twovultures
Donor
The Princess
Salan Sen forced a smile at the man who stared coldly down at her from behind the table.
Strictly speaking, he was dressed in Tugal[1] clothing, but he did not wear them like a European. A tailcoat, split in two, cut up, and then stitched back together, created a loincloth better suited for this hot tropical port than trousers. He had a button-down shirt made in the European style, but the light green color indicated that this was a handwoven shirt of native cotton, probably gifted from his relatives upcountry-the ocelot skin ruffle of his shirt marked him as an aristocrat, and even if he earned a salary harassing foreigners in Tampico, he at least had cousins and in-laws who commanded land and labor somewhere deep in Tlatokan. His hat was a top hat, the sort that she had seen the Tugal passengers in the upper decks wear, but he had brightly colored feathers stabbed through the brim.
His minions, broad men who wore simple white cotton shifts ransacked her trunks, turning over clothes, books, and trinkets before slamming the mahogany doors down and speaking dejectedly to the official. These were port men, Americans whose ancestry was clearly mixed with that of Tugal and Africans. One dark-skinned one even wore his hair in the forward tuft of a Wolof child, and she had tried to greet him with a friendly ‘Na nga def’ but had received only a cold shoulder.
Not for the first time, Salan wished that she could speak the strangely lyrical American languages. She knew multiple Tugal dialects-once you learned one variant of Latin and Germanic, you knew them all-but the American languages were a mystery, except for those Islanders whose language was half Iberian anyway. It made her very nervous to not know what they were looking for.
It should be impossible for them to realize what she was doing, of course. Even if they thought she was up to something, how could they connect her to the Akan? She had never spoken to directly to any agent of that government, and even if they had somehow accessed the letters she had left on the ship and broke the cypher, her instructions used euphemisms. She was just another spare princess from a minor kingdom, niece to a king’s dead brother, whose time was frittered away on little goodwill trips like this one in the Caribbean instead of going to great foreign universities like Timbuktu or Paris. But what if they did know her purpose? What if they knew were to look, find an excuse to take her hostage and extract some great fine from her uncle? The thought almost sent her into a cold sweat.
She tried to keep herself composed, imagining how she appeared to this man, mentally checking herself to not give any offense or cause for suspicion. She wore no furs or feathers, nothing that could be seen as restricted to the native upper classes. Her jewelry was gold, with no jade or turquoise-a commodity a Tugal woman had confided often saw jewelry demanded as a bribe. She wore an ankle-length serr whose colors were bright and cheerful, matching the wrap on her head.
How strange did that look to him? The Tugal women on the ship used parasols in the daytime. The American women did not seem to wear hats at all, simply putting on facepaint to block out the sun. Perhaps that seemed strange to him? If he asked to search her, took the wrap, instead of putting the attention to her bags…
“Put the thought out of your head,” she said to herself. “You must not worry about what you cannot control.”
The last trunk slammed shut. The official looked at her with disdain. He pulled a small pipe from a pouch on the table, and lighting it, dismissed her with a gesture.
Suddenly developing the ability to speak Islander Iberian, his minions agreed to help her carry her trunks to the ship in exchange for an exorbitant fee. It took almost the last of her money, but she didn’t mind. After Tampico, the ship turned back, would stop in the Azores, and there she would meet the agent and make the exchange. The Akan government liked to be generous with its gold when buying friends, and she had no doubt she would be gifted a generous purse.
In the privacy of her room, the colorful headwrapping came off. Beneath it were the long, tightly coiled braids that had provoked so much admiration and curious glances from Tugal and American alike. She unwound them bit by bit, and finally pulled out the contraband that she had feared would get her into so much trouble.
The grey vine had no leaves, and it had left a trace of its sticky white sap in her hair that would probably necessitate cutting her braids off to get rid of, but that didn’t matter now-she didn’t need them, and the vine could be safely wrapped and put in her luggage. The Tugal did not take women as seriously as the Americans, and she had no doubt that she could flatter her way past the Iberian officials.
What a curious item it was, this white gold that came from the rubber vine. But if the Kongo were making so much money off of it, well, why shouldn’t the Akan? Why shouldn’t the Serer, for that matter?
Salan Sen studied the vine, wondering if she could sneak a piece off of it for her own people.
[1]Term generically used for Europeans by Sene-Gambian peoples, from their first contact with Europeans being Portuguese explorers.
Excerpts from “The Industrial Revolution and the Rise of the World System”, by Maynard Acemoglu
While the factors that set the rise of industrialization were complex and multifactored, the immediate desire that led to the tipping point is painfully obvious to any parent who has let an infant unsupervised in the pantry: the human sweet tooth.
