Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
The Great War did run Britain into debt, and the Imperial period nearly as much so, and the United States cleaned up financially by staying out of the former. On the other hand, Britain did restructure its debt with help from the dominions, and the closer ties of TTL's Commonwealth mean that London is still banker to its former empire.
As far as the 1970s are concerned, I'll stick with a US-UK-Germany triumvirate in international finance, with France close behind and the rising powers moving up. And I know I said above that Stamboul isn't really a banking city, but I'm reconsidering that: it would be ideally placed to be banker to the Islamic world, and there isn't another Ottoman city central enough to be New York to its Washington.
I'd assume that New York is slowly moving ahead, but that if the Zollverein ends up becoming the core of a *European Union, that might boost Berlin and even Paris.
Fair point - Bombay would be the financial as well as the industrial capital.
I'd say that's about right. There would be another factor in play, though, in the form of the rapidly changing West African economy of the 1840s and 50s. It's shifting from a traditional peasant-herder economy to an early industrial one, local capital is increasing and money is becoming more important, and in the meantime, finance is chaotic with foundry shares being traded as currency and the Sokoto treasury going through boom-and-bust cycles. In this environment, the hawala system would be best equipped to handle the growing volume of money in the economy and would also, at least at the beginning, be more trusted than "official" banks backed by treasuries of uncertain solvency. Abacar and Bello would both regulate banking tightly, but the hawala system would be likely to grow anyway, and later, as you say, it would have echoes in the Ottoman and wider Islamic world, both as an alternative institution and an official one.
I'd definitely agree with you about Turkestan, but I'm not sure about South Carolina - the post-Civil War government would inherit a state banking system along traditional Western lines, and the path of least resistance would be to keep the system going under new management. On the other hand, given the amount of Abacarist influence in Gullah country, there could also be hawala-style "people's banks" that develop to fill the role of credit unions, and these may even play a part in cracking the entrenched Republican/Circle hold on the state at the end of the 1910s. As you point out, this style of banking would have some leftist street cred, and it could conceivably play a part in TTL's credit union movement, although (as you also say) it would be opposed and it wouldn't form the whole of the movement by any means.
Between the earlier growth of feminism in Africa and reformist religion that frowns on that sort of thing, I'd guess you're right.
Excellent map, and I appreciate your work on it!
Africa, the Pacific and South Asia do really quite look like the HRE writ large.
And no doubt will be getting even more complicated in the next round of updates.
Actually, the only continent that hasn't been HRE-ized in some way is America...
The Americas, anyway. And there's a reason for that: Europe has pre-Westphalian traditions to revive and adapt, Westphalianism never really took hold in Africa and Asia to begin with, but in the modern Americas, Westphalian statehood is the only kind that has ever existed. The precolonial American polities were overrun and replaced much more completely than those in Asia or even Africa, so the Westphalian state is the bedrock of modern Western Hemisphere history, and there's more resistance to letting it go. The same goes for Australasia.
Even with that, though, the Caribbean is starting to look pretty post-Westphalian, and the Native peoples are being assimilated into the international system.
It's neo-feudalism, not the original article: more Europe of the Regions writ large than anything else, with a growing overlay of regional and international authorities playing the role that a king or emperor would play in a feudal society, and all of it increasingly governed by modern democratic norms.
Did I say space-filling Holy Roman Empires before? I meant space-filling Holy Roman Republics.
Maguindanao is there - it's the part of Mindanao island shown in white. It's traditional and somewhat isolationist, so it isn't part of the Southeast Asian treaty zone, and the Moros are tough enough that everyone leaves them alone. There's more money to be made trading with Maguindanao than conquering it.
Zamboanga is also there, but it's a dot on a map of this scale. It's the commercial gateway to Mindanao and the cultural gateway to Spain, and it is part of the treaty zone.
Yeah, I always manage to miss something, don't I...
It would take forever to write...
I doubt I'll ever make a full list, given that there are 11,000 of them. We've had discussions before on the categories of entity that will be part of the international system, and it should be possible to extrapolate from that and guess what many of them are.
Cartographers will indeed have headaches, but they'll also find ways: for one thing, the more obscure or narrowly specialized international authorities will only be shown on specialty maps, while maps and atlases aimed at mass audiences will concentrate on the major regional unions. How many maps in OTL, for instance, show CEEAC/CEMAC, CFA or ECOWAS membership?
