🌊 Ripple · counterfactual
What if the Atlantic slave trade scales up had gone differently?
1525 · west-africa
Plantation demand drives mass forced transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
If it had gone differently: The plantation economy never finds its labour force; Atlantic colonies stay marginal.
What it set up
- 1780The Industrial Revolution, Growth stays flat and Malthusian; most people alive in 1900 live about as their great-grandparents did.
- 1791The Haitian Revolution, No state is founded by the formerly enslaved; abolition loses its sharpest argument for decades.
- 1861The American Civil War, The Union splits for good; there is no single continental United States to become the next century's dominant power.
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