Despite the massive productivity (at a staggering human toll of tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of African lives) of the Macaronesian [1] sugar plantations, this model could not be replicated elsewhere.
Most of Africa’s farming land was not good for sugar; the powerful states of the Americas and Asia, while they could be pushed around on the seas by European mercantilists, would resist the faltering early attempts to expropriate their land for plantation agriculture. The Martial [2] Islands were conquerable, but the distances involved meant that getting supply chains set up for armies that could challenge the indigenous chiefs and their legions of fighting men took a long time.
By the time the infrastructure necessary to duplicate the Macaronesian system was set up in the Martial ocean, an equally efficient and thankfully more human alternative had been discovered. Applying the steam engine-a design known since the time of the Ancient Greeks-to solving the problem of squeezing juice from vegetables, the engineer Marc de la Motte from French Flanders created the formula to produce sugar on an industrial scale using not human labor, but machines.
Within a century, fields from Ireland to Chornarusk abounded with sugar beets, destined to be plucked and sent to the juice grinder in new factory cities. These machines burned a lot of energy, and very quickly after their creation the power of steam was turned to pumping out coal mines and transporting large amounts of coal to the factories. Europe was in full swing of its industrial revolution, and the European mercantile empires that had nibbled at the edges of American, African and Asian lands would quickly drag these nations into the new industrial world system.
It would be a Eurocentric mistake, however, to imply that the rest of the world was only passively moved by Europe. The Chinese Reunification War is often pointed to as the prime example of a nation taking control of its destiny in the industrial world, with the mercantilist southern regime invading the north to seize access to coal mines for industrialization, triggering a wave of internal unrest that would finally result in the imposition of a written constitution on the beleaguered emperors. Often overlooked but equally interesting is the Trans-Atlantic Rubber War.
When rubber’s practically magical properties came to the attention of industrialized Europe, it became one of the most valuable world commodities, and controlling the rubber trade soon became the major concern of economic elites the world over. Indigenously found in the tropical Americas and Africa, powerful actors such as the kingdoms of Tlatokan and the Kongo quickly acted to seize and control access to rubber. The Kongo famously invaded the Katanga region, while Tlatokan imposed a strict military regime over the previously autonomous Gulf region.
But these attempts at state control would be constantly circumvented by other actors. Smugglers turned shipments of rubber away from official channels. Indigenous rulers from lesser powers collaborated with European companies to establish rubber plantations. And areas with poorer access to rubber began to innovate so as to improve the material.
The surest sign of the rise of a modern, interconnected world system that had grown beyond the sail-powered trade routes created or conquered by early modern Europe was the creation of grafted rubber. The discovery that bark from South American rubber vines could be grafted onto African rubber trees to make the plant more productive was made in the early 20th century, and soon provoked a scramble for plants against the monopolizing powers.
The exact circumstances by which the kingdoms of the Bight of Benin gained rubber vines for grafting with are still in dispute; but given that rubber was the most controlled commodity (aside, perhaps, from gold) in both European outposts and American polities, it is most likely something that was deliberately and very carefully smuggled. Most put Nana Ata Panyin Kwaku III as the first African to oversee the creation of grafted rubber plantations, a move that made his kingdom very rich. But events would soon supercede his plans to become the ‘African King of Rubber’....
Back on the Boat
Robert Stetson placed his pipe to his lip, puffing pensively as he thought of the strange and exotic people you met on these passenger cruises-and the questions they aroused.
He did not quite know what to make of it when an African woman marched onto the ship like a general leading troops into battle, a gaggle of struggling dockworkers following her, laden with voluminous trunks.
There was something about her that he found fascinating. The captain had teased him, claiming “number two has a little coup-de-foudre for our African princess”, but it wasn’t that. It was that she combined the high-handedness of an aristocrat with the air of someone being on a cunning plan. He had watched as she entered the room, and left a short while later to mingle with the other passengers of the upper deck. From the corner of his eye, he noticed how she always seemed to keep one eye on her door, and the other on the docks, almost scanning as if something was going to happen. And, he swore that when they cast off, she had breathed a sigh of relief-and after the ship reached international waters, she had once again gone into her room, only to re-emerge with a bottle of good rum to share with her fellow passengers.
It was interesting to think about what might be going on that had created the nervousness she was obviously trying to cover with her imperious facade. A tryst? A theft? A feud?
But, ultimately, as interesting as the idea was, it wasn’t his business as first mate.
“After all” he thought to himself, “you’re a sailor, and you know that the world is big-big enough for all of us, Europeans, Africans and Columbians to have our own stories to ourselves. No sense butting in where it’s not your business.”
