Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Reading between the lines here, although ITTL it seems that Russia is being generally reactionary it seems that the left is getting off lighter than IOTL. It seems that with the Narodniki being (marginally) more successful we don't have them turning to assassination and that the Russian state is busy stomping on minorities and peasants so there's not as much repression to go around for the leftists in the cities. Am I on the right track or reading too much into things?
Also just how thorough was the ethnic cleansing in areas like the north side of the Caucasus? Are the Chechens gone?
Very interesting to see what this is doing to the demographics of Anatolia and the Balkans. It seems that the Ottomons will hold on to a good bit of land in the Balkans and have a strong demographic position in Anatolia but there seems to be some foreshadowing that they'll lose the Arab provinces sooner or later, but maybe I'm reading too much into stuff...
Also just how thorough was the ethnic cleansing in areas like the north side of the Caucasus? Are the Chechens gone?
Very interesting to see what this is doing to the demographics of Anatolia and the Balkans. It seems that the Ottomons will hold on to a good bit of land in the Balkans and have a strong demographic position in Anatolia but there seems to be some foreshadowing that they'll lose the Arab provinces sooner or later, but maybe I'm reading too much into stuff...
Faeelin
Banned
I'm surprised the Ottomans don't try to simply expand the number of seats on the Bank, but I can see the problem.
Fantastic, as always.
Two other points which occur to me: In the ATL, you might see many Muslims from Russia end up in the USA. Do they get treated as whites?
Secondly, I'm a bit concerned about this rise of Arab nationalism. Why is there any rise in OTL? The Ottomans are successfully defending the Islamic World against hostile Europeans; if anything I'd expect stronger Pan-Islamism.
Fantastic, as always.
Two other points which occur to me: In the ATL, you might see many Muslims from Russia end up in the USA. Do they get treated as whites?
Secondly, I'm a bit concerned about this rise of Arab nationalism. Why is there any rise in OTL? The Ottomans are successfully defending the Islamic World against hostile Europeans; if anything I'd expect stronger Pan-Islamism.
Or just squish the liberals through extra-constitutional means, although I guess that things are precarious enough in the sprawling empire that they didn't want to upset things.
Maybe not; the example of OTL says no, I believe even Christian Armenians got treated as undesirable Asians.
OTOH, nonwhites are in a stronger position than OTL. Not nearly strong enough, and they don't have the outrages of OTL to compare to. But Armenians and even Japanese managed to immigrate anyway OTL, along with Jews from Russia, so I daresay they'll at least come over anyway, and they'll have coreligionist allies who whatever else anyone can try to say against them, are long-established Americans.
It's still very much up in the air for us, the studio audience, which side if either the Americans take in the Great War. That will have a lot of bearing on how the status of formerly Russian Muslims shakes down. OTL the Tsar was on our side, legally speaking, and then the Jewish immigrants who fled him (suspicious, except Americans had some pride in being a land of freedom they could flee oppression to) with their Germanic language (suspicious!) were strongly leftists of some kind or other (suspicious! suspicious!) and thus liable to sympathize with the anti-Tsarists even when they went radically Bolshevik. Yet despite the viciousness of US anti-Semitism that persisted even after the Second World War, I'd say the Jews were clearly here to stay and major players in US politics before 1930.
Islamic Central Asians might not be able to fall into the strategic niche stronghold US Jews were able to carve for themselves OTL, but I daresay if the Tsar winds up on the wrong side of the war from the point of view of American elites, they will be able to strengthen their hand in American ethnic politics considerably, especially if the US has good relations with any breakaway Central Asian states the Ottoman/British alliance will doubtless seek to foster.
Even if some of those states are playing off Anglo-Ottoman influence against invitations to membership in a new, somewhat faith-based but leftist radical Russian confederation. They might wind up being a kind of bridge between radical Russians and the West, especially because these radicals, turning on the Tsar, would be turning on an enemy not an ally.
But of course the USA might stay neutral, or even somehow wind up on the Franco-Austro-Russian side. I still think the immigrants can hang in there about as well as Yiddish Jews in New York did OTL.
I also guess the US Muslim community won't be unambiguously on one side or the other. If I had to pick one, I'd say they'd back the side with the Ottomans, but the French are not going to be totally without credit among Muslim-Americans either.
Neutrality through the whole war seems not unlikely at this point.
Faeelin
Banned
Oddly, Armenians were found to be white by the Supreme Court, and lower courts considered Syrians to be (usually) white. Not Afghans, though.
