It’s no wonder some parts of Africa have had a hard time creating a modern, developed industrial societies post-colonialism. I would love to see an alternate history view of what Africa would look like without the centuries of Western exploitation.
It has a secret city that’s super advanced, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily meant to be an alternate history where colonialism never occurred, but I could be wrong as well, haha
Doesn’t seem like it, Wakanda has had unlimited energy and advanced tech for years but none of the other African countries even knew about it much less the world.
If I remember correctly, the Kingdom of Aksum (based out of Ethiopia and Eritrea) was the third largest empire in the world, and on par with Rome and Carthage in terms of advancement.
When they collapsed, they vanished, unlike the Roman empire, which culturally just kind of splintered off into the holy Roman empire, the franks, etc…
I often wonder what Africa would look like if something like the HRE replaced the aksumite empire.
A great number of the enslaved people trafficked to the English Caribbean were later trafficked to work camps in places like South Carolina. In that State in particular (may be the case elsewhere IDK), the majority of the English Colonists as well as enslaved people came from the West Indies.
By the 19th Century the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the US (1808). The British abolished slavery in 1833. Most enslaved people in the US were descendants of enslaved people already there. IDK what the birth rate for enslaved people was, but you can imagine that 100 enslaved people trafficked in 1700 could be over a thousand by the time of the American Civil War. So most of what we think of as the height of US chattel slavery was after the Atlantic Trade was in decline.
A lot of them were taken to Caribean sugar plantations, and Brazil.
BUT a lot (most?) of the people being taken to the American colonies came through the Caribbean. Since this chart shows departures from Africa that wouldn’t be shown, only transit directly to America
Also in the Caribbean it was seen as more economical to work the slaves to death and then import new ones. The conditions on those plantations made south Carolina look like Disney land and the average life expectancy was only a couple years.
In the American south there was more emphasis on keeping the slaves alive and “breeding” them to get more slaves instead of importing more.
This is also why the African diaspora population is a bit less in the Caribbean then in America even though way more Africans were brought into the Caribbean, most of them died before they could have children.
Since the width of the lines is supposed to represent the number of people brought over, I was trying to figure out why the line to North America got thinner - were the authors trying to minimize traffic to North America? And then I realized that it got thinner because so many people died on the journey over.
Europeans left the people slaving on site and only brought over the products. They probably wanted everything to happen out of sight and not risk slaves rioting at home.
Yup, and slavery was already illegal in much of the christian Europe at the start of this timeline. Serfdom (which primarily affected european peasants) would however continue well into the 1800s.
Add comment