WI: the UK government impliment the proposal by Francis Galton to replace Black Africans in Africa with Chinese people.
- Thread starter PecuTheGreat
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I mean, we did manage to see significant Chinese and Japanese migration to the entire West coast of the Americas, so much so that several of these banned Chinese migration(USA, Canada) and that Japanese descent people make up a significant portion of Chilliean and Brazilian populations.
There was also enough migration to South Africa to also result in a ban to Chinese migration, all of this while they'll largely be migrating there to do more labour intensive work.
The Chinese also are a large Population and would definitely have different sub-cultures among them. I forget the name of the book, but there was one book I read sometime ago that made the argument that the Chinese that migrated for hard railwork labour in the USA and those that are famed for their economic work are from different sub-cultures and regions, such migration could just be made to appeal to the groups of Chinese either in high density farming communities thanks to the population growth under the Qing that are also now suffering the famines and natural disasters under the late Qing/early Nationalist China and less the Hui merchants that largely settled Malaysia.
The poor soil argument I have seen laid out before, in this blog arguing against an example given in why nations fail that decisions by leaders alone is able to explain why nearby peoples can have widely differing success, this example was between the Lele and Bushong people, the blog laid out arguments for the greater fertility of the land of the Bushong and their better accessibility to Kongo basin riverine trade routes.
‘Why Nations Fail’ and the fate of Lele and Bushong
Acemoğlu and Robinson rightly argue in ‘Why Nations Fail’ that chance decisions by leaders play a big part in economic success, but using the Congo Basin’s Lele and Bushong as an …
armchairprehistory.com
There is another place in can make the argument in that the Igbo people's agriculture was practiced in such a way that in the forests and Delta swamps of Niger Nigeria, they achieved a population density comparable to the Egyptian Nile Delta, while their neighbours didn't and in current day they are famous in Nigeria for their Enterprise and Crime, the later of which they explain by being more hard working and ambitious.
Another example from Africa are the Hausa, in the Northern part of Nigeria, also coming from a disproportionately fertile region and also being famous traders, with their langauge a Lingua-Franka in the adjacent Sahel and neighboring Northern Savannah.
The creation of an African lingua franca: the Hausa trading diaspora in West Africa. (1700-1900)
Trade networks beyond ethnicity.
isaacsamuel.substack.com
And whoever said that is ignoring the general rule of not making generalizations over large areas. It would be quite absurd to expect and entire continent wide area to have the same attitude towards agriculture, unless they can explain what universally continent wide factors can explain that.
The argument of inferior/superior culture I would say to the extent that it still needs to be had should be limited to singular fields like "A culture does farming for humid tropical environs better than culture B"
Another metric can be to measure in a free environment how much people move from Culture A to Culture B. Tho, this has its disadvantages as it could just be people moving towards an easier way of living.
I mean, I generally agree that the British Empire didn't move to intentionally Genocide populations, but the example I used with the White Highlands of Kenya and Rhodesia both had natives chased out of choice lands and replaced with Whites. This behavior could be replicated in the fertile lands of the Lacustrine.
Now such Population displacements would definitely lead to famine and conflict in the places these groups would be driven to but that can just serve as further evidence to say "the blacks are inferior, they suffer famine in their lands while the Chinese prosper" and further entrench the policy.
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I think all that is needed is the brits clearing out choice lands as the new inhabitants arrived, which they did do even before news arrived in in the Kenyan highlands and Rhodesia. And these aren't small land areas mind you.
And in Rhodesia it was practically the whole country that it happened to.
flyingmoonshot
Banned
Kick
Easy answer. The result is that Africa is far more developed than it is today.
Really not the kind of simple answer I was looking for.
Like what would be the dynamics at decolonization and the world wars. How would Britain frame it's world image in such a timeline, would there even be a decolonization in this region in this timeline and how would this alt Britain engage with states like Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa?.
Try looking at Fiji for a very rough outline of one potential outcome. Large numbers of Indian indentured workers were settled there by the British, resulting in considerable ethnic tension and a number military coups when the Indians began to make inroads into political power. Yes it is not the scenario you're presenting, the colonial administration maintained a policy of preserving indigenous ownership of land right from the very start, but it points in the general direction.
