Deleted member 67076

I don't get the argument though, why would have there been necessarily that many more states without slavery? It's not like state formation was that fast elsewhere.

One could argue that without the slave trade and trade of weaponry and resources there would have been a slower creation of strong entities rising above the others and becoming large enough.

Plus the area that were devoid of states were generally low population density in of themselves.
Because the Colombian exchange actually caused a massive population boon through the introduction of crops suitable for the African soils- cassava, potatoes, corn, beans, rice (in central Africa), and so on that meant population and population density skyrocketed.

The result in part was actually a large increase in war and the formation of increasingly larger polities over the 1600s in much of Africa. But the slave trade kept crippling stability and so state formation gives way to a resurgence of big man politics and localism.

Without slavery, and those big empires stick around, using their newly earned surplus wealth to reinvest in themselves and enter the global trade networks.
 

Deleted member 67076

With regard to the sugar trade, Europeans can just buy sugar from Africa, India, or an alternate Iraq if need be. Hell Spain itself used to be a major sugar producer under the Moorish era.

You dont need the colonies to satiate demand.
 

Lusitania

Donor
With regard to the sugar trade, Europeans can just buy sugar from Africa, India, or an alternate Iraq if need be. Hell Spain itself used to be a major sugar producer under the Moorish era.

You dont need the colonies to satiate demand.
Why buy when you can double or triple your profit if you able to produce it.
 

Deleted member 67076

Why buy when you can double or triple your profit if you able to produce it.
If for whatever reason it isn't economical to set up your own source (i.e, no slaves as people here argue) there's always the ability to buy it to meet local demand.
 

Lusitania

Donor
If for whatever reason it isn't economical to set up your own source (i.e, no slaves as people here argue) there's always the ability to buy it to meet local demand.
Yes but people are always available that’s the point. Even if it is your own people. Tens of thousands of indentured people and criminals from Europe were also sent to the carribean. Plus sources of people from Asia and Africa are always available. The difference between serf and indentured is not a huge stretch from slavery.
 
Yes but people are always available that’s the point. Even if it is your own people. Tens of thousands of indentured people and criminals from Europe were also sent to the carribean. Plus sources of people from Asia and Africa are always available. The difference between serf and indentured is not a huge stretch from slavery.

The difference is your own people are a consistent production/labor economic asset at home that can't be reasonably substituted for. Buying slaves let's you transform production into additional labor quickly in a pre-Industrial economy, while converting your own, say, farmers sucks capacity from somewhere else in the economy.

It's less a difference between the status of slave, serf, and bondman but the fact they're imported Africans vs. Europeans.
 

Lusitania

Donor
The difference is your own people are a consistent production/labor economic asset at home that can't be reasonably substituted for. Buying slaves let's you transform production into additional labor quickly in a pre-Industrial economy, while converting your own, say, farmers sucks capacity from somewhere else in the economy.

It's less a difference between the status of slave, serf, and bondman but the fact they're imported Africans vs. Europeans.
Those are correct but did not stop the sale of indentured servants to the colonies as well as many criminals.

The argument was that without the slavery trade there would not be plantations and wanted to show that other sources of manpower would of been used including renting people for short period of time.

Yes there would be differences but not lack of the sugar industry or cotton. Especially during early few centuries when there was more animosity between Islamic countries and Christian Europe.


Note: the argument that Europe buy cotton or sugar from Arabs and not pursue other alternatives was proven wrong by Portugal and Europe desire to get to India and China by sea so they not enrich the Ottoman Empire and they profit from it.
 

Deleted member 67076

Yes but people are always available that’s the point. Even if it is your own people. Tens of thousands of indentured people and criminals from Europe were also sent to the carribean. Plus sources of people from Asia and Africa are always available. The difference between serf and indentured is not a huge stretch from slavery.
Thats why we're assuming the slave trade gets kneecapped for whatever reason. Perhaps its too expensive to buy slaves. Perhaps an alternate Sahelian African Empire, or an Indian Empire, or an alternate Ottoman/Persian Empire is mass producing sugar/cotton/whatever to such a demand Europeans cannot compete with their competitive advantages via the sheer scale of production and the lower costs of transport and distance, and thus its just simply much cheaper to buy sugar.
 
Thats why we're assuming the slave trade gets kneecapped for whatever reason. Perhaps its too expensive to buy slaves. Perhaps an alternate Sahelian African Empire, or an Indian Empire, or an alternate Ottoman/Persian Empire is mass producing sugar/cotton/whatever to such a demand Europeans cannot compete with their competitive advantages via the sheer scale of production and the lower costs of transport and distance, and thus its just simply much cheaper to buy sugar.

