First off, Africa is not a country, it is a continent. Additionally, most people do not understand just how big Africa is. It is not a homogenous place. Here's a visual that gives an idea of the size of Africa
The causes of its poverty are manifold. Africa had slavery for hundreds of years, but African slavery was really a system of cheap labor. Slavery in Africa did not remove talent and skills, it just relocated them to a different region in Africa. When Europeans arrived, they removed millions of Africans, causing a massive loss of skills and talent. The argument that Africans are lazier than Europeans is also dubious. One of the reasons that Africans were used as slaves in the America's was because they were used to hard, agricultural labor. It must also be noted that when Europeans arrived in Africa they greatly harmed indigenous technological development. The region were most slaves came from were from west Africa, which before Europeans intervened was developing productive textile industries. The importation of European cloth destroyed those nascent industries. The slave trade (as well as elephant tusks) was seen as an investment by Africans. In exchange for bringing slaves they could get guns, which enabled them to get more slaves and elephant tusks. This diverted African economies from industries such as agriculture and manufacturing towards slave trading and elephant hunting.
When Europeans colonized Africa, they were not concerned with developing manufacturing in Africa. Europeans developed extractive industries and infrastructure (essentially, industries designed to remove raw materials from Africa) and not manufacturing industries. Consequently, Africans were never taught any engineering or scientific knowledge, at least not the kind of knowledge that would enable them to manufacture their own raw materials or to maintain the infrastructure that Europeans left behind. At best they could sell raw materials to western countries, but western countries always have an advantage in international markets, because western countries control the means of production, and African countries lack the technical skills to develop mining technologies; thus, they have to outsource the work to western countries.
There have been times over the last century where African countries were on the verge of industrializing, but external events always prevented that. For instance, in the sixties many African countries were building up their textile industries. Western charities realized they could make money by bundling donated clothes and selling them to African merchants. Those merchants would then go back to their countries and sell the clothes. Because most of these clothes were from the United States, they had a cultural capital that clothes made in domestic industries lacked. Unable to compete with cheap clothes from the United States, textile industries went out of business, reversing the economic progress of those African countries. Generally, a country starts out in textiles or agriculture to industrialize. For instance, in the late nineteenth century Japan ushered all its resources behind selling cheap silk, and from the silk industry Japan was able to raise the money to build up its heavier industries. England built up its wealth in the nineteenth century from its textile industry, whose cotton was grown and harvested by slaves in the American South.(That is until the American Civil War. After the Civil War, Europe turned its eyes towards Africa). On a side note, the American Civil War was the first time that machine guns were used in war. Europe then used machine guns in the seventies and the eighties to carve up Africa.
The other alternative for a country to industrialize is to sell agricultural goods on the international markets. African nations cannot do that, because the United States flood international markets with its subsidized goods. African farmers simply cannot compete with farmers that are getting billions of dollars in tax payer subsidies.
Population growth, as mentioned, is another problem. Africa is not nearly as dense as European countries or Asian countries, but it is not developing at a rate fast enough to keep up with population growth. This is a problem in South America, and in the twentieth century it was a problem for China and India. Europe had colonies, which allowed them to shift domestic land towards manufacturing, thus enabling them to create the wealth needed to support growing populations. In the United States, diseases wiped out Native American populations, leaving behind a sparsely populated continent. The sheer amount of resources per capita in the United States greatly aided them in industrialization. Without colonies, China had to shift more and more of their land towards growing food, leaving less land for industry. Ostensibly, Africa could be like the United States, but African geography and topography is different from the United States and may not be as conducive to development. Additionally, as has already been mentioned several times in the thread, most of Africa lacks linguistic unity. Most of the developing Asian countries, including China, have the advantage of relative linguistic unity which enables centralized efforts towards development.
In China, for instance, wealth creation is generated by taxes and government efforts, not specifically by private enterprise. Private enterprises pay taxes to build factories and own land in China, and then the Chinese government uses those taxes to invest in infrastructure, education, and energy. Private enterprise does provide jobs for the poor, but those jobs pay way too little to help China to industrialize. To put it in another way, the factory workers in China lack the buying power to really make a difference in the greater economy. What these factory workers do is create wealth for private industries, who then pay taxes to the Chinese government. The Chinese government then uses those taxes to invest in infrastructure (better roads, water facilities, electricity, etc) that benefits those factory workers.
African countries, however, do not have the centralized clout to force taxes out of western countries. In fact, it is usually the opposite. African countries receive "foreign aid" which they then use to attract the services of western industries. Investors flood the country, speculators create a bubble, the bubble bursts, and the country is left worse off then before the foreign aid. Even worse, the country is still forced to pay back its loans, so all its tax receipts must go to paying foreign loans. This is a massive wealth drain, and it further prevents those countries from funding education or vital infrastructure.