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/White05.htm#Armenians
Then again, you also have Chinese people being treated as white in Mississippi under Jim Crow, all of which proves that the only race that matters is the human race, which has substantial room for improvement.
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/White05.htm#Armenians
Then again, you also have Chinese people being treated as white in Mississippi under Jim Crow, all of which proves that the only race that matters is the human race, which has substantial room for improvement.
You're on the right track. Life for the urban left certainly isn't sweetness and light - leftists have to be very careful to avoid imprisonment or police violence, and any organizations have to stay underground - but the Russian state has higher priorities at the moment. Not to mention that the government is running a crash industrialization program, and it would be a bad idea to kill off all the skilled workers.
This probably means that, come the war and its aftermath, the "median leftist" in Russia will be incrementally less radical than in OTL.
They're not all gone; some of them are holding on in the mountains, where it's very hard for a nineteenth-century army (or even, as we've seen, a late-twentieth-century one) to rout them out. The Chechens in the cities and towns have been expelled, though.
They may lose the Arab provinces, but then again they may not. What will have to happen eventually is for the Ottomans to sort out their nationality issues, which will lead to them becoming a different kind of empire, but exactly how that will play out is still up in the air.
Messing with the central bank would send the empire's credit ratings into the toilet - one of the key reasons why the empire was able to avoid default was the creditor nations' trust in the bank's professionalism. The creditors, BTW, feel much more at home working with the liberals, many of whom were Western-educated, than the conservatives.
Also, changing the number of seats on the bank's board of governors would require a constitutional amendment, which the reactionaries aren't strong enough to put through.
Squishing the liberals extraconstitutionally would be a very risky proposition - they may have lost the election, but they still have powerful supporters in the bureaucracy and the army, and they control the mob in the capital. Also, the constitutional order has lasted long enough, and produced good enough results in terms of economic growth and military victory, that even the moderate conservatives have been reconciled to it. It's easier to negotiate with the liberals, especially since they (the conservatives) are negotiating from a position of strength and can get most of what they want.
Some would probably go to the USA, but I don't know if there would be "many" - the Ottoman Empire is much closer, and the Russian Muslims have historic and religious reasons to go there. I suspect that those who choose the United States would be a relatively small group, skewed disproportionately toward the urban and educated, and that they'd fare much like the turn-of-the-last-century Bosnian Muslim immigrants of OTL - in other words, that they'd fit in pretty well, and there wouldn't be enough of them to get on the racists' radar screen.
They won't go to South Carolina, though - the Islam there is a bit beyond their comfort zone, and they'd be looking either for jobs in the industrial north or homestead land out west.
According to Kimmerling and Migdal's The Palestinian People: A History, the roots of Arab nationalism were already in place at the time of the POD, and the Arab revolt of 1834 helped to galvanize an embryonic national identity. Arab nationalism was of course in a very early phase during the nineteenth century, and the Arabs' grievances related more to perceived oppression and neglect by a distant capital than to any grudge against the Sultan as such, but it did exist.
It will, however, develop differently in TTL. For one thing, the competing nationalism will be a more inclusive Ottoman nationalism rather than an exclusively Turkish one, so the Arabs will have some space to become Ottoman patriots. For another, as you say, the Ottomans are delivering the goods whatever their faults may be. The Arab nationalists' focus for the time being, albeit with exceptions, will be greater rights within the empire - and as I said to Daztur above, the Ottomans will eventually have to come to terms with the diversity of their subject population.
The Central Asian Muslims may be able to take that strategic position simply because there are fewer Jews! The Jewish niche in the United States won't be as large (although it will still be significant) and another skilled, educated and literary-minded immigrant population - such as elite Kazan Tatars or Kazakhs - could fill some of the "Jewish" roles alongside the contemporaneous Jewish immigrants. And yes, they could easily be a bridge between the United States and postwar Russia - and even if the US stays neutral, it could be neutral in one or the other side's favor.
Also, while (as you say) France will not be without credit among American Muslims, the Central Asian immigrants will for obvious reasons be much more focused on Russia. The Muslims most likely to favor France will be in South Carolina, which has increasing trade with French West Africa.
Update possibly tomorrow, more likely Thursday.
So Eastern European Jews will largely stay in that area IATL? Will they still go in large numbers to places like France or the UK (I imagine they would)?
That will be interesting for the 21st century.
