This is a YouTube video from one of the channels I subscribe to (AlternativeHistoryHub). Basically, the video explores, very broadly, what the world would be like if in 1640 Europeans decided they didn’t want any part of the African slave trade. What would the world be like in that case? How would this change history in the Americas, or Africa or the wider world? It’s about 20 mins long for anyone interested in the topic.
I’m honestly not all that well-versed on this period in history, but what he’s saying seems plausible in a broad sense anyway. I think the cascade effect on history would have been more dire, but that’s just my gut feeling. If anyone watches it, let me know your thoughts.
The video just presumes that somehow by magic even though there’s a desperate demand for labor in the Caribbean, Europeans simply ignore all those slaves for sale on the Guinea coast. WTF?
If you watch his videos, that’s usually how it works. He doesn’t try and explain how a change in history happens…history happens for a lot of reasons, so generally trying to have an alternative history path doesn’t really work (why didn’t the South win the Civil War, why didn’t Germany win WWII, what if Europeans never came to the Americans, stuff like that). Instead, he picks a time and then basically just asserts that it happens…and what the alternative history might look like.
Don’t fight the hypothetical. Yes, I actually read your first post and I agree…it’s not likely that anything like this WOULD have happened. The European powers and even the coastal African tribes had too much invested in this and it was just too lucrative for those parties involved that it wasn’t going to happen. But, if it DID, for whatever reason, how would that have changed history?
I think what it would take is a slightly more coherent Mail empire that holds together, or a similar successor empire like the Songhai. If we get a competent reformer as emperor, with a few competent or adequate descendants following him, that is not an impossible outcome.
A more dominant nation here would control trade further down the cost, and be exceptionally populous. In all probability solidly exceeding the population of Western Europe. They also had vast gold resources. A stable empire would be much less likely to trade away subjects, compared to competing entities who sold other nations citizens or undesirables. Especially since the amount of gold they commanded means they can buy pretty much anything they want without imperiling their internal stability by selling citizens.
Thinking about it though, the knock-on effects of a surviving West African empire is likly to exceed those of the strangulation of the West African slave trade.
I think you could do the same hypothetical better if you postulated that somehow sugar cane never evolved. In that case there’s still some African slave trade but nowhere near what there originally was.
My opinion is that Europeans would have enslaved Native Americans instead of Africans. The economics were still there to encourage the development of plantations. So Europeans would have just sought an alternative source of labor.
There were some early attempts to turn Native Americans into slave workers but there were problems. Native American populations had been decimated by disease so they were relatively scarce. And Native Americans obviously had established societies in the America; they were able to offer resistance to Europeans.
The importation of Africans as slaves was seen as an easier alternative. From a military standpoint, Europeans could just fight to exterminate the Native Americans rather than trying to fight them in a limited fashion in order to preserve the defeated people as a labor force. And the Africans who were brought to America has no existing society to support their independence.
But if African slaves hadn’t been an option, Europeans would have fallen back on Native American slaves. The policy probably would have been to exterminate the local tribes to establish clear ownership of the land and then bring in captured Native Americans from more distant parts of the Americas as slaves. So there would have been Native American slaves from the mainland being exported to Caribbean islands. These Native Americans would have been as socially isolated as the Africans were.
The depopulation of the Americas due to disease would have been a temporary condition. The first few generations after contact would have been decimated but eventually the Native Americans would develop enough immunity to stabilize their populations.
Unfortunately, immunity does not work like that. Europeans were still dying in large numbers from smallpox after thousands of years of exposure. And that was one disease. And the native Americans were still being hit with new diseases at the time. Any one that survived smallpox could easily succumb to flu, croup, measles, whooping cough, etc. You get very little selection payoff from being immune to just one.
Additionally, harsh condition and poor nutrition would make them even more susceptible.
The real problem is that unlike some slaves, indians are not immune from Malaria. There is no way they survive in enough numbers to be effective slaves.
The changes I see is that West Africans get poorer, Middle Africans get richer since the West Africans do have as big a market for their slaves and leave the Middle Africans alone to a greater extent. Egypt and India get richer since the south can’t produce nearly as much cotton without slavery. Britain is slightly poorer since they have to import their cotton from further away. The South is much less wealthy and populated until mosquito eradication programs in the early 1900s and then it starts catching up with the rest of the country quickly. The North is more densely populated and poorer since it can’t trade with the West Indies. However since the Civil War never happens both regions become richer than otherwise starting at that time. The politics of the US becomes much more like Canada and Western Europe.
I hesitate to argue with the Grim Render on the subject of mortality but I will.
I’m not suggesting that Native Americans would have developed complete immunity. They would still have died of diseases. I’m just saying they would have developed enough immunity that they weren’t being annihilated by disease. Which is what the Europeans had; enough immunity to maintain population levels.
The Native Americans did achieve this historically. There weren’t massive depopulations due to disease in the 18th and 19th centuries the way there had been in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“Eventually” in this context means a really, really long time.
Peru is one of the more indigenous-heavy states in the Americas, and I’ve seen an estimate that their population took until 1965 or so to get back to its pre-colonial levels.
“Eventually” in this context means a really, really long time.
Peru is one of the more indigenous-heavy states in the Americas, and I’ve seen an estimate that their population took until 1965 or so to get back to its pre-colonial levels. And that’s with a substantial measure of European settlement, albeit less so than a place like the US or Argentina.
Without the slave trade, some 40-million descendants now living very comfortably with shiny cars and bling and education and healthcare in America would instead be groveling miserably in malarial poverty in places like Guinea and Sierra Leone.
I have to agree with the Grim one here…I don’t think that the native population would have been able to bounce back to the numbers needed in order to make for a viable slave population. It would have been pretty difficult to get them as well, since most of the more established and sedentary tribes were decimated and the ones who went to a more nomadic lifestyle were small in population and highly mobile. And basically out of reach, since the early US would have been very different than the one on our time line with a lot fewer resources.
My thought is that if sugar and other crops were so valuable then initially I see a lot more indentured European labor being brought over to work the fields. By the 1600’s populations were fairly stable and rising in Europe, and even though it would be more expensive I think you’d see more mass migration. I was going to say we might import labor from Asia (China and India perhaps), but I don’t know the state of the trade networks at this time. We didn’t have a westward expansion and I have doubts that would happen any time soon for either us or the Spanish or Portuguese (I’m using ‘us’ here to mean British, since we’d still be part of the empire, though much reduced and perhaps to remain part of it).
My WAG is that the US becomes something more like Europe, with a lot of smaller countries importing labor from the home country and trying to exploit resources here on a smaller scale and in a more disjointed fashion. The Spanish never gain the vast and wealthy empire they did in our time line, and neither do the other major powers since it take a lot more to get things spun up in terms of time and resources.
That wouldn’t necessarily be the case in the alternate history being discussed. In our timeline, the basic principle was “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Native Americans were seen simply as an obstacle and a threat and military operations against them were planned accordingly. If living Indians had been seen as having economic value as potential slaves, there would have been a financial incentive to keeping more of them alive.
That isn’t so different from the actual situation in Peru (which is why I brought it up). In the highland regions of South America, the indigenous people were seen explicitly as a labour force on which Spanish wealth depended, and there was even a proverb like “no Indians, no colony.” Africans were imported into western S. America to some degree, but to nowhere near the extent they were in other places (neither was there as much European settlement( and the Spanish Crown on numerous occasions had to penalize governors, landlords, etc. for treating the Native people too harshly and jeopardizing their viability as a feudal labor force. It didn’t really matter, in spite of the relative less harsh policies, indigenous people died off in huge numbers anyway due to disease and social collapse.