[1]Cap Verde, the Canaries, the Azores, and Sao Tome
[2] Pacific, ITTL
Salan Sen forced a smile at the man who stared coldly down at her from behind the table.
Strictly speaking, he was dressed in Tugal[1] clothing, but he did not wear them like a European. A tailcoat, split in two, cut up, and then stitched back together, created a loincloth better suited for this hot tropical port than trousers. He had a button-down shirt made in the European style, but the light green color indicated that this was a handwoven shirt of native cotton, probably gifted from his relatives upcountry-the ocelot skin ruffle of his shirt marked him as an aristocrat, and even if he earned a salary harassing foreigners in Tampico, he at least had cousins and in-laws who commanded land and labor somewhere deep in Tlatokan. His hat was a top hat, the sort that she had seen the Tugal passengers in the upper decks wear, but he had brightly colored feathers stabbed through the brim.
His minions, broad men who wore simple white cotton shifts ransacked her trunks, turning over clothes, books, and trinkets before slamming the mahogany doors down and speaking dejectedly to the official. These were port men, Americans whose ancestry was clearly mixed with that of Tugal and Africans. One dark-skinned one even wore his hair in the forward tuft of a Wolof child, and she had tried to greet him with a friendly ‘Na nga def’ but had received only a cold shoulder.
Not for the first time, Salan wished that she could speak the strangely lyrical American languages. She knew multiple Tugal dialects-once you learned one variant of Latin and Germanic, you knew them all-but the American languages were a mystery, except for those Islanders whose language was half Iberian anyway. It made her very nervous to not know what they were looking for.
It should be impossible for them to realize what she was doing, of course. Even if they thought she was up to something, how could they connect her to the Akan? She had never spoken to directly to any agent of that government, and even if they had somehow accessed the letters she had left on the ship and broke the cypher, her instructions used euphemisms. She was just another spare princess from a minor kingdom, niece to a king’s dead brother, whose time was frittered away on little goodwill trips like this one in the Caribbean instead of going to great foreign universities like Timbuktu or Paris. But what if they did know her purpose? What if they knew were to look, find an excuse to take her hostage and extract some great fine from her uncle? The thought almost sent her into a cold sweat.
She tried to keep herself composed, imagining how she appeared to this man, mentally checking herself to not give any offense or cause for suspicion. She wore no furs or feathers, nothing that could be seen as restricted to the native upper classes. Her jewelry was gold, with no jade or turquoise-a commodity a Tugal woman had confided often saw jewelry demanded as a bribe. She wore an ankle-length serr whose colors were bright and cheerful, matching the wrap on her head.
How strange did that look to him? The Tugal women on the ship used parasols in the daytime. The American women did not seem to wear hats at all, simply putting on facepaint to block out the sun. Perhaps that seemed strange to him? If he asked to search her, took the wrap, instead of putting the attention to her bags…
“Put the thought out of your head,” she said to herself. “You must not worry about what you cannot control.”
The last trunk slammed shut. The official looked at her with disdain. He pulled a small pipe from a pouch on the table, and lighting it, dismissed her with a gesture.
Suddenly developing the ability to speak Islander Iberian, his minions agreed to help her carry her trunks to the ship in exchange for an exorbitant fee. It took almost the last of her money, but she didn’t mind. After Tampico, the ship turned back, would stop in the Azores, and there she would meet the agent and make the exchange. The Akan government liked to be generous with its gold when buying friends, and she had no doubt she would be gifted a generous purse.
In the privacy of her room, the colorful headwrapping came off. Beneath it were the long, tightly coiled braids that had provoked so much admiration and curious glances from Tugal and American alike. She unwound them bit by bit, and finally pulled out the contraband that she had feared would get her into so much trouble.
The grey vine had no leaves, and it had left a trace of its sticky white sap in her hair that would probably necessitate cutting her braids off to get rid of, but that didn’t matter now-she didn’t need them, and the vine could be safely wrapped and put in her luggage. The Tugal did not take women as seriously as the Americans, and she had no doubt that she could flatter her way past the Iberian officials.
What a curious item it was, this white gold that came from the rubber vine. But if the Kongo were making so much money off of it, well, why shouldn’t the Akan? Why shouldn’t the Serer, for that matter?
Salan Sen studied the vine, wondering if she could sneak a piece off of it for her own people.
[1]Term generically used for Europeans by Sene-Gambian peoples, from their first contact with Europeans being Portuguese explorers.
Excerpts from “The Industrial Revolution and the Rise of the World System”, by Maynard Acemoglu
While the factors that set the rise of industrialization were complex and multifactored, the immediate desire that led to the tipping point is painfully obvious to any parent who has let an infant unsupervised in the pantry: the human sweet tooth.