I'd rather not work around the idea of "just pretend this didn't happen ITTL ok?", as it defeats the entire purpose trying to speculate how history could evolve from there on. Also I sincerely doubt this mass-producing is historically and geo-politically plausible in the reasons you just listed, aside from the fact that, without mechanized equipment or fertilizing technology, the only way to mass produce crops to cause such an impact on global trade is through forced labor. You'd probably just end up with the ottomans - or whatever empire that happens to be sitting around the area, since no definitive PODs were suggested - being the ones to import slaves.

I'm not saying that the AST isn't preventable, only that after a few events take place, such as the colonization of the americas by the europeans, it becomes very economically advantageous.
 

Deleted member 67076

Also I sincerely doubt this mass-producing is historically and geo-politically plausible in the reasons you just listed, aside from the fact that, without mechanized equipment or fertilizing technology, the only way to mass produce crops to cause such an impact on global trade is through forced labor. You'd probably just end up with the ottomans - or whatever empire that happens to be sitting around the area, since no definitive PODs were suggested - being the ones to import slaves.
Mass producing in this case merely means large scale production that is represents a significant chunk of total global output, much as how Haiti produced around 60% of the world's sugar and half its coffee.

My main point in this is basically what if an African based empire or some other area is the one to hold the competitive advantage the mass plantation based cash crop production, therefore removing much of the incentive to continually invest in slave based plantations which have a massive cost to maintain despite their vast profits. Whereas per my example, plantations in whats now Guinea, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone under the control of perhaps a Great(er) Fula Empire are in turn able create equally large outputs of sugar cane/cotton/etc, with the added caveat of cutting transport costs into European cities through a much shorter transport window, alongside the lack of colonial monopolies that enable whoever has a boat to enter Fula ports and transport cargo to their destination.

The result is then Caribbean and Brazilian colonies are now out competed and slavery withers as its too expensive and inefficient compared to simply buying en masse, even after tariffs are inevitably thrown up.
 

Lusitania

Donor
Mass producing in this case merely means large scale production that is represents a significant chunk of total global output, much as how Haiti produced around 60% of the world's sugar and half its coffee.

My main point in this is basically what if an African based empire or some other area is the one to hold the competitive advantage the mass plantation based cash crop production, therefore removing much of the incentive to continually invest in slave based plantations which have a massive cost to maintain despite their vast profits. Whereas per my example, plantations in whats now Guinea, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone under the control of perhaps a Great(er) Fula Empire are in turn able create equally large outputs of sugar cane/cotton/etc, with the added caveat of cutting transport costs into European cities through a much shorter transport window, alongside the lack of colonial monopolies that enable whoever has a boat to enter Fula ports and transport cargo to their destination.

The result is then Caribbean and Brazilian colonies are now out competed and slavery withers as its too expensive and inefficient compared to simply buying en masse, even after tariffs are inevitably thrown up.
But you cannot state one place has slaves and another does not. That does not work. If one place has a competive edge over another then will find away to compete and steal their product.

To stipulate Ottoman Empire does this or African empires do that just means that Portugal and other Europeans will find away around it. Even if to finance their rivals to attack and disrupt that country. So sorry that is not how trade and empires worked. Also gaining competive edge over rival will be top priority.

So for there not to be an Atlantic slave trade you cannot have Ottoman or other African empires holding Europeans ransom.

Also you would need a huge POD for Africans to start producing cotton or sugar for export. There was no way for them to get product to Europe till the Portuguese discovered a sea route to west Africa. Till then trade was done through caravans over desert. Not good for sugar too heavy and bulky. Same with cotton to bulky. To come up with African nations do this or another you might as well state Roman Empire never falls.

As for Ottoman Empire it had no natural lands to grow sugar in huge amounts. What land was available was used for food. So grow sugar then less food and people starve.

As for cotton it only became important trade commodity much later when the cotton gin made it economical to grow in the Americas.
 

Deleted member 67076

To stipulate Ottoman Empire does this or African empires do that just means that Portugal and other Europeans will find away around it. Even if to finance their rivals to attack and disrupt that country. So sorry that is not how trade and empires worked. Also gaining competive edge over rival will be top priority.
With what money? If a Sahelian empire is producing enough of the world's sugar and cotton and whatever to make traditional colonial slave plantation economies uncompetitive, the Africans would have enough money to fund armies larger than and equally sophisticated as anything Europe could throw at them. This is even before I get into the ridiculous attrition rate European armies suffered in Africa.