The peace treaty at the close of the Indian War of Independence was in many ways the equivalent of the Statute of Westminster - the imperial conference at which the treaty was made regulated relations between the UK and the existing dominions as well as recognizing Indian independence - and the Commonwealth treaty extended the principle to all self-governing British possessions. As for repatriating the constitution, I'd guess that this has happened in some places but not others, depending on the perceived need for it and the degree of residual loyalty to the mother country - I'd expect it to happen in Canada before Australasia, for instance.
I'm hoping to post the next update later today or tomorrow.
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Right. Thanks.
Don't you mean Frankfurt, not Berlin?
Interesting list here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_exchange#Major_stock_exchanges
Obviously, 'EuroNext' doesn't exist iTTL (or even iOTL in the '70s)
According to Wikipedia, Deutsche Börse was founded in 1993, so that probably won't exist ITTL.
What many of them, in my experience, say IOTL often amounts to equivalents of "here be lions".
Ahmadu Odubogun, “The Dancing Revolutions and the Post-Colonial Niger,” African History Quarterly 53:301-12 (Fall 1999)
… Music and dance had always been forms of political expression in the lower Niger, but in the wake of the Igbo Women’s War [1] and the legends it created, they were considered just as much weapons as guns and riders. The growth of socially-conscious popular music in the 1940s and 50s, and the simultaneous revival of classical music and dance forms [2], refined these arts into a political language. And in Dahomey and Adamawa, before the 1950s were out, that language would be spoken.
Dahomey had always been one of the more repressive states of the former British West Africa, and was so even in the early Commonwealth era. In 1947, the king had reluctantly agreed to a package of reforms in order to achieve dominion status, but since then, he had done everything possible to undermine it. There was responsible government in theory, but elections were manipulated to ensure victory for the palace party, and the public-order laws and secret police were wielded ruthlessly to crush dissent and prevent a repetition of earlier popular uprisings. The government’s repression was matched only by its fiscal corruption, with much of the country’s wealth siphoned off by the royal household and businessmen with court connections.
In these conditions, protest had to take subtle forms, and one of these was the style of dance that had grown up in the neighboring Asante royal republic: modern dance accompanied by classical or popular music which depicted contemporary subject matter in the guise of legend. In Asante, these dances often depicted the triumph of democracy; in Dahomey, they would portray, and be part of, its struggle.
The archetype of Dahomean dance in the early 1950s, and one that would become an icon of its revolution, was The Voice. The dance was ostensibly a re-enactment of the precolonial Dahomey kingdom’s secession from the Oyo Empire, but both movement and musical themes made clear that the dancers were actually portraying the pro-democracy uprisings of the early twentieth century. The dancers rose again each time they were defeated, and ultimately, Papa Legba – the eponymous Voice, in his role as patron of speech and communication – led them to victory over an “Oyo emperor” whose mannerisms and trappings marked him out as a Fon king. Throughout, it was shown that freedom was an active force that would reignite itself among the oppressed even if it was eradicated from public life – a theme that showed how much Abacarist mysticism had penetrated this Christian-animist country, and which also represented a borrowing (or, more accurately, a taking-back) of the Haitian revolutionary tradition. Perhaps, in the title as well as the lyrical themes, there was also a homage to Ibrahim Abacar’s Silent Ones.
Whatever its roots may have been, The Voice, and dances like it, became popular fare at weddings and religious gatherings, and lines from their satirical songs became common political shorthand. This naturally led to entertainers themselves becoming targets, and singers or choreographers were singled out for arrest, harassment and sometimes disappearance. And that would be the king’s undoing.
In the summer of 1957, the secret police raided the yam festival in Abomey – a celebration that by then had become a center of protest and unsanctioned mutual aid – and arrested the dance company that was performing there. The next morning, with the festival still in progress, the dancers’ bodies were found in a dump outside the city. The bodies were obviously meant to be found, but rather than being terrorized as the government hoped, the people were catalyzed. By the end of the day, there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets, and in the Igbo style, they “sat on” the palace, government offices and the houses of hated officials by dancing in front of them and calling for their occupants to step down.
The palace was caught by surprise and, for a few days, it was indecisive. Dahomey was, despite all, a member of the Commonwealth, and while the disappearance of individual dissidents could be swept under the rug, massacres in the streets of the capital would draw sanctions and worse. And those few days proved fatal. By the time the king finally made up his mind to loose his foreign praetorian guard on the protesters, the crowds dancing The Voice in front of the palace included police officers and common soldiers. The hitherto-nonviolent revolution turned bloody that day, but the palace guard was defeated and the king perished before he could flee. By nightfall, the government buildings were in the people’s hands – many of them without a shot fired – and Dahomey was a republic…
… In Adamawa, the revolution was as much a literary affair as one of music and dance. Since the 1930s, a genre of political novels and poetry had grown up, often using the medium of fantasy to conceal their message [3], and the Labor Belloist traditions of the industrial cities also favored poetry. In the fashion of Gobir, where most of the city-states employed civic griots, the Adamawa poets’ compositions, and even literary adaptations, were set to music and sung as election anthems or protest songs. Dance was a more minor key than in Dahomey, but it was also an expression of Belloist community, and the labor brotherhoods and sisterhoods delighted in using court dance to mock the emir.