You would be hard pressed to find any modern economy that industrialized through free markets. Great Britain passed many laws, including the Enclosure Acts, that favored landowners at the expense of workers and peasants. England used tariffs to destroy the textile industries in India, and then used their military to colonize India. France did not industrialize until its government started heavily investing in railroad and coal industries in the 1840's. Japan industrialized through national efforts and reforms, and most countries industrializing today, including China, have strong central governments. Mercantilism, not capitalism, is the first step in industrialization. Yet western countries often impose “free markets” on smaller developing countries, who simply cannot compete on the international markets. Those countries are simply drained of resources and raw materials. Repeatedly, when African countries have been on the verge of industrialization their nascent industries have been destroyed by international markets.
Weapons also play an important role in Africa. Those who rule are those with access to tanks and guns. As Ali Mazuri notes, “The slave trade coincided with the gun trade. African slaves arriving in the Americas helped the West to be more productive; Western guns arriving in Arica helped Africans to be more destructive...Political power in Africa often resides among those who control the means of destruction rather than among those who own the means of production.” Thus, the emphasis for most regimes is in acquiring weapons, not in investing in production.
Here is a thread that discusses this issue
I'm sorry, but this sounds like badly applied Marxist theory. "Resource-depleting" activities as in the trading of gold, ivory and slaves was the source of the wealth of the west African trading empires from long before arrival of European traders and colonists. This wealth depended on the trading with the economically far more advanced Arabs and indirectly also with the Europeans. These west African trading empires were not industrial hubs with advanced manufacturing capabilities, they sold and thrived on what nature had given them. In order to become a "resource-producing" economy, you need technology. Did west Africa possess any advanced manufacturing technology? Handwoven textiles could hardly have become the starting point of any industrialization. For those textiles to have become relevant on any wider market, they would have had to compete with superior industrial textiles from the markets of Europe, India, etc. Many countries are still struggling today with the transitioning from a "resource-depleting" to a "resource-producing" economy. You don't succeed with this through sheer vision and will-power alone, you need advanced technology and skilled labour.Hi Gall-Gaidheal. Welcome to historum.
Two major convergences that did not work out well for Africa.
For one, the colonization of the Americas along with the great dying meant a labor shortage. Europeans really were not suited to work in the New World climate, and the native populations were wiped out mostly by disease. So the demand was met by African slaves. Africa already had a slave trade, but the demand for labor for the Americas dramatically increased the demand for African slave labor. This diverted African economies away from resourcing producing activities towards resource depleting activities, like slave trading. It also meant that capital and power was accumulated by those who had less of an interest in building up Africa, towards only those whose only sought short term gains (by selling slaves) and increasing power.
The "scramble for Africa" was historically speaking a very late development in the history of the African continent and this was more the result of an on-going power game between European powers than it was a sound economically based initiative. Not all of the colonies actually brought any net profit to their colonial holders, they were kept simply as bargaining chips in a much wider power game.
How should the borders have been drawn in order for there not to have been any overlapping etnic, linguistic and cultural lines? I think it's pretty clear that whichever way the borders were outlined, conflicts were inevitable. The only alternative would have been to leave the tribal structure untouched and let the natives fight it out on their own, which would have meant decades of bloody wars throughout the continent, probably far worse than what has happened. While I'm sure that the borders were not drawn up devoid of any interests that the colonial powers themselves had, I'm not convinced that leaving it up to the natives would have been a more preferrable solution. Just look at the recent border controversy between North and South Sudan, it's impossible for them to demarkate their new border because there are various non-resident tribal groups that move around certain areas or use them as a grazing ground for animals, so both sides can claim the territory based on the needs of a particular tribal group that's loyal to them. Those things rarely get solved peacefully on their own.
Teaching local Africans English or French would sometimes have meant giving them an opportunity to work and study abroad or at least having the possibility to read the vast body of literature available in those languages compared to the limited or non-existant body of literature available in the native tongue. Also, I think that you're underestimating the value that learning to read and write brought in terms of the preservation of local traditions and folklore for cultures that previously lacked any kind of written heritage of their own.
This I would agree with you on... In terms of population, the continent has gone from one extreme to another, i.e. from being sparsely populated into being ever more densely populated. Theoretically, it's not really that densely populated in terms of available land area, but the available resources and infrastructure cannot keep up with the growth. This unrestrained demographic growth is however just another aspect of the lack of planning and control by a strong government. Tribalism is still vey much alive in subsaharan Africa and with the ethnic and religious diversity in places like Nigeria, it's not hard to see why it's hard to enforce any policies for the country as a whole. Bottomline, sub-Saharan Africa is far from imitating the success of China with its long-standing tradition of statehood and strict Confucian discipline.
