True, but these benefits come with the natural downsides of your farmland being unusable for a set period of time, which can have devastating effects on a community. Compare a community that sows plants every month of the year to one that can only sow cereals before a certain point of the year. Certainly, there are certain winter crops you can grow, but those wouldn't form the basis of a diet, would they? Additionally, insects like locusts are a known food source that's high in protein, relative even to cattle meat. It's just trading one food source for another. Pests and weeds, you burn before you begin sowing, and manage your fields regularly. It's just daily maintenance.
If we wish to discuss idle land then we need to consider the impact of the rain cycle. West Africa, for instance has much more varied weather patterns that we see in Europe or Asia with its lack of significant snowpack to feed rivers. Droughts are well recorded and crop failures are much more severe when you lack the animals per capita of places like Europe.
Long and the short of it is that we know African agriculture was less effective than what developed over the game's timeframe. The uptake of cassava, corn, and the common bean were all remarkedly quick. Quicker, in fact, than things like potatoes in Ireland. So either the delta for African food production was higher or something magical lead to greater agricultural changes within the game's timeframe.
Irrelevant. We're talking about old world beans.
Great how many calories was the extant hoe agriculture producing per hectacre with these beans?
If we assume they didn't know, they should've at least been able to notice that animals had an unusual tendency to die within a few hours of feeding on sorghum, and swapped over to regular grazing.
No, they new, which is why they switched away from sorghum in large quantities and started using cassava as ground stored calories. Again, arguing that the old ways placed no constraints on Africa makes it awfully hard to explain why the switched. Me, I assume they were like every other agricultural civilization where the productivity of farmland was of paramount concern and within the span of a few generations superior yielding crops heavily displaced inferior ones.
This has been focused on West Africa.
And even in West Africa rice needs specific conditions to grow, the vast majority of West Africa cannot sustain intensive rice cultivation as can be done in Asia.
African rice is its own breed of rice. It was domesticated locally.
Yeah and it was displaced by Asian rice because the latter grows more calories. This in spite of better taste and less labor requirements. This is a common story. The Mississippean culture had their own crop domestication. Then they got access to corn from Mexico and that displaced their old farming techniques. Similarly, the potato displaced a lot of turnips and became a staple in Ireland because it was a superior crop.
Period Africans held that their 1444 crops were inferior to the new ones and it is on the strength of new crops that we see much more intensive agriculture with higher agricultural surpluses arise.
Fair, but corn being a more desirable crop doesn't necessarily mean as much (unless we know how much more desirable it was), especially with the Columbian Exchange being a part of the game's time-frame. Also, do we have knowledge of how they dealt with those pests in the past?
Again, I am not saying that Africans were not using the resources they had well. It is just that their resources, from technology to crops, were lesser than other places. And hence they supported smaller populations and smaller populations of specialized labor. Virtually all their smiths, for instance, were cultic in nature and practiced in small scales. This is what we tend to see in places that cannot support higher concentrations of surplus labor. Scandinavia was like this back in the CK era. But as technology improved and more food could be obtained from the soil, we saw the rise of more specialized labor.
Africa has the problem that its soil was extremely calorie dense early in history for humans and actually very calorie dense with today's technology (though I think Iowa may still be the best cropland in the world). The EUIV timeframe and starting technology was likely Africa's lowest point for relative agricultural productivity. Northern Europe was likely at its relative nadir in the early Roman period. Maybe you disagree, but then do tell me when do you think Africa's cropland was least suited to the extant technology and crops?
No, you're implying they couldn't handle living in their own environment, and had to depend on outsiders to figure it out.
The Inuit could handle living in the Artic environment. However they were not able to build cities nor sustain population densities even a fraction of that in say Iceland. In like fashion, Africans handled living in Africa, but like the Inuit they lived in a place with certain constraints (e.g. Tsetse flies limiting available animal power) which in turn reduced their ability to intensify agriculture to the levels possible elsewhere.
And after all it is not me saying this. Slaves in the new world were known to remark that they could achieve higher crop yields here using African cultivars and African growing techniques. Or you could just look at Haiti, which managed to produce more calories per acre than Africa after independence.
I think that Africans were able to do very well with what they had and then when some restraints were removed they proved capable of even greater production in spite of facing the hardships of slavery. You seem to think that faced no restraints and I am at a loss as to why they were able to produce higher crop yields in places like Georgia or Haiti than back in Africa.
Isn't African soil notoriously fragile? Anyways, last I heard, African bloomeries were generally easy to construct (2-3 hours to make a functional one in a video I saw), didn't rely on difficult materials, and could handle large amounts of metal at once. Simple as the tools might've been, there were a lot of them, they worked with the soil's natural self-management, and they didn't hurt the environment.
An infinite amount of iron produced is still not going to give you the farming implements which Africa ended up adopting and trading with Europe to get. And again, it is not like African states found no use for these iron implements as they actively traded for European made ones throughout the period.