Adamawa had been a pre-revolutionary state for decades and had boiled over on several occasions, so less of a catalyst was needed than in Dahomey. In 1955, as in 1941, the catalyst was a cancelled election. The grand coalition that Whitehall had brokered in 1941 had passed its sell-by date, and after the Abacarists and Labor Belloists brought down the government over corruption and broken promises of reform, the emir saw that his supporters were set to lose badly. With little other option, he declared a state of emergency, prorogued the parliament and established a caretaker government. But unlike previous occasions when Adamawa emirs had done the same thing, he had no support from Britain, from his neighbors, or ultimately from his own army. Even as the generals ordered troops to occupy the cities, their subordinates were meeting with party leaders and the “people’s griots” (as the opposition literary figures were now known), and on the third day of the emergency, with massive protests on the streets, the government fell to a junior officers’ coup…
… The “dancing revolutions” were a step forward for populism, but a step backward for the Niger Valley federalist movement. The new regime in Dahomey was a royal republic like Asante and Indénié, and it was a genuine democracy, but it was also highly nationalist. Vodun became a state religion and, syncretized with both Christianity and Islam, a centerpiece of public ritual, but more to the point, the new government considered itself the heir to precolonial Dahomey and glorified King Ghezo’s resistance to the British, Yoruba and Malê alike. It stayed in the regional customs union, but considered itself a nation apart, and wanted no further political integration with its neighbors. Indeed, it took steps to end the political integration that already existed, withdrawing from the Commonwealth and, in a rejection of the regional trend toward post-Westphalian statehood, enacting a constitutional amendment providing for unitary sovereignty.
Adamawa, for its part, became an increasingly radical state during the late 1950s and early 60s. Its radical tendencies had always been the strongest of the Malê successor states, shaped by the short-lived Islamic Cult of Reason that had ruled Gusau in the early 1850s [4] and by the harsh struggles between the labor brotherhoods and the industrialists, and the far left gradually got the upper hand in the provisional government of 1955-57. The 1957 election brought in a parliament where the largest party was a Marxist-Belloist fusion, and by 1961 it had cemented its power. In keeping with a party where many of the leading figures were intellectuals, it would rule radically, nationalizing everything other than the workers’ cooperatives of the industrial belt (and putting them under state management) while becoming as politically and culturally repressive as the emir had been. This government, too, had no interest in federation, not for reasons of nationalism but out of fear of ideological impurity and economic domination.
With Adamawa and Dahomey off the table, and with the Nupe and Wukari states preferring to remain British protectorates rather than entering a union dominated by Malê political traditions, the federalists began to think smaller. Rather than calling for regional union, they increasingly sought to deepen ties among the states in the Lagos-to-Gobir corridor as well as the Lower Niger Dominion and the delta states.
There was a good deal of diversity within this region. Its heartland, the “corridor city” running from Lagos to Sokoto, was heavily developed – some argued that it would turn into a single conurbation by century’s end – and had an economy based on heavy industry, high technology and education. The hinterland, with the exception of oil-rich Bonny and Calabar, was centered on light industry and cash crops, and was based around a network of small cities that served as regional centers. But all, by now, were part of a single regional economy, shared a commitment to democracy and the rule of law, and increasingly believed that their future was together. They were even, in some ways, a cultural unity, with the influence of Abacar and Bello felt even among the Christians and the Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba and Malê (albeit less so the Igbo) partaking of each other’s festivals, customs and art.
In 1964, a regional conference met in Iseyin, which along with Akure was one of the two Yoruba city-states that hadn’t joined the Oyo Confederation. When the confederation was formed in the 1870s, both had Christian ruling classes and majority-Muslim populations, and feared that they would be swept away by Malê radicalism if they took part. Those fears were long since gone – both had democratized, and Iseyin was a prosperous tobacco and texile producer and fashion center while Akure had become a university town – but the two city-states had grown to like their independence. Both had become strong proponents of regional federation, which they considered the best way to stay independent while realizing the economic and cultural benefits of integration.