Despite the massive productivity (at a staggering human toll of tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of African lives) of the Macaronesian [1] sugar plantations, this model could not be replicated elsewhere.
Most of Africa’s farming land was not good for sugar; the powerful states of the Americas and Asia, while they could be pushed around on the seas by European mercantilists, would resist the faltering early attempts to expropriate their land for plantation agriculture. The Martial [2] Islands were conquerable, but the distances involved meant that getting supply chains set up for armies that could challenge the indigenous chiefs and their legions of fighting men took a long time.
By the time the infrastructure necessary to duplicate the Macaronesian system was set up in the Martial ocean, an equally efficient and thankfully more human alternative had been discovered. Applying the steam engine-a design known since the time of the Ancient Greeks-to solving the problem of squeezing juice from vegetables, the engineer Marc de la Motte from French Flanders created the formula to produce sugar on an industrial scale using not human labor, but machines.
Within a century, fields from Ireland to Chornarusk abounded with sugar beets, destined to be plucked and sent to the juice grinder in new factory cities. These machines burned a lot of energy, and very quickly after their creation the power of steam was turned to pumping out coal mines and transporting large amounts of coal to the factories. Europe was in full swing of its industrial revolution, and the European mercantile empires that had nibbled at the edges of American, African and Asian lands would quickly drag these nations into the new industrial world system.
It would be a Eurocentric mistake, however, to imply that the rest of the world was only passively moved by Europe. The Chinese Reunification War is often pointed to as the prime example of a nation taking control of its destiny in the industrial world, with the mercantilist southern regime invading the north to seize access to coal mines for industrialization, triggering a wave of internal unrest that would finally result in the imposition of a written constitution on the beleaguered emperors. Often overlooked but equally interesting is the Trans-Atlantic Rubber War.
When rubber’s practically magical properties came to the attention of industrialized Europe, it became one of the most valuable world commodities, and controlling the rubber trade soon became the major concern of economic elites the world over. Indigenously found in the tropical Americas and Africa, powerful actors such as the kingdoms of Tlatokan and the Kongo quickly acted to seize and control access to rubber. The Kongo famously invaded the Katanga region, while Tlatokan imposed a strict military regime over the previously autonomous Gulf region.
But these attempts at state control would be constantly circumvented by other actors. Smugglers turned shipments of rubber away from official channels. Indigenous rulers from lesser powers collaborated with European companies to establish rubber plantations. And areas with poorer access to rubber began to innovate so as to improve the material.
The surest sign of the rise of a modern, interconnected world system that had grown beyond the sail-powered trade routes created or conquered by early modern Europe was the creation of grafted rubber. The discovery that bark from South American rubber vines could be grafted onto African rubber trees to make the plant more productive was made in the early 20th century, and soon provoked a scramble for plants against the monopolizing powers.
The exact circumstances by which the kingdoms of the Bight of Benin gained rubber vines for grafting with are still in dispute; but given that rubber was the most controlled commodity (aside, perhaps, from gold) in both European outposts and American polities, it is most likely something that was deliberately and very carefully smuggled. Most put Nana Ata Panyin Kwaku III as the first African to oversee the creation of grafted rubber plantations, a move that made his kingdom very rich. But events would soon supercede his plans to become the ‘African King of Rubber’....
Back on the Boat
Robert Stetson placed his pipe to his lip, puffing pensively as he thought of the strange and exotic people you met on these passenger cruises-and the questions they aroused.
He did not quite know what to make of it when an African woman marched onto the ship like a general leading troops into battle, a gaggle of struggling dockworkers following her, laden with voluminous trunks.
There was something about her that he found fascinating. The captain had teased him, claiming “number two has a little coup-de-foudre for our African princess”, but it wasn’t that. It was that she combined the high-handedness of an aristocrat with the air of someone being on a cunning plan. He had watched as she entered the room, and left a short while later to mingle with the other passengers of the upper deck. From the corner of his eye, he noticed how she always seemed to keep one eye on her door, and the other on the docks, almost scanning as if something was going to happen. And, he swore that when they cast off, she had breathed a sigh of relief-and after the ship reached international waters, she had once again gone into her room, only to re-emerge with a bottle of good rum to share with her fellow passengers.
It was interesting to think about what might be going on that had created the nervousness she was obviously trying to cover with her imperious facade. A tryst? A theft? A feud?
But, ultimately, as interesting as the idea was, it wasn’t his business as first mate.
“After all” he thought to himself, “you’re a sailor, and you know that the world is big-big enough for all of us, Europeans, Africans and Columbians to have our own stories to ourselves. No sense butting in where it’s not your business.”
[1]Cap Verde, the Canaries, the Azores, and Sao Tome
[2] Pacific, ITTL
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