This is a system of hegemony that's guaranteed to last at least a century, which is more than enough to cripple the historical Atlantic Slave trade and entirely alter the colonial development as asked by the OP.

That said, if you get anything even remotely resembling a Songhai or even a Toucouler based empire with a plantation economy there wouldn't be a rival to support; any possible contender would be way too far inland for communications to be reliable. You just won't get the sort of gatekeeper state apparatus you'd hope for.

Although I'm still left wondering why would Europeans try to erode this state? What profit is there in sugar after a Sahelian state starts dumping sugar en masse to anyone with a boat who wants to transfer goods?

Also you would need a huge POD for Africans to start producing cotton or sugar for export. There was no way for them to get product to Europe till the Portuguese discovered a sea route to west Africa. Till then trade was done through caravans over desert. Not good for sugar too heavy and bulky. Same with cotton to bulky. To come up with African nations do this or another you might as well state Roman Empire never falls.
No you don't. Cotton knowledge, particularly the means to do widespread cultivation, was brought over from Africa to the Americas. Not the other way around.

You just need for African states to have open ports for trade and for plantations to be developed on their own territory (precedent for this is exists with peanut and cotton plantations in Senegal). The rest Europeans can buy from the port and sell it to their customers in the various ports back home.

If you want a path of development, a Fula Muslim invasion that conquers south into Senegal and forcibly repopulates subject tribes into serfdom will get you plantations that will in turn funnel enough money to keep a security apparatus necessary to keep the population settled.

As for Ottoman Empire it had no natural lands to grow sugar in huge amounts. What land was available was used for food. So grow sugar then less food and people starve.
Crete, Cyprus, Algeria, Greece, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria were and/or currently are sugar producers and exporters. There's insane amounts of land that could be transformed into sugar producing areas.

No. The Ottoman Empire during its classical era always generated food surpluses particularly in citrus and other fruits. In the later empire its economy was more or less entirely cash crops as its manufacturing capacity was eroded through free trade. But becoming a major exporter of cash crops is doable. Reduce tribal influence, settle tribes, push more people into agriculture, invest in irrigation, expand the road networks, get the Ayans and other tribal chiefs/beylerbeys to invest their energies into large scale agricultural production and you can and will produce enough of a surplus to generate vast amounts of cash crops.
 
Another way to look at it is to study what happened after mass slavery ended.
In the XIXth, there was a big push to get rid of it in the Western dominated territories, and yet there was still a need for tropical resistant mass labour.
There was a need in the Caribbean but also in the Réunion island for sugar, New Caledonia for the mines and Vietnam for rubber.
That's why the coolie system was developed, mass scale recruitment campaigns targeting poor population abroad to come and work (in dire conditions) for a few years.
After, they could go back home or stay as many did as they didn't have any money.
It was basically temporary, semi voluntary slavery. I say semi voluntary cause they were sometime pressed into this, and in Vietnam many were trying to escape but were caught back as they hadn't finished their contracted period.
It's similar to foreign workers in Qatar right now
 

Lusitania

Donor
Another way to look at it is to study what happened after mass slavery ended.
In the XIXth, there was a big push to get rid of it in the Western dominated territories, and yet there was still a need for tropical resistant mass labour.
There was a need in the Caribbean but also in the Réunion island for sugar, New Caledonia for the mines and Vietnam for rubber.
That's why the coolie system was developed, mass scale recruitment campaigns targeting poor population abroad to come and work (in dire conditions) for a few years.
After, they could go back home or stay as many did as they didn't have any money.
It was basically temporary, semi voluntary slavery. I say semi voluntary cause they were sometime pressed into this, and in Vietnam many were trying to escape but were caught back as they hadn't finished their contracted period.
It's similar to foreign workers in Qatar right now
This is what would of happened if there was no Atlantic Trade With African tribes actually providing many of the people to work in the new world. The tribal leaders would of received "payment" for the services of the people thus technically not slave trade very few of the servants would finish their work and like others even fewer return. If a tribe did not have enough people to send to new world they would "borrow" them from neighboring tribes. Therefore if there is $$ to be made there will be movement of people.

In end it would of made the people more expensive and resulted in less people being transported but they still would of developed the same industries maybe not as grand.
 
Those are correct but did not stop the sale of indentured servants to the colonies as well as many criminals.

The argument was that without the slavery trade there would not be plantations and wanted to show that other sources of manpower would of been used including renting people for short period of time.

Yes there would be differences but not lack of the sugar industry or cotton. Especially during early few centuries when there was more animosity between Islamic countries and Christian Europe.