That conference, and the subsequent ones of 1967 and 1970, failed to produce a political union along Indian lines: there were still too many disagreements over what functions to be entrusted to a regional entity, and the parties didn’t want to create barriers that might discourage states outside the corridor from joining. They did, however, reach an agreement of mutual association similar to that between Germany and the Copperbelt or France and Mali, with a defensive alliance and reciprocal citizenship rights, and they agreed to dedicate a budget each year to joint infrastructure projects. At the 1970 conference, they also agreed in principle on a watershed management authority for the Niger with powers equivalent to the one over the Nile, and reached out to the upper Niger states to see if it might be realized. That project would occupy regional diplomacy for much of the 1970s, and it would also, once again, expand the federalists’ aspirations beyond the central corridor…
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Aminatou Salazar, Africa's Twentieth Century (Univ. of Sokoto Press, 2010)
… Much of African historiography treats ethnically-based politics as a by-product of weak states, something that happens when governments are unable to deliver services or command loyalty and where ideology at the national level matters little to daily life. But those who hold this view must always grapple with the counterexamples of Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea. Both became independent with functional governments capable of exercising administrative control and delivering services across their entire territory; both had moderately prosperous and modernizing economies; both had ideologically-based parties that had cut their teeth in the French parliament – but both were dogged by ethnic conflict that would blight their politics for more than a decade and which in one case would start a war.
The answer lies in a measure that, at the time it was enacted, was a model of progressive colonial government: the Latin Right. In theory, this was meant to build a steady pool of African notables with French citizenship who would share in the administration of their colonies and the government of France. In fact, because so much discretion was granted to colonial governors in conferring Latin Right citizenship, civil rights were often distributed arbitrarily and with favoritism toward ethnic groups who were considered “advanced” or loyal or, in the worst cases, who could afford bribes. [4] The result was that certain ethnic groups got an inside track on citizenship and the civil-service jobs that went with it, while members of less favored groups who wanted citizenship were more likely to have to obtain it through military service. The effects of this policy lasted long after French citizenship became universal, and indeed, long after independence.
In Côte d'Ivoire, for instance, the civil service was dominated by the Baoulé and to a lesser extent the southwestern peoples, while the army had a preponderance of Muslims from the north. A quarter-century of equal opportunity had changed this somewhat, but the Baoulé still had a majority of the senior ranks as well as the high-level connections that young people could use to get their first job. As such, they were a majority of the political class, and both the main left-wing party and the largest center-right party were dominated by them, with only an agrarian populist party based in the north. And in the first post-independence parliament, ethnic solidarity proved stronger than ideology, as the left and right formed a coalition which openly favored Baoulé interests and froze out the northerners. [5]
Given the number of northern officers in the new state’s army, the government justifiably feared a military coup, and it also needed to distract the southwestern peoples from the favoritism being shown to the Baoulé districts. Their solution was revanchist nationalism: almost at once, the government asserted a claim to Indénié, arguing that it had been “stolen” after the Great War. The fact that it had been taken from France, and that none of the precolonial Ivoirian states had any historical claim to it, was quietly forgotten.
Throughout the later 1950s, the government kept up a steady stream of minor border incidents, hoping that an atmosphere of permanent crisis would justify its rule and keep the army busy. But in November 1957, the crisis slipped the leash. An Ivoirian patrol encountered an Indénié unit near the border – which side is still a matter of dispute – and during the ensuing firefight, a government minister who had been visiting the border defenses was killed. The minister was also a high-ranking chief, and his death resulted in calls for war which, thanks to the nationalist fervor that the government had spent the past three years whipping up, soon spread throughout the country. The government had no desire for full-scale war with Indénié, but the clamor was too loud to ignore, and the ruling parties faced a revolt among their own back benches if they delayed. A declaration of war was made – one of the last conflicts in which that formality would be observed – and the Ivoirian army mobilized and crossed the border.
Indénié was a considerably poorer and less populous country than Côte d'Ivoire, and its army was smaller and less well-equipped. But the Indénié military was on its own territory, and the government had been preparing for a defensive war for some time. Also, the Ivoirian government had been using the crisis to purge the army, forcing experienced northern officers to retire and replacing them with less experienced Baoulé who were promoted for their political connections. The defenders thus inflicted several humiliating defeats on the Ivoirian army during the first weeks of the war, and bought time for the territorial reserve units to mobilize and harass Ivoirian supply columns. But by the spring of 1958, numbers and hardware were beginning to tell, and the Ivoirian army tightened a ring around the capital.