That will be interesting for the 21st century.
This reminds me of how Apartheid South Africa called Japanese "honorary whites".
You put me in an awkward position here, Jonathan... On the one hand, I love seeing the Ottoman Empire (and the Muslim world in general) do well in ATL's. But I also like seeing Russia do well too, and you've gone and pitted them against each other! Conflicting sentiments! Gaah!
Ah, well... At least reading about it is a pleasure, as always.
[Edit] And belated congrats on 100,000 views!
Ah, well... At least reading about it is a pleasure, as always.
[Edit] And belated congrats on 100,000 views!
The total number of Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire is 1.6 million, which about 700,000 less than OTL; the reason is that, although the level of oppression and pogrom violence is about the same, the migration period is shorter. The Great War will cut things off for a few years; after that, the period of political flux will lead to some emigration, but the post-1900 environment will be different enough that more Jews will stay put. This will indeed mean that Russia and, especially, Poland will have a higher Jewish population going into the twentieth century.
The breakdown of emigration is (approximately) as follows:
Ottoman Empire: 600,000, of which 75,000 to Palestine;
United States: 500,000 (less than a third of OTL);
Salonika: 200,000;
Western Europe: 100,000;
Cape Colony and East Africa: 100,000;
Argentina and other Latin America: 100,000;
Canada: 40,000;
Australia: 10,000.
Most of the emigrants to Western Europe will go to Britain and France, although some will also settle in the North German Confederation, the Netherlands and Belgium. The total number is less than OTL but still substantial.
Hell, even African-American visitors got that treatment from time to time. Not to mention that it was possible to petition the government to change one's racial classification, and these petitions were sometimes granted. Racial politics is often more political than racial (to the extent, of course, that "race" can be said to be anything other than a political construct to begin with).
They're pitted against each other in the immediate term, yes. In the long term, though, their relationship may not be zero-sum - especially since I've just realized what one of the major ideological movements of TTL's twentieth century will be, and among its successes will be the intertwining of parts of the Ottoman and Russian realms. (The only hints I'll give right now: the movement will be a response to the dilemma of multi-ethnic empires in an age of nationalism and democracy, and it won't be federalism, although it will partake of some federalist aspects.)
Somewhat belated question on the Coasters from a while back. ITTL there is a lot more trade between various African colonies than IOTL for various reasons. Why didn't the colonial powers crack down on it since they didn't usually like that sort of thing IOTL. Didn't care? Stuff smuggled? Turned a blind eye since it was small scale? Different economic ideas? Or were the colonial powers IOTL more permissive to that kind of trade than I've been lead to believe...
The Coasters' trade was nominally illegal, but it was tolerated because (a) it was small-scale; (b) it was an established fact by the time the colonial powers took firm control; and (c) it was useful. The last factor was particularly important: the coastal traders were a source of information for colonial authorities as to events in neighboring colonies; they provided amenities that were otherwise difficult or expensive to obtain (especially in small outposts where European goods were hard to come by), and many of them had European investors or silent partners who provided a form of protection. Also, by this time, most of the Coasters have learned what they can get away with, and avoid the kinds of cargo that would attract the authorities' attention.
This wasn't 100 percent: there would be occasional crackdowns, after which the Coasters would move their operations to other ports for a while. Eventually they'd drift back in - even during the Great War, the coastal trade will never be entirely interrupted.
Symposium on the 125th Anniversary of the Brussels Conference
University of Sokoto: September 15, 2011
MODERATOR: Our first panel, to open the symposium, will be "The Brussels Conference: The View from 10,000 Meters." On my far left is our own Aminatou Salazar, chair of the history department and author of Africa's Twentieth Century and The Brussels Verdict. To her right, on my immediate left, Thierry Landier of the École diplomatique in Paris. To my immediate right, Aishwarya Trivedi of Zanzibar University, whose work on colonialism in the Congo Basin will be published next year. And last, Andries Viljoen of Stellenbosch University, currently visiting at the University of South Carolina and author of Africa and the Atlantic World.
I'll start the discussion with a basic, open question. The Brussels Conference has been described as both a success and a failure. Which one was it?
LANDIER: Both.
VILJOEN: I disagree. The answer is definitely "neither."
SALAZAR: A success or failure from whose point of view?
MODERATOR: I see we're making progress already, but let me be more specific. We'll focus on the failures first, because that's what gets the press. What were some of the complicating factors going into the conference?
