I'm sorry, it appears you just asked for evidence while listing a literal cornucopia of evidence from sources at the time. The UN created this group specifically to study population changes, are you doubting that these scientists findings are robust? If so, where is your rebuttal and would you provide a copy that I could peruse for free? Because I fail to see how if these UN studies (and let's be honest, the report is a study of its own, peer reviewed like any other publication) were incorrect the scientific community would just sit and nod their heads like good little cattle?
I'm sorry, I know it might be hard, but I did not ask for a giant appeal to authority. I asked you to point out for me which entry in their bibliography - the source for
all their data in the database. Say I wanted to publish something, rather than citing a secondary source (which the authors clearly agree their papers and database are) which citation would I use?
You can see the map. Not many people lived in the approach, but that doesn't mean that there was never a force that was prepared to make the march. It means for a multitude of reasons (and perhaps potable water was one of them) they did not. No, I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt. They were most likely most deterred by the lack of hospitable travel conditions. This does not mean it was completely impossible for other states in Africa, states that actively traded with these people. And it was FAR easier than other areas of the game that are deemed passable, especially if Paradox decides that Congo is passable as it seems may happen. I would have a far harder time defending armies marching through that hellhole.
There was never a force
able to make the march prior to the advent of steam power, machine tools, modern explosives, the introduction of higher caloric density agriculture, etc. The native
African porters from Smuts's force had
higher attrition rates than the line regiments.
And do not BS about trade. How much poundage was moved along these alleged trade routes? If these routes were large scale why, unlike every other active trade route in world history, did they not leave a genetic legacy? Why do we not see any evidence of East - West pandemic spread across this highly used passage.
I fully grant that there are states inside the Great Lakes region (albeit nowhere near as close to the model as anything in India), those states were just isolated by the realities of
geography.
Well at least you are consistent. But... why aren't you making a fuss about this still? You seem inordinately angry at this particular example and Salish, both of which are multitudes more tame than 90% of the other lands that should be backed up to a wasteland.
Oh heck no, I have consistently argued for some sort of restraint in provinces to actually reflect the strategy and history of the time. If that has been in North America, through the Sahara, or in the Himalayas. This particular one bugs me more because it is far more likely to result in the Western AIs ahistorically getting further bogged down in Africa and nuking East Asia with even more pointless waiting time to westernize (which unfortunately is still mind-boggling overpowered).
And if you are going to argue that state construction wasn't congealed enough at the time, that can be said about almost everything except Europe. Asia had just started with complex imperial structure at the game start, and even then societies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and India had societies much more comparable to tribes. The exception in the Middle East is the Ottoman Empire, but even under the empire tribes kept their local control. Hell, you could argue that until the 20th century this was still the case. Does this mean that the entirety of the world should reflect perfectly the issues and borders of states? If it was, we would have a great deal fewer playable nations!
India had multiple states which met multiple conditions many times. While, yes, I would leave some of Asia and the ME as open ground for spawnable tags, those places do have long history of forming empires that managed diplomatic relations (in some cases with Rome and China), regularlized fighting forces, long range campaigns, etc. I could be convinced to have some "wasteland" in central SE Asia, but I am not sure exactly how that would fall out.
And yet the trade still exited from the area, as the Congo basin received a deal of the wealth from that side of the continent. Not only this, but how did the people even migrate to the area if it is that inhospitable? The people living in the area can be traced back to Egypt. I suppose Egyptians had access to modern medicine, steamboats, and trains?
What trade? I know of no large volume trade that left the area.
The point I have been talking about is that EU simulates regimental warfare. Having done actual military logistics and read people like van Creveld, I know that moving large bodies of men is
much more difficult than just pointing a column in one direction and saying "march".
Case in point Gustavus Adolphus once wanted to relieve a siege that would require a 50 mile march from the nearest navigable river. However, the countryside had been picked clean by several sequential campaigns. One of the
most brilliant logisticians of the era was unable to achieve one of his stated strategic priorities for want of sufficient caloric density along his marching path. Now we are talking about a longer march, with even inferior caloric density, water issues, and far less forgiving terrain.