Even as the siege of Abengourou began, the Indénié government appealed to the Court of Arbitration, invoking the Washington Conference provisions against aggressive war. [6] To the surprise of many, the Ivoirian government appeared in answer to the lawsuit, but it soon became clear that its object was to delay any ruling until the conquest of Indénié was a fait accompli. The court wasted little time on the issue of whether Indénié was rightfully Ivoirian territory – the post-Great War peace treaty was settled international law – but the suit devolved into argument over whether the initial clash had taken place on the Ivoirian side of the border and whether there had been a previous pattern of border violations constituting aggressive action by Indénié. At one point, Côte d'Ivoire’s lawyers even demanded that the court send a surveying team to formally demarcate the frontier so that it could determine on whose soil each clash took place.
The lengthening proceedings caused consternation not only among the judges but among political leaders who had invested much in making the court an instrument of international peacekeeping. They realized that this was the first real test of the emerging international system, and that if the court failed to prevent Indénié from being conquered, it would lose all credibility as an alternative to the battlefield. Several countries in Africa and Europe, most notably France, made increasingly unsubtle hints that they might intervene if the court failed to do so.
The Court of Arbitration keeps no records of its back-room deliberations, so there is no way to know if it was moved to action by these hints or by its own exasperation. But whatever the reason, there is no doubt about what it did. On September 11, 1958, the court cut short its proceedings, ruling unanimously that, as a matter of jus ad bellum, a minor border clash didn’t justify full-scale war regardless of where it took place. It therefore declared Côte d'Ivoire the aggressor, and ordered that it quit Indénié within ten days or face international intervention.
The ruling brought about a crisis of confidence within the Ivoirian government. They were now too deeply committed to the war to back down, but they also couldn’t defeat the Court of Arbitration’s permanent peacekeeping force. After several days of deliberation, they decided that they would be most likely to survive a fighting retreat, so when peacekeepers drawn from more than sixty nations landed to relieve Abengourou, the Ivoirian army offered resistance. It took two months for the last soldier to be driven back across the border, with the final skirmish on Indénié soil occurring on January 7, 1959.
That wasn’t the final battle of the war, though, because the Ivoirian army now turned on itself. The northern soldiers and officers blamed the government for both the war and the defeat, and they rose up against the loyalist units. The result was several months of confused civil war before the northerners took Grand Bassam and established a military regime. This government was not only dictatorial but was just as ethnically chauvinist as the prior one, resulting in near-constant insurgency and terrorism among the Baoulé and the peoples of the southwest.
It was 1964 before France and Liberia were able to broker a settlement, and the solution was an extreme one at that. Côte d'Ivoire was partitioned into southern and northern states, with the northern one, although a republic, calling itself the Four Kingdoms after the precolonial states of Kabadougou, Senoufo, Kong and Bouna. This finally ended the fighting, and the creative energy that had characterized urban Côte d'Ivoire in the 1940s began to recover. Within a few years, the two states were even able to cooperate after a fashion, joining the Afro-Atlantic Common Market together. But erasing the legacy of war and ethnic politics would take a long time…
… In Guinea, the conflict was the same but the resolution was simpler. As in Côte d'Ivoire, the post-independence government was dominated by coastal ethnic groups along with the few interior ones that had secured favor during the Latin Right period, and froze out the others, particularly the southern peoples and the Fulani. In 1961, after a clumsy attempt to purge the army, the Fula-dominated military took over.
Unlike its Ivoirian counterpart, however, the Guinean army didn’t make the mistake of being ethnically chauvinist in turn. It aggressively promoted a multiethnic civil service and wrote a need-based budgeting formula into the constitution. It also adopted an Afro-Atlantic ideology, accepting the Liberian-inspired idea that West Africa and its diaspora were a single cultural region. Indeed, it accepted the notion, which was gaining currency in Liberia and Sierra Leone, that Africans living on the shores of the Atlantic had merged into a single people, and promoted an Afro-Atlantic identity over existing ethnic loyalties and even encouraged the creolization of indigenous languages.
The military regime succeeded, in large measure, in eliminating the lingering inequalities that had caused ethnic conflict during the 1950s. Its equal and opposite cultural reaction, however, met with resistance from those who opposed being creolized. And as the memory of the independence struggle became more distant and the country grew more prosperous, more people called for the return of democracy…
… Mauritania, too, had ethnic strife, but it fit the East African and Congolese paradigm more closely: it was a weak state that had never been strongly administered by France and had few institutions inherited from the French period. After independence, the majority Moors, the Haratins (descendants of slaves who had become a distinct class since abolition under French rule), and the “black” ethnic groups of the south which were kin to those in Senegal and Mali. For a decade, an uneasy modus vivendi existed between the three, but in 1967, a rebellion broke out among the Haratins, who were treated in some places as if they were still slaves. As the fighting spread through the country, both Moors and Haratins clashed with the southern peoples, many of whom fled as refugees to the neighboring countries. At the end of the decade, the situation had degenerated into a three-cornered war, fought mainly in the southern part of the country, which showed little sign of stopping.