LANDIER: Well, the diplomatic corps still studies it as an example of what happens when you get too ambitious. The organizers in the French government had a straightforward objective: partition Africa amicably so that the powers could pursue their colonial goals without the risk of war. But then Britain said "let's sort out Grão Pará and Patagonia while we're at it," the Dutch wanted to revisit the Aceh question, Russia wanted to talk about Korea, someone brought up Burma and Siam...
TRIVEDI: It was never intended to be a general conference on imperial boundaries, and to be fair, King Leopold did his best to keep the focus on Africa. But the delegates wanted to do their horse-trading, and would often demand concessions elsewhere in return for their support on a particular African dispute. Portugal, for instance, was willing to concede some of the disputed areas in Mozambique to Britain, but it wanted a readjustment of Goa's trade status vis-a-vis British India, and that was well beyond what the British delegation was authorized to discuss. Some of the issues the parties wanted to bring up, such as Korea, would have required the participation of countries that weren’t present. All the side bets and horse-trading got in the way.
MODERATOR: Speaking of Leopold, did his own frustrated African ambitions help to scupper the conference?
SALAZAR: There were certainly accusations. During and after the conference, several newspapers reported that Leopold had offered to favor one side or another in resolving border disputes if they opened the door to a Belgian role in the Congo Basin, but this was never proven, and the newspapers' sources were dubious.
LANDIER: To all appearances, Leopold was neutral between the contending parties, which is what France was looking for when they asked him to host the conference. I could actually make the case that doing so helped to soothe his frustration, because it made him a player in African affairs despite not having a colony. Whether he was partial behind closed doors... there are a couple of instances that seem suspicious, but as Aminatou said, nothing in the way of proof.
MODERATOR: Moving on to other complicating factors...
SALAZAR: The conference had a real problem of moral legitimacy. Earlier in the nineteenth century, European interference in Africa was justified by reference to suppressing the slave trade. By the time of the Brussels Conference, though, the Royal Navy and my Malê ancestors had made that a dead letter. There was still some slave-trading along the trans-Saharan route from southern Sudan to Libya, but between the Ottomans, Bornu and the Egyptian army, it was clearly on its way out. Naked imperialism was a much tougher sell, especially with the Congo becoming more and more of a scandal.
TRIVEDI: Oh, yes. The first of Mamadou Camara’s Congo novels had come out the previous year. It was fiction, of course, and no one at the time knew who wrote it, but the author was clearly a Congo hand, and its account fit well with the atrocity reports that the rubber companies were circulating about their competitors. Everyone was talking about the Congo, and the outrage was genuine; no one wanted to be party to massacre and oppression, and the diverse origins of the rubber companies made most of the participating countries complicit.
Intervention in the Congo actually became one of the major themes of the conference, with the parties stressing the need to systematize colonial rule in order to protect the Africans against oppression by profit-driven concessionaires. That rang a bit hollow, though, given that the Europeans were essentially justifying imperialism as a way to control their own excesses.
VILJOEN: The ultimate justification that emerged from the conference was development: bringing European civilization to the natives, “giving our younger brothers a hand up.” That was a vague enough rubric to include nearly all the powers’ conceptions of what colonialism should be, and also one that was easy enough to honor in the breach. It seemed to satisfy the honor of most of the participants. But the hypocrisy of imposing colonial rule for the Africans’ own good, at a conference to which they weren’t invited, didn’t go unremarked.
MODERATOR: I was meaning to get to the invitation list. I understand it was a contentious issue in itself.
VILJOEN: Definitely. Including the Ottomans was uncontroversial, but a couple of the powers also wanted to invite some of the internationally recognized African states. Russia, for instance, argued strongly that the Ethiopians should get a place at the table – that they, too, were an imperial power which was expanding into Somalia and the upper White Nile. Britain made the same argument for its Omani protégés, and there was also some talk of inviting Liberia so that it could settle its border disputes with the British and French colonies. A few of the organizers even argued that Atlantic countries with an interest in the African trade should participate. But the consensus was that things would get out of hand if there were too many participants, and besides, why invite the Africans to spoil the fun of carving up their continent?
TRIVEDI: Not that the Omanis or Ethiopians went entirely unrepresented – the Russians spoke up consistently for Ethiopian interests, and Britain argued for the Omanis.
SALAZAR: Which meant, though, that the Somali and Sudanese areas that got marked off for Ethiopian expansion were designated as Russian spheres of interest, which would cause some problems later. And of course, no one stood up for the rest of Africa.
