cultural centers in the 20th century.
I'd argue this is for the better.
Most of the time, our global civilization's (or its Western civilization precursor's, for that matter) strategies of public governance have very little clue about what the hell to do with such big conglomerations.
Especially if they are not the result of several pre-existing centers but massive outgrowths of a single main one.
Those mega-cities are a problem on so many levels - the world, and Africa in particular, won't miss one less.
Problem is that they are a sort of natural evolution in countries with rapidly evolving population : people go where there are opportunities that is to say cities and it makes a virtuous (or vicious depending on you point of view) circle as more people will go in. Whether the city is a megacity or not don't fundamentally change the issues of an overgrown city in transport shandy towns ect. I would actually be very surprised if the Niger region doesn't have at least three or four cities with 5+ million people (look at the population base : 140 million for Nigeria alone).
I wonder why there isn't any link between Segou and Grand Bassam, isn't there a planed railroad?
Otherwise good map it give a clear view of the situation.
All this talk of city population is making me think about population growth patterns overall. Are there any demographic factors in TTL's West Africa that would make the population growth slower than it was OTL?
Hmm... I wonder what the Gabonais and Luba would be trading in the Congo Basin (clueless about African trade).
Jonathan, would Pan-Islamism be as prominent in this timeline as it is OTL? I would figure that the idea will be thought of sooner or later as more and more Islamic countries are modernized either through self-rule or under colonial infrastructure building. I would imagine that it would be a different movement when comapred to OTL, seeing that Tolstoyism, Futurism and Labor Belloism are prominent ideas for change in this era.
Also, what are the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the Empire of Japan at this time? Would Yamada Torajiro still be the Japanese ambassador to Istanbul? If so, there could be some serious butterflies that could be flown as Sultan Abdul-Hamid wanted to have friendly relations with another great independent power against European dominance.
Also, with the Ottoman Empire being much more developed than OTL, is her economy still dependent on rural agriculture? If not, then how much has industrial production contributed to the Porte?
Besides that, where would the Ottoman Parliament be convening?
Also, is the Nizam of Hyderabad still modernizing his kingdom as per OTL?
EDIT: How are things going in the N'Dele kingdom?
(Man, that's a lot of "Also's")
Jonathan, would Pan-Islamism be as prominent in this timeline as it is OTL? I would figure that the idea will be thought of sooner or later as more and more Islamic countries are modernized either through self-rule or under colonial infrastructure building. I would imagine that it would be a different movement when comapred to OTL, seeing that Tolstoyism, Futurism and Labor Belloism are prominent ideas for change in this era.
Also, what are the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the Empire of Japan at this time? Would Yamada Torajiro still be the Japanese ambassador to Istanbul? If so, there could be some serious butterflies that could be flown as Sultan Abdul-Hamid wanted to have friendly relations with another great independent power against European dominance.
Also, with the Ottoman Empire being much more developed than OTL, is her economy still dependent on rural agriculture? If not, then how much has industrial production contributed to the Porte?
Besides that, where would the Ottoman Parliament be convening?
Also, is the Nizam of Hyderabad still modernizing his kingdom as per OTL?
EDIT: How are things going in the N'Dele kingdom?
(Man, that's a lot of "Also's")
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There will certainly be large cities there - I'd expect Ilorin to have a population of several million in the 21st century, with Lagos, Sokoto, the Adamawa industrial cities and at least one of the Niger Delta ports also above the million mark. For anything much above five million, though, the borders are wrong. Migration from countryside to city tends to take place within borders rather than across them, so a city needs to be part of a big country in order to get really big. In OTL, all 170 million Nigerians are part of a single country, which has enabled Lagos to grow to the size it has (the absence of any other city that could qualify as an economic center has also helped), but in TTL, the region is divided among at least ten separate entities, many of them with their own economic center.
There will be big cities in sub-Saharan Africa and problems like industrial slums and peri-urban shantytowns - the Adamawa cities have them already - but nothing like OTL Lagos, which as Falecius said, is probably a good thing politically and environmentally. Cairo, on the other hand, might be even bigger than OTL because it has much of the Sudan to draw from.
There's an existing railroad; it's just that the map shows trading networks that weren't created by the colonial powers. The empires' internal networks add another level of complexity - in the Niger Valley, they largely follow the pre-existing trade routes, but in the French and German colonies, they add to what was there before.
Increased urbanization, liberation of women, somewhat greater freedom to emigrate - they're on the rapid-growth side of the demographic curve now, but the shift will come earlier than OTL. The population of the Niger Valley in 2013 TTL won't be nearly 170 million.
They're small merchants, on a scale that doesn't threaten imperial monopolies - generally manufactured housewares and textiles in exchange for handicrafts, jewelry, coffee, nuts and oil seeds.
Hmmm. I imagine that the two countries would be friendly, because they were on the same side of the Great War and have no clashing political interests. There might be some element of "us against the Europeans" as well, but the Ottomans' relationship with Europe isn't as adversarial as OTL and the sultan has concentrated more on pan-Islamic unity than anti-colonialism. I'd guess that there would at least be an exchange of embassies and some level of bilateral trade.