The Court of Arbitration had no remit for civil wars, so it was up to the neighboring states to broker a peace, and by 1970, France, Mali and Morocco were all engaged in doing so. A peace movement had also developed among the refugees – the Moors who had fled to Morocco as well as the Wolof and Pulaar in Senegal – and later in the year, their leaders agreed to form a multiethnic government in exile. But it was far from clear that this government could take power without international intervention, or that it would succeed in bringing civil peace even if it did rule…
… The conflicts in the former French colonies, especially Côte d'Ivoire, had echoes in the Mossi kingdom. As early as the 1940s, factions within the Mossi government were discontented with the poverty and increasingly totalitarian repression that were required to maintain the state as a hermit kingdom, and the Ivoirian civil war – which spilled over into Mossi territory on several occasions – gave them the upper hand. It was their back-channel contacts with France and the Niger Valley states that prevented either side from establishing bases on Mossi soil, and the fighting also brought home the realization that the Mossi state was part of West Africa whether it wanted to be or not.
All that, combined with growing popular discontent, discredited the hard-line factions, and after the bad harvest of 1962, the opposition took sudden form as the normally caste-conscious Mossi took to the streets. This would turn into another “dancing revolution” as the dissident ministers seized the opportunity to stage a palace coup and proclaim an end to the kingdom’s isolation. This was easier said than done, because of the compensation claims that still loomed over the nationalization of foreign-owned plantations, but in 1965, a breakthrough was achieved when Britain and a consortium of Niger Valley nations agreed to assume these claims. The quid pro quo was a commercial treaty in which the Mossi joined the regional customs union and allowed foreign companies to resume business, although it was able to insist that such companies take Mossi partners and make transfers of knowledge and technology.
For the Mossi, the age of the hermit kingdom was over. But the struggle to escape that era’s legacy of poverty would be a long one, and many wondered whether the nation could keep its dearly-won cultural independence…
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Najat Mansouri, The Desert’s Edge (Algiers: Feraoun, 2006)
… In the depths of the Sahara, the oil-rich economies confronted the challenges of wealth and modernity during the 1960s much as they had done the decade before. Greater Bornu had Belloist traditions of solidarity and a strong social welfare state to mediate growth; the Toucouleur Empire, which was investor and supplier rather than an oil-drilling country itself, held to participatory patterns of growth; and the Kingdom of the Arabs kept throwing money at the problem and enabling traditional patterns of life to be carried on with ever greater luxury. [7] But none of these policies could please everyone, and even where there was a broad consensus about how to manage oil wealth, some inevitably found it alienating. The Shelterers – the traditionalists who eschewed technology and modern ways of life as inherently tempting to sin [8] – gained recruits in all three nations, and though they would always be a small minority, it became clear that they were a persistent one.
By this time they were also forming distinct variations. Some stayed in, or even moved to, the cities, where peri-urban Shelterer enclaves were common by 1970; these were the ones who were willing to work in and trade with the wider society and use services such as modern medicine, although they eschewed modern trappings within the walls of their compounds. Others, whose withdrawal was more complete, lived in self-contained villages or nomadic communities and refused congress with any product of the twentieth century, even medicine. And then there were the hardest core of fanatics, the ones who sought not merely to withdraw but to strike back. They saw modernity as a dynamic force that would always keep encroaching on them, and limiting the space in which their lives could be lived, unless it were stopped.
The first terror bombing of an oil well took place in the Kingdom of the Arabs in 1965, and by the end of the decade, fanatic Shelterers were also attacking cities there and in the neighboring countries. The government struck back at the sending troops to pursue the terrorists’ networks and putting heavy pressure on the Shelterer communities to provide information. This raised a dilemma for those communities’ leaders: the great majority of them condemned the violence and only wanted to be left alone, but cooperation with the government was cooperation with sin, and was seen as even more so when innocents were caught in the crossfire…
… At the desert’s southern edge, another challenge awaited: the slow advance of the dunes into the Sahelian nations. Several dry years in the early 1960s, combined with overgrazing, decimated the grasses that anchored the soil, and by the end of the decade, the desert was on the march. [9] At the time, no one knew and few guessed that this was a forerunner of a changing global climate, but it was clear that no one state could fight the desert alone, and that doing so required a Belloist community of nations.