MODERATOR: They tried to speak for themselves, though, didn’t they?
LANDIER: Yes, that was one of the more memorable moments of the conference – two moments, actually. There were two separate attempts to crash the party, one by a delegation from the kingdom of Ankole in the Great Lakes, and one by a coalition of labor unions from Ilorin, Sokoto and Adamawa. I believe Aminatou had family in the second group.
SALAZAR: A great-grandfather, in fact – he was a leader in one of the Zaria labor brotherhoods, and would later be a founder of the Abacarist Labor Party here in Sokoto.
MODERATOR: If I may break in, why those two delegations? Why didn’t the Toucouleur send one, or Bornu?
TRIVEDI: Maybe I can answer that. Ankole had recently been taken over by the Brotherhood Faith Assembly, an African missionary church that was descended from Carlsenism. Many of the early leaders came from the marriages between Carlsen’s Swedish settlers and the Maasai, which meant that they were more attuned to European political culture. The same, of course, was true of the Malê trade unionists, who were well aware of how Usman Abacar had worked the British press during the Oyo-Company War. They knew that public opinion in Europe could be valuable to them, and wanted to tell their story to a European audience.
SALAZAR: They certainly were aware of the press, and were in close contact with it throughout the conference. Both delegations made sure the newspapermen knew about their applications for credentials, and when they were denied admission, they held their own conferences on the steps of the Belgian parliament. And they got plenty of coverage, for the novelty if nothing else.
MODERATOR: I expect the two missions had different messages?
VILJOEN: You could certainly say that. The Ankole delegation made the case for “Africa’s five and twenty independent kingdoms, ancient states with venerable cultures, who should be welcomed in brotherhood to the family of nations and not parceled out for conquest” – they were a bit on the flowery side. With the unionists, it was “black and white working men unite.”
MODERATOR: Was this the European public’s introduction to the African labor movement?
SALAZAR: Not entirely. There were Africans in the French and Russian trade unions already, and Malê immigrants were starting to show up in Chatham and London. But this was probably the first that many Europeans had heard about labor unions in Africa itself. Not to mention that many of the European dailies’ readers were hearing for the first time about the kingdoms that the Ankole delegation named off.
TRIVEDI: Not that it made a difference.
SALAZAR: I’ll rephrase my answer to Madam Moderator’s first question: made a difference from what standpoint? It certainly didn’t save Africa from colonialism, but did it move the needle a little? It might well have, judging by some of the postwar proposals for colonial government, and some of the responses to the early demands for self-rule.
LANDIER: Although the mission civilisatrice rhetoric, which also came from the conference, was sometimes an obstacle to those very demands. We sometimes forget that denial of self-rule was seen by some as progressive, especially once a generation had grown up that saw colonialism as the natural state of affairs.
MODERATOR: We’re going a little far afield now, so I’d like to return the discussion to the conference. We’ve been talking about complicating factors, but what about the successes? What were the participants able to get done in spite of themselves?
VILJOEN: There were quite a few, actually. Several of the border disputes were settled, sometimes even between powers that didn’t have amicable relations. The zones of influence along the West African coast from Lagos southward were demarcated; the North German confederation had a free and clear claim to the Ubangi-Shari, Italy to Tunisia, and France to Madagascar and the north side of the lower Congo. The British and Germans agreed to work cooperatively in the Lunda and Barotse regions through to Katanga, although this brought both into further conflict with the Portuguese.
MODERATOR: A partial success, then.
VILJOEN: Correct. And the conference did also enact standards for colonial rule, such as the principle of effectivity: that a power needed to establish either direct rule or a treaty relationship with local rulers in order to make good its colonial claims.
SALAZAR: Free navigation on the Congo, Niger and upper Nile, with Egypt signing on for the lower Nile the following year.
TRIVEDI: The greatest success, though, was probably the establishment of an international authority to run the Congo basin. No one was willing to give the Congo to any single power, so they set up a board to administer it as they’d done with Kraków in 1815, and authorized the formation of an international army and civil service.
LANDIER: I’m not sure I’d call that a success: with the concessionaires resisting every step of the way, establishing control on the ground was much easier said than done, and once the members of the board fell to fighting each other, it turned into a mess very fast.
