Chapter 1510 - 42: Assessing the Situation

Chapter 1510: Chapter 42: Assessing the Situation

Currently, the economic challenges faced by East Africa are quite similar to those previously encountered by the Far East Empire. In terms of high-end industries and technology, countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States, the traditional industrial powerhouses of Europe and America, still hold the advantage.

East Africa finds itself in a somewhat awkward position, neither thriving nor struggling. Despite making remarkable progress in recent years through reasonably strategic industrial and research layouts,

East Africa’s medium and high-end industries are still relatively weak compared to its current economic size.

In the late 19th to early 20th century (usually referring to the first two decades of the 20th century), the United States and Germany faced similar situations to East Africa. However, they had deep foundations that allowed them to achieve rapid progress, surpassing the United Kingdom and France in industry and technology ahead of World War I.

Since its independence, the United States has never seemed to run out of luck. Its development has been smooth sailing with excellent geographical, climatic, resource, and agricultural conditions. In the words of the past, it is truly the "chosen land."

From Ernst’s perspective, unless Europe can be integrated into a single nation, objectively speaking, there is nowhere in the world with better conditions for the industrial era than the United States.

As for East Africa, while it has become the world’s largest economy through half a century of effort, the cost paid was much greater than that of the United States.

Take the steel industry, for example; the United States has abundant coal and iron resources, spatially concentrated and complemented by the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River for shipping, virtually feeding its population.

Meanwhile, in early times, East Africa’s coal and iron resources were not particularly prominent. Only in the southern colonial regions near Lake Malawi were there enough coal resources for early industrial development, and iron was limited in distribution.

Even later, through relentless warfare and territorial expansion, East Africa finally compensated for its resource shortcomings. Yet, the development costs of its steel industry still exceeded those of the United States, especially before acquiring South Africa, the region with the most concentrated mineral resources in Africa. Many East African steel companies relied on land transportation construction to be established.

This means the initial stage of East African industrial development, particularly in steel, was realized on the basis of railway transportation.

However, railway construction is evidently far less convenient than shipping benefits offered by the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River, and its construction, operation, and maintenance costs are higher.

In early industrialization, the advantage of coal and iron complexes was significant, relying on proximity to both coal and iron resources for steel industry development.

The British Isles, Germany’s Ruhr District, and America’s Great Lakes industrial area are typical examples, whereas France serves as a negative example, falling behind due to insufficient coal for its industry.

East Africa only gained the conditions for building coal and iron complexes after acquiring South Africa and Mozambique. An example is the Tete Industrial area, rich and concentrated in both coal and steel resources.

Besides having resources, their quantity and distribution consider transport costs, whereby East Africa clearly incurs higher costs than the United States. The U.S.’s open Central Plains make it one of the lowest regions globally for railroad and highway construction costs.

However, East Africa’s terrain is far more complex, with plateaus, basins, mountains, plains, and numerous valleys, all escalating construction difficulty.

Nonetheless, East Africa’s terrain isn’t excessively challenging, generally moderate, with plateaus yielding relatively flat land overall. Nevertheless, construction costs are indisputably higher than those in the United States and Europe.

East Africa’s solution to these disadvantageous factors was straightforward: over half a century of large-scale transportation infrastructure construction.

The main difficulties of transportation infrastructure were concentrated in the early stages. Once completed, it was overwhelmingly beneficial, and East Africa’s sacrifices primarily involved millions of Black laborers, who were merely numbers or expendable resources to the East African Government during the last century to the beginning of this century.

Solving transportation infrastructure issues laid the foundation for East Africa’s leapfrogging industrial development in the early century.

However, before this, the costs of industrial development in East Africa clearly exceeded those in Europe and America.

Ernst said to Friedrich: "Although we in East Africa appear like upstarts to other countries, especially those in Europe and America, they haven’t seen the efforts we made for East Africa’s development."

"Nearly ten million people lost their lives for East Africa’s construction. It’s precisely because of the sacrifice of these millions of Black laborers that we built the world’s largest agricultural scale, the world’s leading power system, the world’s third-largest transportation network, the world’s fourth-largest water management system, and so on, establishing a solid foundation as the world’s number one industrial nation."

In agriculture, East Africa has the world’s largest arable land area, naturally, as East Africa itself is a populous nation, with agricultural consumption exceeding that of the United States. Hence, East Africa’s cultivated land has been consistently expanding.

Regarding the power system, East Africa entirely benefited from early planning and leveraging the concentration of efforts to achieve big outcomes, transforming East Africa into the region with the most widespread and developed power globally.

In terms of transportation, East Africa boasts the world’s third-largest railway network, only surpassed by that of North America and the European Region. As for highways, East Africa’s road construction length is second only to Europe, but its paved road length is the longest in the world, becoming the world’s largest automobile producer. Finally, regarding shipping, East Africa’s shipping development level also ranks behind Europe and America.