Lateknight
Banned
How could you get a state in Europe were the majority of the population is sub - Saharan African?
How could you get a state in Europe were the majority of the population is sub - Saharan African?
Wouldn't that lead to a mestizo majority rather than sub-saharian?You might be able to pull this off with Portugal, maybe: amazingly enough, a fair amount of ethnic blending seems to have occurred over there even in OTL, just on a lesser scale than Brazil.
A less realistic, though possible situation would be to have a larger Sub-Saharan population concentrated in some part of France, and then have France collapse, leading to a small Black-majority statelet.
The Parisian Banlieues declare independence?
Answering the OP : that's incredibly hard.
Relations between Mediterranean basin and Sub-Saharian Africa were virtully absent up to the Arab Conquests, and even there, you didn't have much more than slave trade for migrations.
(Granted, there was African influence on protohistoric eastern Mediterranean basin, but that's an exception)
It would require such relations to appear much earlier than OTL, maybe trough a Carthaginian-wank but even that, eventually, would produce a metissed society.
And for modern situation, except using conspiracy theories such as Eurabia and other racist lunacy, you don't have a real way to maintain black people separated from others, and to prevent an at least partial assimilation.
Assuming that nothing got butterflied there (you'll probably concede that it would a big challenge), such society would end metissed after some generations.Sadly, American race relations make it seem possible *if* Malta can be populated by Carthaginians and then be part of a Spain, France, or Sicily/Italy till independence is gained.
Assuming that nothing got butterflied there (you'll probably concede that it would a big challenge), such society would end metissed after some generations.
Even Arabo-Muslims society, that were incredibly despising towards Zanj and drained sahelian Africa of their population ended to mix with them eventually.
A large african population in America was possible because of an extensive use of slavery, in proportions never seen in Antiquity or Middle-Ages, that didn't existed in Europe at this time; and a relativly fewer european settlement in first place.
Even in a America blacks as population has stabilized at 15-20 percent even in the south they have never been a majority with 1/3 of population.
How could you get a state in Europe were the majority of the population is sub - Saharan African?
Well, technically some countries abolished slavery since XIVth century (France, Sweden, etc.) but while it was more or less applied during the XVIIth century, it eventually went into slaves being expulsed out of the territory, and to forbid metis union in metropole.Decades after most of Europe?
Pretty impossible I´d think.
Sub-Saharan Africans were only "needed" for the sugar cane and cotton plantations in the Americas given the climate, not for work in Europe.
If I remember correctly that´s why the USA and Brazil were the last two - Western influenced - countries to abolish slavery?
Decades after most of Europe?
Why is it that people assume that sub-Saharan Africans can only venture out of Africa in any TL as slaves? I'd still argue that a more realistic version of the POD used in Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt TL, with a more virulent Black Death rather than an increased vulnerability solely among the European population, would have the desired effect. Everywhere in the Old World (and the New World, when contact is made) will suffer more, losing more of their indigenous populations, but due to a number of factors- primarily, geography and genetic variation- sub-Saharan Africa and its population will always suffer least of all. And with their extra losses making it far harder for the Europeans and Arabs to pick up the pieces ITTL, the sub-Saharan Africans- the Sahelian Kingdoms, most likely- could easily expand northwards to fill the deeper, more lasting voids left behind by the Black Death in North Africa and Europe. ITTL, you could easily have a situation where the present-day population is majority sub-Saharan African, not just in a single European nation, but across the entire European peninsula...
The only problem here is that the Sahara forms a massive barrier to mass migration northwards.
Your more likely to see Eurasian populations recover before you have Sub-Saharan Africans of any significant number enter into the Med.
Africa is huge. I'm not aware of any massive population pressures that would want to make people move northwards.
Well, everyone came out of Africa in the first place, didn't they? What 'massive population pressures' were there in Africa to motivate the first humans who left the continent? And by this late stage, they'd know full well that there were plenty of things worth moving northwards for. The Sahara was hardly impassable- the trans-Saharan trade was still significant at this time, with the Portuguese still in the process of establishing their first few Gold Coast trading posts. If there were bigger die-backs in Europe and the Arab World, would all of these Saharan trade routes just wither away into oblivion, or would some of the Western and Central African states seize the opportunity to control the profitable trade routes themselves?
And if they did, they'd want to control them from their source, by seizing the trading posts in North Africa. From this point, if they did manage to seize back control of Marrakesh and the rest of the Maghreb region from the crippled North African Arab states, it wouldn't be a massive step to continue that expansion further, crossing the Straits of Gibraltar during TTL's even darker Dark Ages and establishing a foothold on the far less populous Iberian peninsula. And who's to say how much further they could get, especially if they can manage to achieve dominance in the Mediterranean?