So what was possible? Small scale movement. 10 men can move through areas that 100 cannot. 100 can move where 10,000 cannot. Water sources, like rain pools can easily support small bands that can disperse over wide frontages. Likewise, if you are not trying to feed thousands of soldiers, but instead of pastoralists moving with food on the hoof, you can slowly cross terrain by moving on the order of miles per month or year by letting your much hardier animals graze over extremely wide frontage and then slaughtering them for calories. This is how, after all, the Inuit managed to live on honest ice pack at times. This is why the Rockies, which can trivially support small foraging parties, were impassable to large scale armies (such that even in 1848 the US army went down the Gila instead of crossing the place).
Kongo wasn't even distantly related to the Great Lakes region. They did trade with the region though, along with countries like Luba. It's odd that you're denying obvious trade that happened. Although marriage between the tribes? I don't know of any evidence for this, but I don't see why there would be either.
Name another trade route without haplotype mixing. We have Dutch haplotypes in Taiwan. We have Irish haplotypes in Spain and all manner of haplotypes in North Africa from the slave trade.
The reason I doubt the existence of large scale trade is the records in Zanzibar of
opening the trade in 1844. For instance, the Kabaka of Buganda was recorded as having
never seen guns before by bin Ibrahim (a trader out of Zanzibar). Shortly thereafter when large scale slaving started in the area, it was regarded as virgin territory
by the slavers. You are basically calling a whole bunch of Zanzibari traders
liars or
idiots who certainly did alter the trade patterns of the time.
I have no idea about the historical accuracy here, and trust your experience talking to Imams. But this doesn't mean that no relations at all were possible.
So a place you say is
easy to get to (places that are hard to march an army into are easy for small scale groups to enter), that had
regular trade somehow missed the whole religion thing from one of the two most
evangelistic religions in world history; a religion with a LONG history of attaining converts via its trading prowess? And did so
consistently for a millenium?
Remember, we have historical records of Islam being introduced, converting large swathes of the population, and declaring an Islamic state in just a few decades (the last was put down by a Catholic-Protestant alliance with western imperialist backing).
So somehow this totally-not-isolated region just ignored Islam for ... reasons.
That would be nice.There are records of trade taking place, especially between the states of Congo. And I never said that it was well connected to the rest of Africa, just that the connection was possible in the time-frame. Especially for a country already from the region.
You mean, there are states where there were actually states?
How would I know that this wasn't your position? You had been talking exclusively about European expansion in the era. And the sentence that I used the strawman in was basically a paraphrased version of what you wrote. You've only just started to use examples where they matter in the slightest, and the reasoning has basically been because it didn't happen it could never happen.
Please, reread the thread. I have
never said these states didn't exist. I have said the
marchable approaches to them did not. My request for population data has nothing to do with the size of the population on the lakes themselves, and
everything to do with supporting a march into the interior.
No, the Swahili were not stupid. They had other options, and didn't need to expend as much by traveling elsewhere.
And what, exactly, were these alleged expenses? Why would they be higher to slave in Buganda than in Juba and Madagascar?
Yet again, saying that it didn't happen isn't proof that it couldn't happen. Perhaps the area was stigmatized by the peoples due to ancient defeats and hardships in the area. Perhaps the prevalence of population once was associated with giant military might that decayed after centuries.
So where else in the world have these century spanning "stigmas" stopped conquest and large scale trade? I know of nothing such as this anywhere in world history.
Perhaps the nations (and this is going to be a huge shocker!) had other more pressing concerns than invading an area that was more than likely unsuitable to capture citizens and send them out of.
Any place you can march regiments through is suitable for slaving. Slaving bands take an order of magnitude lower of caloric density to maintain. On both the East and West coasts, the value per pound or per calorie was higher for slaves than just about anything (spices, gold, and ivory would be higher). The slaving states on both the East and the West both expended massive resources, far more than required to march a regiment overland hundreds of miles acquiring slaves.
You cannot have it both ways. Either it is
possible to move regiments through the hinterlands and hence
easy to move slaves through ... or it is
hard (at best) to move slaves through and
impossible to move armies through. I hold to the later - the lack of navigable rivers, the problems with alkalinity, the staple crops of cassava and plantains, the highland terrain ... all of these are things that say you do not have armies moving through here.
