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Discuss the latest article by @Youngmarshall here.
I find most fascinating that titbit of the Nama still getting Cape Town newspapers during the Scramble. It just paints such a picture.
And says something that the Germans didn't notice that was going or or at least didn't think it mattered.
Actually they did think it mattered but like only in tactical terms. What essentially happened was when Germany claimed South West Africa, the british already had a colony there. Walvis bay, which was an exclave of South Africa and remained as such for a short time even after Namibia won independence.
This was essentially a trading post, run by Cape Town Traders. The Herero, San and Nama would come down, trade goods and crucially use the post bag. They'd send letters to contacts in cape town and put in orders for newspapers etc.
Von Francois initial orders were basically just stay in Walvis bay, send men to patrol the beach occasionally and just check that other Europeans weren't trying anything, that there was no build up of troops there.
What he actually did was build a base a little outside Walvis Bay and act as like a road check for when African traders came down to trade. You known being able to turn around traders, ask for tolls that sort of thing.
His goal was to provoke the Nama into attacking so he'd get reinforcements and it does seem like his first idea of how to do that was to threaten to cut them off from their newspapers, but that didn't work so he decided on war crimes instead.
Whether he didn't realise that this meant the Nama could tell the British about what he was doing there or whether he just correctly assumed they wouldn't really care (the official british response to the Nama was that they didn't believe the germans would commit massacres and so wouldn't investigate) is an open question.
I think every single sentence from 'Von Francois' just made me want to cry.
Cruelty, evilness and its 'banality'. Pure, undiluted. Because the Namas could be a means to an end for some people.
I think describing it as 'the bloody and harrowing history of X' lets the reader know what they're in for.I'm editing part two now and it's so horrifying. Von Francois is the least of it.
@Thande, it's not for another two weeks but I'm going to have to ask you to put trigger warnings on it when you link to it on social media.
Like most of the articles are about comics and space and world fairs and I don't think you should stumble upon 3,000 words about mass killings and rape and concentration camps unaware.
I think describing it as 'the bloody and harrowing history of X' lets the reader know what they're in for.
Its like people forgot why they got into the Empire business in the first place and just broke all the rules.
I think one thing that distinguishes the later part of nineteenth century from early burst of Imperialism is the extent to which it really was just a landgrab.
Rationally speaking, there are good reasons to try and seize the silver and gold of Peru and Mesoamerica. India has always been a lucrative target for foreign conquerors. Egypt, the Cape, the mouth of the Yangtze: Strategically important, hugely profitable.
Even the Spanish expeditions into North America were just that- expeditions, attempts to find the wealth they were sure that was there.
Whereas in Africa, one of the striking things is how a kind of madness seemed to take hold. France needed to regain its honour after 1871. Germans wanted to show they were a great nation of the world. Italian governments need to prove that they they had the enterprising spirit of their ancestors. They each began seizing vast quantities of territory that often had no strategic or commercial value to speak of- and as they expanded, the British public became spooked out of all proportion by the perceived closing of the gap (not unlike the later Dreadnought Race.)
Leopold dreamed his terrible dreams.
And all over the continent, people died. They died, and were enslaved, and were sometimes murdered and enslaved by people who absolutely believed that they were breaking chains.
And less than a century later, most of them were leaving only shattered countries and looted governments behind them.
One of the things I've tried to do differently in LTTW is that this just...doesn't happen, except for a bit of nibbling around the edges. So a lot of Africa in 1900 is still just blank space on the map. (Tony Jones also had a different but related take on this in Cliveless World).I think one thing that distinguishes the later part of nineteenth century from early burst of Imperialism is the extent to which it really was just a landgrab.
Rationally speaking, there are good reasons to try and seize the silver and gold of Peru and Mesoamerica. India has always been a lucrative target for foreign conquerors. Egypt, the Cape, the mouth of the Yangtze: Strategically important, hugely profitable.
Even the Spanish expeditions into North America were just that- expeditions, attempts to find the wealth they were sure that was there.
Whereas in Africa, one of the striking things is how a kind of madness seemed to take hold.
One of the things I've tried to do differently in LTTW is that this just...doesn't happen, except for a bit of nibbling around the edges. So a lot of Africa in 1900 is still just blank space on the map. (Tony Jones also had a different but related take on this in Cliveless World).
Part of the trigger or un-trigger I used is that the resurgent Ottomans sniped Algeria out from under the French's noses, and that whole angle never really got started (they'd also lost Dakar earlier in LTTW) which meant other countries didn't feel the need to emulate them.It'll take me probably more than a year to finish writing all the stories about the Scramble I want to, but the current plan is for the very last article to simply be 'what if just none of this happened' because you're right it 100% didn't really have to.
Part of the trigger or un-trigger I used is that the resurgent Ottomans sniped Algeria out from under the French's noses, and that whole angle never really got started (they'd also lost Dakar earlier in LTTW) which meant other countries didn't feel the need to emulate them.
Given the bizarrely specific circumstances of how Algeria became French in OTL and its connexions to whichever revolution it is this week, it'd probably be possible to do that with a much later POD.
Land speculation is old as time.I think with regard to Southern Rhodesia, in particular the early days, you have the bleakly amusing phenomenon of the newly acquired land being traded at ever increasingly higher values in Cape Town and London stock exchanges, values which far exceeded what the land was actually worth as the BSAC half-covered up and half tried to find another use for land that as it turns out, wasn't a Second Rand at all. As @SenatorChickpea the dream way outstripped the reality.
All monarchs with regnal numbers of X or more sound inherently amusing and made-up to British ears, because of the apparent unwritten law that ours have to stop at VIII.Among Charles X's many, many sins.
He was just the absolute worst.
Land speculation is old as time.
I mean that describes pretty much all colonial histories, it just depends if something else shows up. Reminder that the USA was mostly colonised because people thought North America was much narrower, so it'd only take a dozen days to walk to the west coast and then sail to China and Japan, i.e. the actual reason why Columbus et al were sailing west in the first place.I guess with Southern Rhodesia in the early day's there's thing train of thought that goes:
a)the reason we said this land was awesome and should be colonised doesn't actually exist
b)we have all this land now
c)shit, now what?