African Entrepreneurship Record

Of course, the premise is that the Ottoman Empire joins Germany as it did in the previous life. In this way, aside from the Suez Canal, East Africa can directly leverage the Persian Gulf and then use the Baghdad railway to transport materials to Germany and Austria-Hungary.

After all, with the Suez Canal under the United Kingdom’s control, there are certain risks. However, even so, East Africa has more advantages than the United States, as the U.S. can only choose one route, across the Atlantic Ocean, whereas East Africa has three trade routes. In a more extreme scenario, East Africa can establish a land trade route along the Sahara—Mediterranean coast, although this would be very difficult and lack cost advantages.

This is assuming that history follows its original path and that East African industrial development succeeds, along with a strong navy to protect East Africa’s economic interests.

In the past life, the fundamental guarantee that allowed the United States to profit from both sides during the war was its relatively strong naval power. Otherwise, the Royal and French navies would have been fully capable of cutting off trade between the United States and the Allies.

It’s worth noting that by the end of World War I, the total tonnage of the United States Navy was close to half of the Royal Navy’s, with a total tonnage nearing 500,000 tons. Moreover, during the early to mid-stages of World War I, the United States maintained its status as a Neutral Country and did not participate in the war. Therefore, the root guarantee for the U.S. to profit from both sides during World War I was still its formidable naval strength.

This holds significant reference value for Ernst, meaning that before an all-out war in Europe, the military strength of the East African Army should also be greatly expanded and enhanced.

However, this does not interfere with the economic development policies during the First Five-Year Plan in East Africa. The First Five-Year Plan in East Africa is completely different from that of the Soviet Union’s First and Second Five-Year Plans, which prioritized the development of defense and heavy industries.

In contrast, East Africa’s First Five-Year Plan is relatively balanced, focusing primarily on heavy industry while also vigorously developing light industry and agriculture. Although there is a bias towards heavy industry, light industry and agriculture still occupy a certain share, unlike the Soviet Union’s first two Five-Year Plans, which were imbalanced.

The reason for this lies in the differing national conditions and geopolitical contexts of the two countries. The Soviet Union faced a severe external crisis and was at constant risk of joint armed intervention by European countries due to its harsh geopolitical environment.

This forced the Soviet Union to first resolve its natural security problems, this forced choice planting seeds of future industrial structural imbalance. Thus, the Soviet Union’s path of economic development was extremely difficult, and the various crises also led to struggles in the bi-polar competition with the United States.

In stark contrast, East Africa’s geopolitical situation is remarkably secure, being not far from major trade routes between Asia and Europe, with smooth maritime routes—all of which are fundamental favorable conditions for East Africa’s economic development.

In the First Five-Year Plan, East Africa continued to focus on heavy industry as the core of its development, related to its current national conditions. East Africa’s industrial level is far behind that of Europe and America, resulting in severely insufficient industrial output.

Heavy industry, as the most basic form of industry, can be regarded as the foundation of industrial growth. This is evident from its definition, as heavy industry provides the material and technical foundations for the primary production sectors in the national economy.

With heavy industry laying the groundwork, the development of light industry has a foundation to build upon. Taking the first industrial development as an example, the development of the steel and coal industries was the most crucial driver for the advancement of Britain’s textile industry. Steel provided raw materials for textile machinery manufacturing, while also promoting the development of the railway and shipbuilding industries, boosting transportation and facilitating the export of British textiles. Coal was the main source of energy for the textile and other light industries.

Therefore, in theory, the development of light industry cannot be independent of heavy industry. Light industry without heavy industry is like a rootless duckweed, difficult to sustain.

For East Africa, whether it is steel, coal, oil, electricity, or chemicals, these basic industries are the main targets and trends of industrial development during the First Five-Year Plan, particularly the steel and coal industries. East Africa lags significantly behind the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. However, upon completion of the First Five-Year Plan, East Africa’s capabilities in these two foundational industrial fields will undergo substantial improvement, particularly narrowing the gap with the United Kingdom.

The development of these foundational industries will provide raw materials and production supplies for the development of light industry and agriculture in East Africa. For the current East Africa, once heavy industry is developed, light industry and agriculture will naturally develop as well.

Simply put, during the First Five-Year Plan, the most critical task for East Africa is to explode the production capacity of the basic industries to supply the fundamental raw materials necessary for economic development. These raw materials will be invested into infrastructure, city, and transportation construction in East Africa.

Thus, Ernst told the government officials, ”In the construction in the West, we must establish a new comprehensive industrial base in the West Coast Province of East Africa, promoting the development of local light and heavy industries. This is completely different from our past construction experiences.”

”In the past, East Africa leaned towards agricultural development, dictated by the national conditions at the time. At that time, East Africa lacked capital, technology, and talent, so we could only start with the most basic agriculture. Now that we have gathered the essential elements for industrial development, this is also the main reason for our transition from agriculture to industry as our development focus in the 1990s.”

”Of course, there is still a substantial gap between us and the countries of Europe and America, so at this stage, focusing on basic industry, which is heavy industry, is the necessary path for East Africa.”

”Once heavy industry is developed, we can then use it as a foundation to develop other industries, which is a significant path in the current world economic development, and essentially the characteristic of Germany’s industrial development in the last century.”

”In the last century, Germany’s industrial development began with steel, coal, and railway, subsequently surpassing both the United Kingdom and France in various fields and becoming the world’s third largest industrial nation. Due to historical reasons, East Africa cannot possibly achieve such comprehensive development in just a few years.”

”We can only accelerate this process through administrative and planned means, and my expectation is that at least after the completion of two Five-Year Plans, East Africa’s overall industrial level will surpass that of Russia.”

Currently, Russia is known as the world’s fifth industrial country, supposed to be ranked between France and East Africa, with Austria-Hungary coming in at the seventh position.

However, in the globally recognized ranking of industrial strength (excluding the East African Government), East Africa is actually ranked seventh, still behind Austria-Hungary, with the order being the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, Austria, and East Africa.

However, based on East Africa’s understanding of its own industry, East Africa’s industrial strength and scale should actually have surpassed France, although the overall industrial output of East Africa is relatively low. One significant reason for this is the high proportion of heavy industry.

If we exclude the output value factor, the ranking of industrial scale among the countries is the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, East Africa, France, Austria, with Russia ranking fourth in the world due to its large population size. In this scenario, although East Africa’s industrial level is higher than that of Russia, it is still unable to bridge the gap with Russia’s tens of millions population in a short time.

France’s industrial output value is higher than that of East Africa, but in the field of basic industries, France obviously cannot surpass East Africa, because France’s domestic lack of raw materials for industrial development causes its industrial investment to flow towards light and high-profit industries.

So if there were a military build-up between France and East Africa, East Africa would likely surpass France, not only in terms of manpower but also in the field of defense industry. However, the current development focus of East Africa is not on military industry, which is why at this stage East Africa’s navy and army in scale and strength do not match up to France.

This is clearly not good news for France, as Germany has consumed a lot of its energy, necessitating the maintenance of a relatively large army size, inevitably causing a certain negative impact on its economy.