Further I have an ace in the hole. During WWI large scale regimental warfare was tried, invading the region from the coast. Regiments lost the vast majority of their manpower. Hundreds of thousands of men died or were casualties of
just the terrain. When the Germans fled in front of the overwhelming strength of the South Africans, they retreated not across the inhospitable terrain you suggest would be easy for a 20th century German force ... but instead invaded Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) because of its caloric density (something only possible thanks to machine tools, climate tolerant wheat varieties, and several other mid-late 19th century advances). When people had
their lives on the line they acted as though this march was not possible.
The point is that saying something is impossible because there was no historical precedent is horribly naive, we might as well say something like nuclear winter was impossible because of US and Soviet interactions. There are instances in which this is a gross oversimplification of the Cold War.
Nuclear winter is impossible. The maximal nuclear exchange (sometime in the early-mid 70s) had nowhere near enough energy to eject mass greater than that of Pinatubo. Now sure, if you use crappy propaganda calculations that model an earth without oceans, maybe you will see something like nuclear winter ... but in the real world we know how much stratospheric ejecta is possible with the standard megaton warheads and we can pretty easily calculate that even at worst case scenarios (a 1970s full launch with no counter-force strikes) we would get maybe a degree of cooling on a global basis.
And this is exactly what is happening here. You are making wild assumptions that does not jive with known limits of physics and geography. Marching men on the local diet (the
only choice without navigable rivers) is nigh unto impossible for ranges in the hundreds of km. Maintaining a supply of fresh water when you evaporate out all your water is pretty hard to impossible for thousands of men. Like nuclear winter, you need a plausible mechanism to overcome hurdles.
How do you feed regiments in this terrain before you hit the caloric jackpot around the lakes proper?
How do you supply potable water when the surface is salty and alkaline from
millenia of evaporation?
Then you should be complaining about nearly half the territory in this game. You are not. So allow nations that existed during the time period exist, and stop attempting to halt expansion of game mechanics because you feel that the history of the world is set in stone and was never grey.
I like this cultural imperialist notion coming from someone that actively denies that trade existed between these groups because it wasn't a slave trade.
Oh cut the BS. I bring up the slave trade because:
A. It was the
dominant trade at the time
B. Anywhere you have large concentrations of people it was a viable trade good (be it in Poland, Iceland, or Africa)
C. When recorded trade
was established it was one of two main goods traded (the other being ivory).
Bin Ibrahim is recorded as the first trader ever there. When he arrived, guns and manufactured cloth were the top of his trade goods. Given how the whole African coast was awash in guns from the slave trade oh say 150 years prior it is shocking that
the most powerful man in the kingdom had
never heard of guns if there were regular large scale trade contacts.
But don't take my word for it:
This is all recounted by
Ugandan sources:
http://www.monitor.co.ug/SpecialReports/-/688342/1361764/-/vwys08/-/index.html
But let me guess, you know their history better than they do.
See the funny thing is all the major trade players of the 19th century: the Zanzibari slavers, the Khedivan Egyptians/Sudanese ivory traders, and the British Indian army all arrived in the area thinking it was an
isolated area that had
untapped trade potential. And they all promptly build trade networks in and out based on advances in transportation, argiculture, and tools that were not available in the EU era. I guess
all of them and the
Ugandans were idiots who did not know the history of the area better than you.
Unfortunately though, you'll find that I've made no such claim about states. It was isolated, and yes that was in part due to it's geography. That does not mean the isolation was unbreakable, or that trade wasn't possible there. It also doesn't mean that any African state (funny, I thought you just rebuked me for using this parlance) would be impossibly precluded from the area. There have been stranger occurrences, for instance, how they even got there in the first place.
Any African state would be precluded from this area. The caloric density does not support regimental marching. The potable water is not there. In spite of many reasons to set up trade, it was not done until the 1840s (and initially on a small scale).
Bin Ibrahim, Ismail Pasha, Mutesa I, John Hanning Speke ... they are all idiots who thought the area was just barerly approachable with the then current tools. You are only non-idiot thinking about this.