Note: the argument that Europe buy cotton or sugar from Arabs and not pursue other alternatives was proven wrong by Portugal and Europe desire to get to India and China by sea so they not enrich the Ottoman Empire and they profit from it.

That's correct, in the sense that Europeans were prepared to exploit their own excess or... surely populations as labor in the colonies. I'd note, however, that indenture took a rather large dip in many sugar dependent areas (Barbados is a key example, as well as Post-Bacon's Rebellion Virginia) following periods of unrest and the access to the slave supply improving, pointing out the weaknesses and limited scalability of using European populations as virtual slave labor (It builds long-term a surely population of lower class whites with common language, local roots, guns, and a notion they're entitled to certain rights and a share of the wealth, and there are only so many criminals and decent land parcels to give away at the end of the indenture). A plantation system built on that kind of labor system is not going to be nearly as stable or produce the kind of profits and quantity of goods long-term as one built on imported, disposable labor, which suggests it'd be less prevalient or that the areas that it dominates will be generally less developed and populated
 

Lusitania

Donor
That's correct, in the sense that Europeans were prepared to exploit their own excess or... surely populations as labor in the colonies. I'd note, however, that indenture took a rather large dip in many sugar dependent areas (Barbados is a key example, as well as Post-Bacon's Rebellion Virginia) following periods of unrest and the access to the slave supply improving, pointing out the weaknesses and limited scalability of using European populations as virtual slave labor (It builds long-term a surely population of lower class whites with common language, local roots, guns, and a notion they're entitled to certain rights and a share of the wealth, and there are only so many criminals and decent land parcels to give away at the end of the indenture). A plantation system built on that kind of labor system is not going to be nearly as stable or produce the kind of profits and quantity of goods long-term as one built on imported, disposable labor, which suggests it'd be less prevalient or that the areas that it dominates will be generally less developed and populated

Yes things would not of been as large or the Caribbean as rich. The Spanish not as rich if they could not get as many miner for the silver mines. Everything would change. As noted the huge salve trade distorted the African continent for centuries, enriching the coastal tribes at cost of inland tribes who provided majority of the slaves.

You could even have plantation owners guaranteeing the workers passage back to African so they not have to support a large free population. Also provides a safety release for workers to see that at some time in future they too could look forward to return to their families even if only small number ever finish their contract. The end result would of been more hostile areas not developed and the development take much longer so the amount of sugar would of been less (at least initially).
 
Yes things would not of been as large or the Caribbean as rich. The Spanish not as rich if they could not get as many miner for the silver mines. Everything would change. As noted the huge salve trade distorted the African continent for centuries, enriching the coastal tribes at cost of inland tribes who provided majority of the slaves.

You could even have plantation owners guaranteeing the workers passage back to African so they not have to support a large free population. Also provides a safety release for workers to see that at some time in future they too could look forward to return to their families even if only small number ever finish their contract. The end result would of been more hostile areas not developed and the development take much longer so the amount of sugar would of been less (at least initially).

That's a very viable theory, though the gran blancs would probably have to choose locally on a case by case basis weather they're going to go with the indenture approach or the bondsman approach (As you suggest, "buying up" bond contracts and ransom prices for debtors and prisoners of war from African polities, who then have to work X number of years to buy back their freedom). Certainly, you'd probably have to respect some additional rights over those of slaves (You can't beat them to death, for instance, or they'd be free to pursue work without their bondholder's permission) similar to your Indentures, though unlike your white migrants your costs are mostly up front rather than on the tail end and can't be covered with state-granted land without the additional step of selling those (Adding a further burden to initial capital outlays) and there's also the question of what to do with those blacks who want to stay. After all, young men who spend a decade or a little more in the Americas, perhaps finding a wife and having children there and having no capital or skills to put to use back home, might very well prefer to stay where they are (As would said children, for that matter) unless we're assuming you're only really bringing over men (Which itself would be problematic... if there's a historically low number of white female migrants than you get dangeriously high sex ratio that's going to result in... intense competition for what limited female attention there is, and if there's more you have the "Black men courting white women" problem that's liable to produce some pretty intense enforcement of sexually-repressive moors... on a population that's generally self-selected to be young, at least moderately agressive/violent/risktaking, ect. Just look at the libertine culture that emerged in most colonies IOTL). Trying to do both is just going to create too much tension, so I imagine you'd see colonies that can be established with high profit expectation in the tropical climates and with state backing (Say, sugar islands in the Carribean) to try for a bondsman system while those who's founders have less initial capital but larger land prospects would go with the indenture system.
 
