Going Global

Africa, it seems, is getting reasonably well embedded into my thinking about the 1600 – Something campaign. In some senses it is a natural progression from the Europe and Asian campaigns, the eastern part of Africa being, of course, heavily embedded in Indian Ocean trade patterns, including, of course, the slave trade of East Africa, which moved people largely to the Ottoman Empire.

As an aside, I do have to wonder why this aspect of the slave trade (which was significant, and went on for a lot longer than the Atlantic trade, I think) does not cause me as much angst as the Atlantic slave trade. Perhaps it is because Britain, or Western Europe, was not involved in it. Or perhaps, at least as far as I know, the consequences in the here and now are not quite as significant. Or, maybe, it is simply that it is not as well known in the English-speaking world. I am not sure, but, anyway, the African nations on my map only require populating with armies and diplomatic relations, and they are ready to roll.

And so we come to the Americas. This is getting more complicated than Africa, it turns out. A lot of Africa was unknown at the time, of course, and remained so until the mid-1800s, more or less. But a fair bit of South America had been explored, conquered, and exploited by Europeans for a century or so. Now, granted, using JWH’s suggestion (in a comment) for shimmying around the problems of the slave trade, that is much less of a problem than it could have been, but in terms of a map, the indigenous peoples are a bit of a problem.

Now, in West Africa I did come up with a problem, in that there are two areas of very small states – the Akan and Igbo areas. The current thought is to have these as single entities on the map, and to ensure that they cannot simply be conquered. That is, a hostile force entering the area will, even if it wins a battle, not conquer the province. In South America, I am thinking of a similar system, only one with limits. The Akan area had, according to the map I found, 33 independent states, while the Igbo states were 45 – 50 independent political entities. In South America, the tribes could (eventually) be conquered. More or less. So I think the provinces will have to be listed as to how many victories by European armies are needed in order for a conquest to be achieved.

There are other complications, of course. Historically, while the Europeans did have the unwholesome habit of massacring the natives (and did so to the end of the 19^th Century, at least), much of the destruction of Native Americans was achieved by introducing European diseases. This weakened the political entities as well as the constitution of the survivors. I am not intending to model this, but it does mean that some of the native tribes, at least in the early days, were quite small and struggling, I imagine, to maintain ordinary lifestyles. I think, therefore, the natives will be fairly quiet, and only respond to incursions by Europeans or random events. It means I do not have to track their diplomatic relations.

In a similar but different way, North America was, in 1600, largely unknown territory to Europeans, and, as Jeremy Black notes, relations were fairly good, based on trade for furs and fish. These tribes too, of course, suffered from being immunologically naive to European diseases, but also (sort of) benefitted from only fairly small numbers of initial European settlers. Here, too, then, I can keep the natives as being fairly pacific (they did fight each other, and that might need to be handled by random events) and only reactive to European incursions.

In terms of mapping, North America is easier than the south, because the native tribal names and areas have been broadly speaking better preserved. A map I downloaded from the Library of Congress shows the whole slew of tribal names and areas across the continent. This is, possibly, in far too much detail for my purposes, so I am thinking of collecting the tribes into areas and treating each area much as I suggested for the Igbo and Akan areas.

For both North and South America, it might be worth going into more detail for the coastal tribes. These were the ones (obviously) with most contact with Europeans. After all, only occasional explorers tried to get up the Amazon, and even now it is a big adventure for Europeans. And European expansion west of the Appalachian Mountains was (sort of) blocked until the later Eighteenth Century. Indeed, I have seen it suggested that this was one of the drivers for the American Revolution, along with British court cases ruling that no one could be enslaved while on British soil (I do not know enough to comment on the veracity of these claims, by the way. I stop in 1700).

I suppose that the other issue is that these sorts of tribal polities had no idea, or need for, European concepts of boundaries. Many of the tribes were semi-nomadic, moving on so as not to exhaust the local flora and fauna. I do not think they were early environmentalists, by the way, just that this was a better survival strategy at the level of their times and location. This sort of nomad activity would, however, take place on a fairly small scale, that is, within my areas on the map. So I can ignore it.

The only other thing to consider is the nature of the sea-borne empires – the Portuguese and, latterly, the Dutch and possibly the English. The current idea is to give the Portuguese some fortified trading posts – Luanda, Goa, Malacca, and so on. These will be in areas still ‘owned’ by the locals, but can have an army and a fleet based in them. And they can be attacked.

So, those are the opening ideas. I am hoping that they will not make the running of the campaign too painful; the Estimable Mrs P is concerned that it will get too complicated and issue forth is torrents of expletives, depressions and swearing off playing with toy soldiers. But I am a bit more hopeful that this sort of light-touch approach will keep it manageable, and me sane.