AHC: More Populous Rhine Delta than Yangtze Delta

Teutoberg Forest

The Yangtze Delta is the biggest megalopolis on Earth, with over 115 million people in 2013 per a quick glance at Wikipedia. While the area has developed rapidly during China's ongoing period of robust growth, the seeds for this megacity were planted well before the Rhine (-Meuse-Scheldt) delta was anything more than a handful of squabbling feudal possessions. However, today the Rhine delta is one of the most densely populated areas of Europe in its own right, and is also close to the built-up Ruhr area in Germany. What would need to happen in order for a Rhine Delta metropolis to be more populous than the Yangtze Delta megalopolis at a present-day technology level?

I think a united Germany-Netherlands-France area would be a necessity, for one, in order to facilitate a central metropolitan area with almost as much population as those three countries (and Belgium) combined. A triangle with vertices at Lille, Amsterdam, and Bonn, along with the Ruhr, is actually pretty similar in scale to the Yangtze Delta, and was (and still is) the OTL center of industry in Continental Europe, leading me to believe that if a megalopolis of Chinese proportions could exist anywhere in Europe it would be here. In addition, the distance from Frankfurt to Amsterdam is about equal to that between Ningbo and Nanjing, which are both part of the Yangtze megalopolis, so I suppose that means that Frankfurt could be incorporated into our not-just-Rhine metropolis. Per this population map tool, that region (including Frankfurt) gives us a population a bit shy of 50 million; given that this is already the most peopled area of Europe, is it even possible to get to the 115 million of today's Yangtze Delta?
 

Help

spectrum said:
How about potatoes arriving in Northern Europe during the classical age.
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Pretty far way to travel, and I feel that would be an ASB. I did think about that a bit, but I think the only option would be to have rice spread there early on. Or, a good strain of wheat.
 
AltoRegnant

AltoRegnant

My dad likes to wonder about ancient (like borderline pre-celtic) European-American trade, citing iron mining in in the great lakes pre contact. Probably along some glacial trade routes and the north sea

Now I haven't looked into it, both because it sounds ridiculous imo, and I struggle to conceive of that far back. But that would make potatoes in the Rhine possible in theory
 

Emperor Gustavus Adolphus

Banned
I have said this in the other thread, yesterday. This is possible but would need a different type of Early Agriculture and Civilization (building of Villages/Cities). OTL Civilization started along the more hotter regions and spread. But an alternate is possible, too.
 

Falecius

Well, it would help to have a large (probably Frankish) loosely unified polity comprising both this region and the territory around it. You don' need to have this area as the political core of the state, though it's likely; China's political capital is Beijing after all.
Not having the region as one of the most contested battlegrounds of European history (precisely because it was so rich in trade and industry) would surely help population-wise, and in general a large, somewhat stable state thhere would avoid the recurring devastating wars that damaged so much of European demographics. However, the Yangtze Delta was still devastated by wars (heck the Taiping!) so probably having a booming industry and service economy that attracts immigrants, presumably from the rest of this alt-Francia and perhaps from elsewhere, is even more important. Industrial Europe still had major "surplus" population its growing industrial sector couldn't fully absorb anyway, which flooded Australasia, the Americas and Southern Africa, so if some of that could instead turn into seeking jobs from rural areas intro the industrial core, could be even more effective than avoiding wars.
 
SealTheRealDeal

SealTheRealDeal

Teutoberg Forest said:
While the area has developed rapidly during China's ongoing period of robust growth, the seeds for this megacity were planted well before the Rhine (-Meuse-Scheldt) delta was anything more than a handful of squabbling feudal possessions.
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Really? I was under the impression that the development of the Yangtze Delta was really a late 17th century-forward development, and prior to that upstream areas were more important. Shanghai certainly wasn't too important while the ban on ocean going trade was still in effect.
 

Deleted member 109224

The Yangtze Delta metro encompasses more than just the Delta itself. It extends inland as far as Hefei.
For comparison, the Ruhr could reasonably be considered part of the Rhine Delta metro. The distance from Shanghai to Hefei is almost double that of Rotterdam to Cologne.

Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Rhineland-Westpahlia have 50m people, so you're already halfway there.

A German semi-integrated MittelEuropa could easily see this region be much much larger.
 
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NorCalifornio

KingOnTheEdge said:
My dad likes to wonder about ancient (like borderline pre-celtic) European-American trade, citing iron mining in in the great lakes pre contact. Probably along some glacial trade routes and the north sea

Now I haven't looked into it, both because it sounds ridiculous imo, and I struggle to conceive of that far back. But that would make potatoes in the Rhine possible in theory
Click to expand...

Contact between Europe and the Great Lakes is one thing, contact between Europe and South America is another. AFAIK potatoes never made it north of the Isthmus of Panama until the Spanish conquest IOTL.
 
Lusitania

Lusitania

Donor
NorCalifornio said:
Contact between Europe and the Great Lakes is one thing, contact between Europe and South America is another. AFAIK potatoes never made it north of the Isthmus of Panama until the Spanish conquest IOTL.
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Geography was against the Americas. Where travelers, animals could traverse China to Europe, Andes to Great Lakes not as much. In human geography they discuss how a agricultural production could slowly migrate from China to Europe and vice verse. Example a horse eats an apple not all seeds in apple are digested and some whole seeds will be deposited in horse dung some tens of miles away. This will continue till a plant traverses the whole Eurasia continent. Where as in the Americas the tropical area between north and southern America prevented (or made it much harder). Plus in the Americas we never had the heavy trade networks that Eurasia had. Yes there was trade but not as extensive and far flung as in Eurasia. If the Americas had a few trading nations such as one that would travelled from Alaska to Andes and another from Maiyans to Great Lakes. It would of been possible for potatoes to reach as far north as Great Lakes and so forth.
 
kasumigenx

kasumigenx

If that is a united Neustria+Austrasia, the center would be in Rhine, if it is a Surviving Western Roman Empire, the center should be Loire, I think.
 

Arkenfolm

NorCalifornio said:
Contact between Europe and the Great Lakes is one thing, contact between Europe and South America is another. AFAIK potatoes never made it north of the Isthmus of Panama until the Spanish conquest IOTL.
Click to expand...
I encountered a reference once that suggested there may have been in the pre-Spanish era potatoes in the highlands of the Sierra Madre del Sur, which corresponds to the area most in contact with coastal South America through sporadic raft journeys but I'm not certain how correct this is and would need to check again. If potatoes were present there, they might not've been important for some reason or another, maybe cultural (which gives yet another barrier to transmission).
 
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