Plausibility Check: Indian Settler Colonies in Africa?

I was wondering, with Africa being quite near to India, if India were to end up being the global colonial power like Europe was OTL, would Africa see the majority of India settlement, like North America saw OTL from Europe?
 
I was wondering, with Africa being quite near to India, if India were to end up being the global colonial power like Europe was OTL, would Africa see the majority of India settlement, like North America saw OTL from Europe?

The only settler colonies OTL were under foreign colonial regimes, of course. Though an interesting early development were very sizable Tamil trader colonies as early as Ptolemaic Egypt on the Red Sea coast.

And of course Caliphate-era Indian worker colonies in Iraq.
 
I was wondering, with Africa being quite near to India, if India were to end up being the global colonial power like Europe was OTL, would Africa see the majority of India settlement, like North America saw OTL from Europe?

Africa has actually seen a lot of Indian settlement IOTL under English colonialism, when Indian workers were sent to work on projects such as the Uganda railroad. The ones that weren't eaten by lions went on to establish diaspora communities that exist to this day.

Indian Global Powers would definitely create colonies in East Africa, but unlike North America the Indian settlers would not have enough of a 'guns, germs, and steel' advantage over the local Africans to replace them. More likely, you'd get an Indian/African creole culture equivalent to OTL's Swahili culture dominating the Indian Ocean coastline.
 
If India became an Imperial power and decided to establish colonies East Africa, primarily from Somalia* to northern Mozambique would very likely be one of their original colonization targets, with the northern portion probably during their first expansion, which IMO would also include colonizing South Arabia.
 
I was wondering, with Africa being quite near to India, if India were to end up being the global colonial power like Europe was OTL, would Africa see the majority of India settlement, like North America saw OTL from Europe?

I'm not sure that Indian colonialism would take the form of settlement as European colonialism did. I suspect a system of vassalage and trade dominance would be more like it.
 

Thande

Donor
Technically you could say Madagascar is an Indian settler colony in Africa if you stretch the definition, given that Malays are also found in India although the colonists most probably came from the Malay peninsula.
 
Technically you could say Madagascar is an Indian settler colony in Africa if you stretch the definition, given that Malays are also found in India although the colonists most probably came from the Malay peninsula.

I'm pretty sure that the only thing Malays and Malayali have in common is having been part of the British Empire and having similar sounding names.
 
I'm pretty sure that the only thing Malays and Malayali have in common is having been part of the British Empire and having similar sounding names.
According to Wikipedia the Madagascaran people came from Borneo, not the Malay Peninsula. Though I would guess a few probably came from there, and part of Borneo is in Malaysia at least.
 
Try something with the Sultanate of Muscat and their own brand of Islam coming closer to some group from the subcontinent, who might settle the areas emptied of slaves.
 
I don't think you can get the same thing one saw in the Americas anywhere else. The American continents had been separated from the rest of the globe for so long that the people there simply didn't have any resistance to the Old World diseases, which led to virgin field epidemics that took out over 50% of the population at a time, in multiple, concussive, waves. There's a reason why in modern times there's just as many Bantu in East Africa alone as there are ethnically indigenous people in all of the Americas.
 
According to Wikipedia the Madagascaran people came from Borneo, not the Malay Peninsula. Though I would guess a few probably came from there, and part of Borneo is in Malaysia at least.


Yes, but my point is that the Malayali are'nt related to the Malays, they're Dravidians who live in South India.


There's a reason why in modern times there's just as many Bantu in East Africa alone as there are ethnically indigenous people in all of the Americas.

That's not really a good comparison, given Bantu not only make-up over 90% of East Africa's population, but you may as well replace Bantu with Romance Languages.
 
That's not really a good comparison, given Bantu not only make-up over 90% of East Africa's population, but you may as well replace Bantu with Romance Languages.

OK, there's just as many Mandinka as there are Native Americans on the North American continent.
 
That's not really a good comparison, given Bantu not only make-up over 90% of East Africa's population, but you may as well replace Bantu with Romance Languages.

That's true, comparing Bantu to Native Americans as a whole is comparing apples to oranges.

A more apt comparison is comparing the entire native population of sub-Saharan Africa to the entire native population of the Americas. Subtracting Africans of European and South Asian descent, the difference in population gets even more stark.

EDIT: Come to think of it, if we include Inuit in the Native American population, we might as well throw in the native population of North Africa as well. Which, once again, increases the population difference and shows how settler colonies in Africa are facing a very different challenge from those in the Americas.
 
OK, there's just as many Mandinka as there are Native Americans on the North American continent.

While it is a better fomr of comparison, it's not correct.

Their are only 13 million Mandinka while their are 48 million Amerindians in the America's.
 
While it is a better fomr of comparison, it's not correct.

Their are only 13 million Mandinka while their are 48 million Amerindians in the America's.

Which is why I said NORTH America. 2.5 million in the US, 1.1 in Canada... its not a pretty picture.

A more apt comparison is comparing the entire native population of sub-Saharan Africa to the entire native population of the Americas. Subtracting Africans of European and South Asian descent, the difference in population gets even more stark.

EDIT: Come to think of it, if we include Inuit in the Native American population, we might as well throw in the native population of North Africa as well. Which, once again, increases the population difference and shows how settler colonies in Africa are facing a very different challenge from those in the Americas.

Thank you. Its good to see someone actually understands the point I'm making.
 
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