Okay, how so?
I never said they weren't. But it massively shifted their economies even further towards those activities; in fact there were nascent manufacturing industries that were completely unraveled by this shift.abvgd said:
I never said they were. By by the early modern period, there were clearly shifts in some parts of Western Africa to more advanced methods of production and different kinds of economic organization, a process that was abruptly halted shortly after the discovery of the new world.abvgd said:
What???? So does technology just exist in nature? Yes, you need technology, which you develop as demand and resources dictate. Did Europe start out with more technology? Asia? Was manufacturing technology and transportation technology just lying around when the river valley civilizations arose? Does Europe or Asia intrinsically have more technology?abvgd said:
We are not talking about industrialization, considering that full-scale industrialization did not occur until the nineteenth century, or about 250-300 years after what I am talking about here. Your point about handwoven textiles is also irrelevant. Division of labor and the cheapness of labor mattered just as much for productivity and competitiveness as industrial technology in the Early Modern World. Most Africans would have been too poor to even be worth the attention of European, Arabic, and Asian traders. African textile industries would not be selling to European or Asian or Middle Eastern markets; they would be selling where they had a comparative advantage, and that is to home markets, which would have helped indigenous development. I am not saying that Western Africa would have become Great Britain, the Netherlands, China, or Japan.abvgd said:
Okay, so how do you explain modern the industrialization of China in recent years, where most labor has been low-skill, especially in relation to Western labor. You don't start off with skilled labor, you develop skilled labor as your economy advances. And the most important things is probably comparative advantage, not absolute advantage.abvgd said:
No doubt imperial competition was a part of the scramble for Africa, but the 1870's was marked by severe economic recession. The whole 1873 to 1896 period is known as the Long Depression in Europe. It was this depression, more so than political struggles, that drove Europe to search out new markets and new sources of revenues. The first "scrambles" actually occurred because of cotton supply disruptions from the American Civil. The American South provided about 80% of the world's supply of cotton, and textile manufacturing was the largest industry in the world, especially in Great Britain, France, and Germany. The supply disruptions drove France into Indochina, and Great Britain to consider other sources of cotton, including from India and Egypt. The fact that not all of the colonies brought net profit to colonial holders is irrelevant, because they didn't know that beforehand, and the myth was that Africa was a place of vast resources. Note that I am not dismissing the importance of the political reasons for the scramble for Africa, but that was just one part of many reasons for colonial expansion.abvgd said:
But widespread civil wars were not inevitable. It is kind of hard to have an advancing society if you don't even have internal stability. Let me ask you this: why would interstate competition in Africa have been more devastating than the hundreds of years of persistent interstate conflict in Europe? The "inevitability" of African civil wars seems to be a subtle way of dismissing the impact of centuries of European colonialism in Africa. It had nothing to do with that! Africans are just essentially the way they are today!abvgd said:
I am not underestimating the importance of reading and writing. Those things are very important for administration and governance and a host of other things, and it is not likely that an advanced political-economy is possible without such things. But the question was "Why is Africa so Poor?" Part of the reason is that they lacked the technical knowledge and skills to maintain infrastructure left over from Europeans. Reading and writing is great, but it won't help you maintain roads or manufacturing plants.abvgd said:
Actually, considering that Europeans were building infrastructure in Africa, there would have been a huge market for engineers and scientists. But the concern of colonialists was never to help Africans become self-reliant; it was to make them docile and amenable through enculturating them.avgd said:
Again, I don't know what your point is here. I never said that missionary schools were bad in themselves. I said that one of the problems was that the focus of western education was more cultural assimilation than technical education.avgd said:
I don't disagree here, but again, you vastly oversimplify things. Africa can't compete in either textiles or agriculture, because western countries tend to heavily subsidize their textile and agricultural industries. The fact is that African agriculture can't compete with US agriculture that receives 300 billion dollars a year in subsidies, and in per capita terms, the subsidies in European countries are probably not that different from the US. When Europe advanced, they had unique advantages, such as an almost unlimited supply of silver from the new world that enabled them to compete in world markets despite their lack of labor and technological productivity. For instance, from 1660 to 1720, 94% of VOC exports to Asia was silver. They had many other unique advantages as well, but I won't get into that here. Again, I may start a thread or do a blog post, but lately I am busy.abvgd said:
Don't think the 'maxim' had much importance in Africa, the breechloading rifle was more important this further increased European military dominance, the maxim was just a later add on.