Rule of thumb: alien minorities usurping an indigenous minority rarely ends well, regardless of what ethnicity the alien minority are. However unlike European colonists, these hypothetical non-European migrants are less likely to maintain the same kind of very strong attachment to the home country Europeans did, therefore less likely to voluntarily leave upon independence.
Mmmmm, the Afrikaners in South Africa or Protestant Plantations in Ireland might be other good examples to mine.
Not to sound aggressive, but that statement seems quite racist without any explanation.
Further thought. Istr a passage (possibly in Brian Aldiss' Trillion Year Spree) about an old sf story set in a future utopia, which casually mentions "the great exterminations" when the white and yellow races combined to wipe out the black and brown ones. Having dropped this bombshell the author blithely goes on to describe the wonderful society that they went on to set up once they'd got the genocide out of the way.
So even sf wasn't immune to such attitudes. Perhaps mercifully, the title and author escape me.
You know, I used to think the whole White identitarians thinking East Asians are the Okay race was a new thing, apparently it's much older than I thought.
There was a series of 8 novels called the "Chung Kuo" series by David Wingrove. The Chinese and whites do indeed not only genocide Africans and brown people (such as Indians, Indonesians, and other South East Asians) but also the Japanese (because they are their main rivals in Asia). The Chinese then set up a global dictatorship with whites as semi-partners (but in a subordinate role). I got through a couple of the books, but understandably (considering I'm of Indian origin), I found them extremely distasteful, and eventually gave up.
Not sure if these are the books/author you are thinking of, but it seems to match the description.
Chung Kuo (novel series) - Wikipedia
Chung Kuo
A science-fiction series by Hugo Award-winning author David Wingrove, where Earth in the 22nd century is in the iron grip of a Chinese empire run by the Seven T'ang. This world is called the Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom. Mankind's 36 billion …
tvtropes.org
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"The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples."
From "The dawn of everything" by David Wengrow and David Graeber
You know I know the ideas of genocide the "lesser races" was more widespread than 1 person and especially prevailant among some of the progressives of USA and the idea that that was at least de-facto reality was prevailant in USA during the colonization of the West Coast - Rockies, but I didn't know people with such policy goals had basically captured an entire institution of colonial Britain.
Makes the possibility of such a timeline more plausible.
From "The dawn of everything" by David Wengrow and David Graeber
You know I know the ideas of genocide the "lesser races" was more widespread than 1 person and especially prevailant among some of the progressives of USA and the idea that that was at least de-facto reality was prevailant in USA during the colonization of the West Coast - Rockies, but I didn't know people with such policy goals had basically captured an entire institution of colonial Britain.
Makes the possibility of such a timeline more plausible.
Oh my, huge number of sources, plus I've talked with a lot of Fijians of various ethnicities and a fair few NZ analysts. Good starting point would be "Broken Waves: A history of the Fiji Islands in the 20th century" by Brij Lai and "Back to the chessboard: the coup and re-emergence of pre-colonial rivalries in Fiji" by Hermann Muckler. Online Wikipedia does give an adequate overview of it all.
Derek Pullem
Donor
OK.
Firstly the OP makes such an implausible assumption that I would argue this is lives in ASB.
Secondly Galton's attitudes on ethnic cleansing / genocide, whilst not rare, were not mainstream.
Thirdly, not sure which society you are describing (or referencing as it comes from Graeber's book) as an "entire institution of colonial Britain" but the history of the various Ethnological societies in Victorian Britain is riven by factionality to the extent that even a member of todays socialist / communist left would be surprised at the number of diverse groups in 1840-1870 period.
Fourthly, Graeber's book whilst certainly thought provoking and interesting suffers from a little too much of his anarchist politics bleeding through to be a serious reference tome.
The British Empire certainly did use third country labour to supplement and in some case displace indigenous labour. Even when it was done at a large scale, as in South and East Africa and the Pacific it was shown to be problematic in terms of its original purpose i.e. more efficient exploitation of the natural resources / development.
So if Galton's ideas did get traction at the highest government level I'd expect to see many more societies post colonialism that resembled todays South Africa - multi-racial with significant ethnic tensions. But total displacement and genocide is ASB.
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