Ottoman industrialization is a relative thing - it's more developed than OTL, but it isn't Germany or the United States either, or even France. There are several regions in the Balkans, northwest Anatolia and the Levant that are industrialized, but the majority of the country is still rural, with 70 percent or more of the people living on the land. With that said, though, the industrial regions are a key source of tax revenue and foreign exchange, and are one reason the Ottoman Empire was able to survive the war without collapsing. The Porte's revenues are at least twice what they were at this time in OTL, although there's a good deal of waste and maldistribution.
The parliament would meet in the capital, most likely in a building constructed for the purpose in the 1870s.
Hyderabad's been mentioned a couple of times. Popular protest forced the Nizam to allow a legislature of limited powers, and its members, some of whom are influenced by Abacarism or *Ahmadism, have taken the lead in development. The current Nizam is a modernizer, albeit conservative, and he and the legislature have worked fairly well together - thus far.
It's still rather loosely controlled - the people are diverse and the infrastructure is rudimentary - and it's feeling out its relationship with Germany, trying to avoid angering the Germans while also keeping from being swallowed up.
South America and the Caribbean next, followed by the Ottoman world and Russia, and then one more narrative to close out the 1900-10 decade.
In what sense? Did the diaspora build/retain substantive connections early on, not say in the later 20th century where infrastructure, immigration and independence would all aid such?
Speaking of Japan, one wonders whether the fact they are less of a "unique" success among non-European nations will influence their thinking - whether there is less of a drive to prove themselves as European as possible, and perhaps less of a later xenophobic, we-are-the-master-race reaction? (Of course, actually geopolitical realities will matter here too: aggression and militarism are fed by success, and Japan seems in a poorer position than OTL to do much more in the way of expansion).
Bruce
Bruce
To be fair, AFAIK late 19th/early 20th century utopian fiction was basically like that all around - it's why, say, Looking Backward is so dull to modern eyes. And that last 100 pages of The Jungle where Jurgis just goes around listening to people speechify about Socialism is such a weird tonal shift.
It could actually go either way, the whole idea of populations continually declining in birth rates as they develop is basically being turned on its head as wrong IOTL as Africa basically is'nt following the model (places that have developed a fair bit should according to the theory have high, but gradually declining birth rates, ye their population is growing even faster and birthrates are'nt declining while other parts are declining before they should be) and even Europe is proving it wrong as some places that had seen a long period of falling birthrates and population growth rates are seeing increases.
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Wouldn't all the Niger valley states be quite interconnected? See for example our Ivory Coast : Abidjan is very big compared to the total population but it's because they managed to attract people from all over the region. In practice, I would expect cities from Yorubaland (Ibadan, Oyo, Osogbo) to be more interconnected, maybe even being considered as a single metropolitan region like the Flemish diamond. I recommand the reading of this : http://www.afd.fr/jahia/webdav/site...blications/BT/Africapolis_Final-Report_EN.pdf as it provide more serious estimates for the urban population of West Africa. Apparently, the population in Nigeria is overestimated for various reasons and the census aren't so reliable.
There is also the fact that the real boom in population won't appear until at least a few decades : so if by then the Niger valley federate, I would expect its capital to grow very fast.
Anyway, Latin America will be interesting : there was an awful lot of wars at the beginning of the twentieth century : the Thousand Days' War in Colombia, the Mexican revolution ect. I wonder how all that will unfold.
As this article shows, there were sporadic transatlantic contacts between the slaves and those who remained in West Africa, especially among Muslims. But I take your point - the African diaspora under slavery wasn't able to maintain the kind of connections to the motherland that voluntary emigrants and colonists can have. By that measure, the difference between TTL and OTL is that a transatlantic African diaspora is being constructed earlier.
He was a political exile from Russia and merchant sailor as in OTL, but he had better health and stayed at sea. He was a Royal Navy officer during the war, achieving the rank of lieutenant commander. After the war, he gave up sailing to return to the new Polish kingdom and enter politics, and is now a liberal member of the Sejm.
He's still a writer, albeit not as prolific as OTL, and has a fascination with Africa and India from his sailing days.
They certainly don't have victory disease in TTL, but that could cut two ways - the lackluster performance of the army in Korea might make them want to prove themselves even more. Of course, that desire might prove useful if channeled into the economic arena, as TTL's Japan is now doing. Taming the Kamchatka frontier will also be an important source of cultural affirmation even though the people who actually go to Kamchatka are considered a bit strange.
Fair enough, and maybe that's why Funmilayo made her point through a magical-realist dystopia rather than a utopia - as far as she's concerned, it isn't a story if there are no battles and adventures.
The article seems to confirm what I first suspected upon reading Iori's comment - that traditional attitudes toward women play a part in slowing the demographic transition. That will be less of a factor in TTL. (I'd also like to see statistics for a longer period.)
Hmmm, they're actually close enough together for that to be possible, and Ilorin isn't that much farther. One possibility is a continuous metropolitan belt running from Lagos to Ilorin or maybe Jebba (which is already more important than OTL due to its status as an early Malê industrial town and river port). But that would still require borders which are, if not open, then at least not closed. If they're all part of the British empire or a regional federation, then the necessary conditions will exist, but anything in between will make that kind of urban growth harder. Probably a lot will depend on conditions during the 1930s through 60s, and also on whether the region develops a single economic and political capital (there are several cities in TTL that might compete for the role).
The Africapolis link is a great resource - thanks for letting me know about it.
Finally, I'd appreciate if someone would again favor me with another comment so that the next update, which will be posted today or tomorrow, isn't at the bottom of the page.