TRIVEDI: They did deal with the warlord states in Jumbe and Janssen’s Land, though. And after the big war, the international administration provided a framework for state-building. I don’t think anything could have prevented the horrors in the Congo during the later 1880s and 1890s, but the twentieth century could have been much worse without…
MODERATOR: Again, let’s stay on the subject of the conference for now: there will be other panels later to discuss the twentieth century. We’ve just named some of the successes, how about the greatest failures?
VILJOENS: Simply that many of the powers weren’t able to resolve their border disputes, even with Belgian mediation. Britain, Portugal and the North German Confederation still had disputes over zones of influence in southern Africa, the Franco-British quarrels in West Africa and the Sahel were mostly unresolved, and the Omani-Ethiopian border remained very volatile. Katanga too – Msiri’s Yeke kingdom, several of the concessionaires and at least two colonial powers were jockeying for influence there at the time. The parties went back and forth on whether it should be part of the international Congo or not, but ultimately failed to include it, leaving the battles there to be sorted out on the ground. The African Cockpit was still one when the party was over.
SALAZAR: That, and the powers failed to agree on a treaty banning the sale of arms to Africans. Russian and British objections were the main sticking points here: both of them were actively arming their regional proxies, and didn’t want to stop. There was a genuine divide here between the powers who saw African kingdoms as “real” countries and those that didn’t.
MODERATOR: Would you say that created opportunities for the remaining African states?
SALAZAR: Definitely, but also risks. Not many of them managed to ride all the way through the Great War and into the twentieth century without being absorbed by one empire or another.
MODERATOR: So to sum up, what ultimately came out of Brussels?
LANDIER: The European powers tried to systematize African colonialism, and had limited success. And in the doing, they helped set the stage for the Great War.
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I have a question about the Symposium:
Did the participants all speak English, or is this transcript a very good translation?
If translated, it appears to have been done very well, in very colloquial (of the academic variety of course!) speech.
Not even the British Empire of OTL universalized English as much as the post-WWII US dominance. ITTL I think the claim the 20th century would become, looking forward, or was, looking backward, an "American Century" would be much more dubious.
Does English nevertheless become so universal that a conference held in Africa, with only one participant having any association with the USA whatsoever and that a tenuous one, that professor being in this timeline's terms a Boer (or conceivably he's not white at all and what this timeline would call an Afrikaner and not a Boer) and no one having any direct connection to Britain, is still held in English and not, for instance, French?
To be sure the host country was a former British colony and so were the home countries of three participants---conceivably Stellenbosch University is currently either on soil that is still under the British crown somehow, or part of the Commonwealth. Perhaps Sokoto and Zanzibar are Commonwealth too, if distinct from a British Empire that may or may not still exist in some form.
I guess I've answered my own question--though English is probably not the mother tongue, in the sense of the language spoken in their childhood homes, of any of the participants, it would be a language they'd learn very early, as soon as they went to grammar school if not already picking up a lot of it much earlier, and only Landier would have grown up in a country where English in some form is not the default lingua franca of government and business, no matter how proudly independent these countries might be of any formal ties to Britain by now. Actually I'd think maybe Zanzibar might have gone over to Arabic or Swahili perhaps, but given that "Zanizibar" probably refers to a much bigger nation than just the island or even Tanzania of OTL, these languages would at best be merely competitive with English. Arabic would only have an edge if "Zanzibar" includes Oman and maybe more territory on the Arabian peninsula itself.
Landier of course would probably have learned English, at least formally, almost as young as the Africans would have, but one doubts it has any place in formal French government or business. In the African countries I suppose versions of English are deeply entrenched and probably there isn't even a sentiment to dislodge it.
So if the USA also has strong world influence, that's probably a side issue here; the USA could have gone almost completely isolationist and have little influence on world culture and they'd still be having this conference in English. And that would be the case even if all three African countries represented--Zanzibar, Sokoto, and whatever southern African polity Stellenbosch is located in by now--have each cast off all British ties most forcefully and never came under any significant US influence whatsoever.
Not that I get the impression of any such tensions here; if Britain is divorced from these African countries it looks like at this historical distance from those events it's now an amicable estrangement.
And it could all go exactly the same if every one of them is in a loose Commonwealth; I would even say they could all be in the British Empire (well, all but France of course) if we hadn't already been told Sokoto definitely would not be by this late date.
Did the participants all speak English, or is this transcript a very good translation?
If translated, it appears to have been done very well, in very colloquial (of the academic variety of course!) speech.
