Let say for a moment that when European settlers arrived they killed of many tribes and mated with the rest. Leaving few pure native Africans.
Instead of extracting resources however, they decided to start a colony like they did in the US. Thousands of people came to West Africa’s coastline. They established themselves their and created small towns.
How different would the course of history be not just for Africa but for the world? Would it be the most powerful in the world due to its resources and size?
Or perhaps as I’ve heard some people say, would the sheer size of the African continent and rough terrain, various diseases (malaria, typhoid, river blindness) and lack of domestic animals have made it nearly impossible to create developed countries in the first place?
Depends what you mean by “better”. If you are defining “better” as “more like Europe” then yes, replacing all the natives with Europeans would have made Africa “better” in the same way killing or displacing all the Native Americans made the Americas “better”.
If you have a different definition of “better”, however, the answer will likely be different.
Not quite sure of the distinction you’re making here. Colonies were established to extract resources, in both America and Africa, and the colonists built, in many places and in many respects, quite a nice life (for themselves). Some, particularly in the south and east, considered themselves established enough to see themselves comparable to the US, in terms of nation-building. The Southern Rhodesians even went so far as to ape various US-style symbols when launching their Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965.
Even though the facts of demography went against them in the end, many of European descent continued to identify as committed to the land they were living in, so there are plenty of white South Africans, Kenyans and so on living a broadly European lifestyle.
Whether European colonists would have been able to manage the same sort of economic development by relying on European labour in the extractive and farming industries, whether they could have developed the same sort of appeal as the US to the “huddled masses” to attract the necessary labour, and whether the end result would have been “better” (in what sense?) - well, that’s a matter of guesswork tempered by judgment.
You calling the OP a troll albeit very slightly disguised? Shame. I wonder if a link to threads labeled “racist” “liar” etc are going to follow this trend.
Look at Europe today vs Africa today. Why would it have diverged tremendously differently merely due to the presence of mosquitoes and army ants?
Europeans were what happened to Africa. They took over Africa and eliminated the mostly self-sufficient farming economy that had existed. Africa became a source of cheap raw materials for Europe. And then Africa had to turn around and buy expensive food and manufactured goods from Europe.
If European governments had treated European settlers in Africa the same way they historically treated the native Africans, then the settlers would have been equally screwed.
Most African colonialism was due to 19th century Great Power rivalries, it occurred *after * most of the settler colonies had gone out of fashion.
Certainly there were places where European settled in large numbers, like Algeria and S Africa, where you saw a ruling elite emerge on racial lines.
If Europeans had settled heavily on the W African coast than I suspect that it would have been more like Latin America, where you have countries being of variously racial makeups ranging from heavily kixed to heavily Euro.
Accusing other posters of being trolls is not permitted in this forum. Do not do this again. No formal warning, but it will be next time.
RickJay
Moderator
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
It’s one of the reasons why South Africa is not quite the cesspit that most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa is.
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Of course, one of the reasons so many African nations are cesspits is that Europe invaded them and interrupted any independent development they might have accomplished on their own, and indeed drew the boundaries of the nations such that in a lot of cases they make no sense.
If we run the whole thing again, who’s to say that absent European involvement there would not today be a vast Republic of Zululand cheerfully trundling along, occupying most of the southern part of the continent? How might Ethiopia have fared had Italy not wrecked it? Who knows?
Once stability has been achieved, great progress has been made; Botswana has gone from being the poorest nation on earth to having an economy large enough to be strikingly out of place in Africa; for the first 30-35 years of being an independent country it was the fastest growing national economy in the world, IIRC. Zambia has in recent years made remarkable strides, and since the end of its civil war Namibia has been far more successful than you would expect possible for a country with that much stacked against it.
Of course, when they settled, their actions, unlike the actions of other Europeans in sub-Sahara Africa, was actual settlement and colonization. Had the other sub-Saharan societies not been subjected to forced labor to extract the mineral or cultivated products of their lands, they might easily have done just as well. For that matter, had the Boers and, later, British, actually invested their energies in establishing their farms and mines with the existing peoples instead of subduing them and (effectively) enslaving them to be mere labor, South Africa would probably be much more successful, as well.
Almost certainly not. In addition to the points you mentioned, I’d add that North America offered a wealth of advantages that don’t have any equivalent in Africa.
America has the largest continuous slice of homogeneous and arable land in the world, and practically all of it is accessible through the Mississippi River and its various branches. This offered tremendous advantages in terms of food production and transportation, making it possible to settle North America very, very quickly.
America is separated from the rest of the world by a rather large ocean. Part of the reason for America’s emergence as an economic powerhouse is that it was insulated from Europe’s devastating wars. In addition to retaining manpower, it was able to leverage its undamaged infrastructure and factories to emerge as a technological and industrial giant. A hypothetical European-dominated Africa would most likely have become another theater for various European wars.
A difficult hypothetical. Euros were able to eliminate most of the indigenous population of the Americas because contagious diseases did most of the killing for them. But there was not much Euros could have brought to Africa that the locals’ immune systems would not have shrugged off.
I find it odd that people are so open to admitting that another group lacked the ability or maybe even courage to defend themselves as if military weakness were a badge of honor. Frankly, I’d be embarrassed if a handful Europeans could somehow conquer and subjugate millions of Africans. Say what you will about the Afghanis, you can kill them but you can’t tame them.
Argentina is largely populated by people of European ancestry, leaving few pure native Amerindians, mostly due to mass immigration. It’s not a cesspit but things can be dysfunctional.