In 1969, in response to a Malian initiative, representatives of the Sahelian nations – including France, represented by the Senegalese departmental government – met at an encampment by the Tree of Ténéré, an acacia located in greater Bornu more than 400 kilometers from the nearest other tree. [10] There, they agreed to pool their resources for plantings and other anti-desertification measures, jointly manage subterranean aquifers and oases, and regulate nomadic land use, and pledged that the richer Sahelian states would help the poorer ones implement farming and herding practices that would minimize overgrazing and deforestation. The League of the Tree of Ténéré, as it was called, would be the first multinational authority established for primarily environmental reasons, and it would include all the Sahelian nations from Bornu and its vassals all the way to Senegal…
… On the northern rim of the Sahara, the pan-Maghrebi movement of the 1930s and 40s was largely spent as a political force. It had achieved democracy in Morocco and the Rif Republic, inspired Algeria to loosen its ties to France, and even played a part in the Libyan uprising [11], but with those victories won, the north African nations proved too diverse and too wedded to their political and economic networks to want further union. This was shown most pointedly in Algeria, where the territorial government called a second independence referendum in 1963: despite the fact that more than 100,000 Frenchmen had left for metropolitan France after Algeria gained autonomy, support for independence actually declined and the voters reaffirmed autonomous overseas territory status by a considerable margin. Algeria was enough master in its own house to satisfy its people’s demand for self-rule and equality, and familial and economic ties across the Mediterranean prevailed against appeals to Maghrebi solidarity.
On the other hand, pan-Maghrebism continued to gain strength as a cultural movement. The 1950s and 60s saw a resurgence of interest in Berber heritage all along the southern Mediterranean littoral, and the growth of television and air travel brought the music and drama of all the Maghrebi and Saharan countries to each other. And here, Algeria was a leader. It was the richest and second most populous counry in the Maghreb, and its popular music, with its mix of Sufi, secular Arabic, Berber and European forms, became known throughout the region. And as a TAOM, Algeria had the right to conduct diplomacy in cultural and educational matters, and by 1970 it was a regular sponsor of regional collaborations…
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[1] See posts 3872 and 3893.
[2] See post 5502.
[3] See posts 206 and 5502.
[4] See posts 885 and 4263.
[5] See post 5533.
[6] See post 5221.
[7] See post 5533.
[8] See posts 5008, 5533 and 5911.
[9] In OTL, this happened a few years later, but it has been hastened ITTL by greater industrial development.
[10] This tree existed IOTL, with roots going down 36 meters to the water table, until it was knocked down by a drunk driver in 1973. It and another tree to the north were, according to Wikipedia, the only individual trees to be shown on a 1:4,000,000-scale map.
[11] See post 5533.
What was founded in 1993 was the Deutsche Börse AG as a Joint-Stock-Company; before that, stock exchanges in Germany were organized as some kind of self-governing body of the traders. Generally, 1585 is taken as the formal founding year of the Frankfurt Stocke Exchange. OTOH, although Frankfurt has been one of the most important stock exchanges in Germany for centuries, it gained its pre-eminent role only after WWII. There are several regional exchanges, and there were more in the past; for 1897, WP lists 27: Berlin, Breslau, Danzig, Düsseldorf, Elbing, Essen, Frankfurt, Gleiwitz, Halle, Königsberg, Magdeburg, Memel, Posen, Stettin (Prussia), München, Augsburg (Bavaria), Leipzig, Dresden, Zwickau, Chemnitz (Saxonia), Stuttgart (Württemberg), Mannheim (Baden), Mülhausen, Straßburg (Alsatia-Lotharingia), Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck. Most of them only had local significance. Before WWI, the actual leader among the German stock exchanges was Berlin; it reached this Position during the 1880s and 1890s, so this is something I'd expect to happen ITTL as well, and without the catastrophes of OTL WWI & II that lead to total reorderings of Germany's political and economic structures, I'd expect Berlin to become and remain the main stock exchange in Germany.
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Actually that's how it has been ITTL since the end of Spanish rule there and that white state is the Maguindanao Sultanate, that white single pixel on the western peninsular is Zamboanga. So yeah, don't attempt to "correct" it, okay?
Also AE, I too like the map! But Nauru isn't part of Nauru and the Gilbert Islands, so you'd better fix that.