1000-1700 AD, and likely during earlier times as well. I wouldn't use the "% of global population" metric, just because population data tends to be unreliable. I'd look more at their general capacity and leave an open range of values.
By soil type, Africa is not the highest yielding place on the globe. Its precipitation is hard to capture and harder still to irrigate. With modern practices, many places in Africa have been extremely productive cropland, but not before adopting new technologies. For pretty much any historical measure of agricultural surplus, Africa has not had much. Which method measuring agricultural surplus do you prefer?
The fact is, they couldn't make it work. Crown support or not, the attempts failed, and that's what we have to go on.
Ehh the freebooters won some and lost some. The scheme as whole, where Portugal controlled a series of forts on the coast, partnered with local elites, and made massive bank off the slave trade and East Indian trade worked for just under 200 years.
[QUTOE]Morocco sent over a force of about 5,000 men to try to colonize a region about the size of Eastern Europe, and temporarily ceased to exist as that happened. Their men were primarily a disruptive force that enabled revolts to occur and (with the help of locals) managed to prevent the Malian Empire's resurgence. [/QUOTE]
So not that much different than the Seljuk/Ottoman conquests. Or the Russians, the Mughals, or the Spanish for that matter.
They didn't have anything akin to a colonial structure, and even if they had, they were operating by sending men and camels back through the Sahara desert, to a nation-state that didn't exist.
Ehh they had enough structure to suffer internal infighting and have an attempted coup of the "new" territory. As far as sending things back on camels, that is the point. West Africa is highly isolated and moving out things of value was limited the highest value per weight.
I can't agree with this, and I don't see how you came to that conclusion. Not in the slightest bit.
So when do you think the stirrup was introduced into West Africa? When do you think it was fully diffused throughout the continent. Every history I have ever read about African cavalry thinks that this happened during the game's timeframe. In Eurasia stirrups had diffused through centuries before. And so it goes. Likewise the compass was widespread throughout Europe at game start (barely), but it was limited in Africa to the Eastern Coast and North Africa, in spite of having been introduced to East Africa centuries before Europe. Waterwheels. Canal Locks. This goes on quite a bit.
We've already gone over the population bit. The estimates definitely would've put them way beyond North Africa, at the very least.
Poorer? How do you figure? How are you counting this? What's the value of a Kola nut? What's the value of a pound of gold? What's the value of a bronze armlet?
Technologically-deficient? Stirrups definitely aren't the example you want to use for that. We both agree that horses were rare in the region due to the influence of the Tsetse fly. Bloomeries are more easily constructed than Blast Furnaces. Heavy plows run the risk of disrupting the soil, and would've been less useful for staple crops like yams, that require relatively little land area to produce food. We should probably gauge them using technologies that would've been entirely beneficial for them to use.
Bloomeries cannot produce the quality of metal needed for cannons or remotely reliable firearms. Heavy plows were items traded to Africans for slaves. If they are useless why did Africans buy them?
As far the stirrup, it was taken up by literally every African cavalry force eventually. And pretty much everyone eventually got cavalry.
Again I am not picking things useless to Africans. I am picking things they either regularly traded for, eventually developed widespread local manufacture of, or produced goods for which they regularly traded.
I mean in this thread I have been told that artillery would be useless, yet the Kongolese paid a lot to the Dutch for artillery. I am told that heavy plows would be useless, but they were on trade ship manifests.
Gold's value was limited when it was being traded in Sub-Saharan Africa. they knew how much they could get for it in North Africa and other areas.
It was also limited outside of Africa as most African gold was neither coined nor rendered into bullion. And such coinage as occurred was done with blanks lacking inscriptions or imagery which were used throughout Eurasia as aids against clipping and counterfeiting (and was adopted by African gold producers over time). After all the gold trade was largely gold dust heading north to be coined and then for the coins to circulate over thousands of miles.
I don't understand what you're saying here. They rapidly began to use technology they could consistently import, and swapped over to using goods with additional benefits. This sounds like they were relatively up-to-date with this sort of thing.
Technology they (or anyone) could consistently import was never up-to-date. This is an era of state secrets when it was illegal for mill workers to emigrate. When a method of glassblowing was guarded by death sentence to anyone who revealed it.
Africa started the game vastly behind the main Eurasian trade basin (with the normal caveats about those parts of Africa connected to that trade basin). It caught up for a while, then started falling behind again. Part of the latter falling behind was undoubtedly the decimation wrought by the slave trade and the ever weakening ability of the Islamic states to serve as a competitor to the Western powers.
West Africa should go through a rise in the 17th century and then have to deal with the unsustainable nature of the slave trade. Instead we start with Africa very close to being on par with Europe (and trivially close if you can dev push institutions). By game end they are technologically maybe a decade behind. This is basically eliminating a huge portion of the major currents in West African history from the game.
Frankly I would much prefer to have Africa and the Americas have mechanisms for modeling the historical rise of the coastal slaving states or of the Beaver Wars that require balancing you priorities with those of your trade partners rather than just having West Africa become just another blob states wait to get rolled by whoever gets there first while the place is consolidating.