Crete, Cyprus, Algeria, Greece, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria were and/or currently are sugar producers and exporters. There's insane amounts of land that could be transformed into sugar producing areas.

No. The Ottoman Empire during its classical era always generated food surpluses particularly in citrus and other fruits. In the later empire its economy was more or less entirely cash crops as its manufacturing capacity was eroded through free trade.

I kind of want to talk about this point a little and then digress from it.

Some of the general themes on this thread have been implying that the Europeans came up with something new, remarkable, economically decisive, and unusually cruel, sometime after the discovery of the Americas.

That's just a very odd way of looking at it. What was the context of slavery in the period as western/Mediterranean Europe started pulling ahead of the world in sailing, which incidentally led to the Americas?

Well, millions of people were enslaved. It was normal; the past was mostly terrible, in case we forget that part. Nobody was inventing a single thing when they bought the slaves in Africa and took them to Cabo Verde. Since the middle ages and onwards, the Mediterranean was a hotbed of slavery. Europeans were enslaved and traded regularly in Africa and the Ottoman Empire (even before the Barbary states got into state-sanctioned piracy), and Africans were brought to Europe by the earliest European explorers, from Guinea and from the Canaries, which was devastating to the Canaries, by the way. It would make absolutely no sense for a people who own slaves and are themselves often a target for slavers, to say, you know what, we don't like slavery and won't buy any slaves. Especially when all the major societies they encounter in Africa are themselves basing wealth and status on the number of slaves owned by the rich and powerful, and practice slave-taking warfare.

What was the nature of this Mediterranean slavery? Well, people seem to think that it was some kind of domestic servant arrangement or a system of mutual ransom rackets, but that was never the case. Plantation slavery was pioneered in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Islamic period left some parts of the basin not only dependent on the continued success of the latifundia, but also trapped from developing as a mixed economy by an early monetization which emphasized cash crops. 14th and 15th c. Iberia was already growing cash crops, and even medieval Spain was a source of things the rest of Europe didn't have but really wanted, most of which was powered by latifundia. To recap, in the 14th and early 15th c. there were lots of people enslaved by Europeans and living and working the fields IN EUROPE, and the explorers of the 15th c. would have grown up with that still on their minds. So once again, it would be completely strange for them to look at potential slaves and say, nah, we're going to behave completely differently from most other cultures we meet and our own ancestors and contemporaries and not build plantations and not have slaves work them.

The reason why the "In Europe" part of it declined, is, to my mind, sort of a combination of things that happened, some cultural, some economic, and both influencing each other. The main one is the decline of religious pluralism in Europe itself, with the expulsions of the Jews and Muslims. Since most slavery was done by one religious community to the other all over the Mediterranean, that expulsions got rid of both the slaves themselves (those who converted and were never driven out became serfs), and the people who were insiders in the cross-maritime slave trade networks.

That gap was filled elsewhere; on the Atlantic islands, at first, and then the Caribbean and the American mainland. New networks replaced old ones and only grew as technology became better and more reliable, but they grew only as a natural progression of the medieval context within which Mediterranean Europe already existed.

Because the Colombian exchange actually caused a massive population boon through the introduction of crops suitable for the African soils- cassava, potatoes, corn, beans, rice (in central Africa), and so on that meant population and population density skyrocketed.

The result in part was actually a large increase in war and the formation of increasingly larger polities over the 1600s in much of Africa. But the slave trade kept crippling stability and so state formation gives way to a resurgence of big man politics and localism.

Without slavery, and those big empires stick around, using their newly earned surplus wealth to reinvest in themselves and enter the global trade networks.

Not sure about West Africa itself, but the Kongo could have certainly been in a better shape if it was losing less people: they were losing so many that even their own kings were acutely aware of it. The Portuguese of course weren't necessarily interested in a stronger Kongo, so they didn't care about the king complaining.
 
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Deleted member 67076

Not sure about West Africa itself, but the Kongo could have certainly been in a better shape if it was losing less people: they were losing so many that even their own kings were acutely aware of it. The Portuguese of course weren't necessarily interested in a stronger
West Africas case was less so about losing people in raw numbers but more so in that much of the warfare disrupted long established trade networks for a century or two until the Fulani Jihads, and depressed the capital classes of Mali and Songhai.

In other words its a guns vs butter situation; all that money spent on warfare and capturing to fuel the plunder economy and stagnating the population numbers could have been reinvested back home into textiles, irrigation, production of luxury goods, banking etc.
 
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