Ok, ok. I'm sorry. I stand corrected gentlemen. You guys are right of course. I just didn't notice, especially the Zamboanga Republic's tiny white dot there.
I never thought that Zamboanga is more of a city-state while the Philippine Republic also covers part of Mindanao. I kinda forgot about that too. And of course Sulu getting most of the Zamboanga peninsula. Lanao is part of Maguindanao too.
Well, I think it's totally right. Sorry guys. Hehehe.
Thank you Jonathan for making me go on a Wiki-walk for the past hour or so on famous trees, just because you used a particular one for the update above.
Oh, wait. No thank you, Jonathan. No thank you.
Oh, wait. No thank you, Jonathan. No thank you.
To me, it looked like the Singing Revolution several decades earlier. The Shelterers' nutjob wing, on the other hand, reminded me of Unabomber - if Unabomber had been many, and an Islamic fundamentalist. Why are they using bombs if they reject modern technology, though?
To me, it looked like the Singing Revolution several decades earlier. The Shelterers' nutjob wing, on the other hand, reminded me of Unabomber - if Unabomber had been many, and an Islamic fundamentalist. Why are they using bombs if they reject modern technology, though?
They are also reminiscent of Boko Haram.
Sulemain
Banned
To me, it looked like the Singing Revolution several decades earlier. The Shelterers' nutjob wing, on the other hand, reminded me of Unabomber - if Unabomber had been many, and an Islamic fundamentalist. Why are they using bombs if they reject modern technology, though?
Fanatics aren't usually internally consistent.
To me, it looked like the Singing Revolution several decades earlier. The Shelterers' nutjob wing, on the other hand, reminded me of Unabomber - if Unabomber had been many, and an Islamic fundamentalist. Why are they using bombs if they reject modern technology, though?
Never underestimate the ability of people to rationalize violating their own (supposedly) closely-held principles...
Would the later German unification of TTL affect that, though? ITTL the North German Confederation lasted thirty years, meaning that government wasn't centralized in Berlin until the late 1890s. Would this give another city such as Frankfurt or one of the Hanseatic city-states time to become pre-eminent in finance, or would the pull of Berlin as the Prussian capital and the NDB's center of gravity still draw most of the bankers there?
In OTL, the Zamboanga Republic had considerable territorial claims but only controlled the city; I figured that would be true ITTL as well given that its main strength is commercial rather than military.
The Philippine Republic has that part of Mindanao island that isn't part of one of the traditional sultanates.
For the most part, yes. The former French West Africa (except Mali) will be part of TTL's rebuttal to the "colonialism wasn't so bad" argument - it will be held up as a model of how well-intentioned and enlightened policies can still fuck things up when imposed from the top down - but by the 1970s, most of these countries are starting to win the battle with their past.
The environmental and ideological conflicts along the Saharan rim, though, could take somewhat longer.
Thank you Jonathan for making me go on a Wiki-walk for the past hour or so on famous trees, just because you used a particular one for the update above.
Oh, wait. No thank you, Jonathan. No thank you.
Always happy to be of service.
You know, Dance Dance Revolution never crossed my mind.
I hadn't thought of Estonia either, although the comparison is very apt. I was aiming for a portrayal of what a modern "people power" revolution would look like in TTL's West Africa, given the strong cultural elements of dance and music and the political use of those art forms. The Igbo Dancing Women's Movement of OTL, which really hasn't been studied enough, has been my primary template for West African nonviolent action.The Unabomber analogy has been mentioned before on this thread, and it was my primary model. I did also think of Boko Haram, though - the militant Shelterers aren't a military organization (yet) and they don't go around enslaving young girls, but they do think that the only way to prevent modernism from overrunning them is to violently expel it from the region.
Why are they using bombs if they reject modern technology, though?
From the Shelterer fanatics' point of view, there's nothing to rationalize. Gunpowder isn't modern - it's been around for centuries. Hell, even the Amish use deer rifles. One of the Shelter nutjobs would see nothing wrong, even notionally, with setting off an IED.
I'm surprised that given South America's different borders and somewhat spotty history a Amazon River Authority or similar hasn't sprung up. It seems like TTL would be the perfect venue for an organization to safeguard the waters, the watershed, and the people who live along it.
Excellent update, by the way. I'm particularly interested in the Mossi and how neo-colonialism (of a sort) may play out as they interact with their neighbors.
Cheers,
Ganesha
Excellent update, by the way. I'm particularly interested in the Mossi and how neo-colonialism (of a sort) may play out as they interact with their neighbors.
Cheers,
Ganesha