Not even the British Empire of OTL universalized English as much as the post-WWII US dominance. ITTL I think the claim the 20th century would become, looking forward, or was, looking backward, an "American Century" would be much more dubious.
Does English nevertheless become so universal that a conference held in Africa, with only one participant having any association with the USA whatsoever and that a tenuous one, that professor being in this timeline's terms a Boer (or conceivably he's not white at all and what this timeline would call an Afrikaner and not a Boer) and no one having any direct connection to Britain, is still held in English and not, for instance, French?
To be sure the host country was a former British colony and so were the home countries of three participants---conceivably Stellenbosch University is currently either on soil that is still under the British crown somehow, or part of the Commonwealth. Perhaps Sokoto and Zanzibar are Commonwealth too, if distinct from a British Empire that may or may not still exist in some form.
I guess I've answered my own question--though English is probably not the mother tongue, in the sense of the language spoken in their childhood homes, of any of the participants, it would be a language they'd learn very early, as soon as they went to grammar school if not already picking up a lot of it much earlier, and only Landier would have grown up in a country where English in some form is not the default lingua franca of government and business, no matter how proudly independent these countries might be of any formal ties to Britain by now. Actually I'd think maybe Zanzibar might have gone over to Arabic or Swahili perhaps, but given that "Zanizibar" probably refers to a much bigger nation than just the island or even Tanzania of OTL, these languages would at best be merely competitive with English. Arabic would only have an edge if "Zanzibar" includes Oman and maybe more territory on the Arabian peninsula itself.
Landier of course would probably have learned English, at least formally, almost as young as the Africans would have, but one doubts it has any place in formal French government or business. In the African countries I suppose versions of English are deeply entrenched and probably there isn't even a sentiment to dislodge it.
So if the USA also has strong world influence, that's probably a side issue here; the USA could have gone almost completely isolationist and have little influence on world culture and they'd still be having this conference in English. And that would be the case even if all three African countries represented--Zanzibar, Sokoto, and whatever southern African polity Stellenbosch is located in by now--have each cast off all British ties most forcefully and never came under any significant US influence whatsoever.
Not that I get the impression of any such tensions here; if Britain is divorced from these African countries it looks like at this historical distance from those events it's now an amicable estrangement.
And it could all go exactly the same if every one of them is in a loose Commonwealth; I would even say they could all be in the British Empire (well, all but France of course
) if we hadn't already been told Sokoto definitely would not be by this late date.I like the format too, but I can't take credit for it.
Without giving too much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries away (especially since much of what happens then still hasn't been worked out; this timeline is considerably less scripted than you might think), the symposium is indeed in English. In this timeline as in OTL, Africans typically speak several languages - an ethnic language and one or more languages of wider communication - and the language of the former colonial power (the term "former" being appropriate even for colonies that have now been integrated into the metropole) is typically one of the latter.
In Sokoto, the languages of wider communication are English and Sudanic (the Portuguese-Arabic-Fulfulde creole pioneered by Malê traders). Southern Africa is either English-Afrikaans, German-Afrikaans or Portuguese-Afrikaans, and Stellenbosch is well within the English zone. The nation that Zanzibar is part of has three languages of wider communication, but English is one of them. So English is the language that three out of the four symposium participants have in common, and that each would have learned as a child.
Landier probably didn't learn English in childhood, but he would have studied it as a young man, given its importance to international trade and diplomacy: English isn't quite as hegemonic in TTL as in OTL, but it still has a very strong international presence.
And for the record, Viljoen is white, which in TTL makes him both an Afrikaner (a native speaker of Afrikaans) and a Boer (the term reserved specifically for white native Afrikaans speakers).
Japan not being there is why the attempt to negotiate about Korea never really got off the ground. The serious discussions will happen later. Although, when you think about it, the whole premise of the Brussels Conference was to negotiate about Africa without any Africans present, and Japan, while not being considered equivalent to an African kingdom, is not yet seen as part of the "imperialists' club" in the 1880s.
Anyway, in honor of the 1000th comment, which this is, I'm wondering if there are any artists in the audience. If so, I'd be interested in seeing how y'all render Paulo Abacar, either at the beginning of the story when he is a 55-year-old Malê war-leader or later on when he is the de facto president/king of Sokoto. Or if any of you find another character more inspiring, I'd like to see what you do with that.
Next update will be Usman and Adeseye in London for Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, after which I think I'll update the Egyptian timeline before proceeding to the 1886-93 cycle.