African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 1047: Chapter 56: Capital of Automobiles

December 3, 1905.

Rhein City.

As the capital of a nation, Rhein City was developing at a breakneck pace, and what drew particular attention was the automobiles that were no longer anything rare on its streets.

Although automobiles had already become widespread in all the world’s major cities and served as a symbol of industrial civilization, the more developed a city was, the more cars it tended to have.

On the streets of Berlin, Paris, London, and New York, one could see this curious contraption to a greater or lesser extent, but in the Rhine area the number of automobiles was almost excessive: the registered vehicles alone had reached the astonishing figure of over thirty‑three thousand.

At that time, the total population of Rhein City was only close to four hundred thousand, which meant that there was roughly one car for every dozen or so people; automobiles in East Africa had already become the mainstream means of transportation.

At the same time, the number of urban rail vehicles and buses had also increased markedly, giving the city the highest density in the world in its region; as a medium‑sized city by current global standards, Rhein City’s level of development was self‑evident.

Before the First Five‑Year Plan, East Africa’s automobile industry was already quite well‑known worldwide, and at that time East Africa’s automobile output was still within the range that foreign diplomatic personnel could comprehend, but once the First Five‑Year Plan ended, East Africa’s annual automobile production had reached a level that was very difficult for them to make sense of.

Of course, the diplomatic personnel of the European and American countries could still find reasons to explain the scale of automobile ownership in Rhein City. For example, the French ambassador Thomson said: ”East Africa indeed got an early start in the automobile industry, but this does not mean that East Africa has surpassed the European countries. In fact, as a centralized state, East Africa can easily concentrate resources in its capital. I fear the East African Government has prioritized allocating the bulk of the nation’s automobile output to Rhein City. In our France, such a situation would be impossible.”

”We in France could never, like the East African Government, use political means to marshal the strength of the entire country to build up a political center of our own. This is an extremely wasteful vanity project. If it were in France, as long as you have the means, even citizens outside Paris can afford to buy a car. In East Africa, I suspect that apart from Rhein City and a few other developed cities, the situation is entirely a double face just like in Tsarist Russia.”

Even having seen it with their own eyes, Europeans could not possibly admit in the short term that East Africa had surpassed them in certain fields; this was sheer arrogance. In fact, both East Africa and the United States were subjected to this kind of ”discrimination.” How could Europe, as the center of world civilization, possibly be overtaken by countries in the ”barbaric” lands of East Africa and the United States? This was something those who upheld Eurocentrism simply could not accept at the time.

That said, there were perceptive people who noticed the problem of East Africa’s and the United States’ rapid development. The United States still offered traces to follow: as a ”land chosen by heaven,” the fundamental conditions of the United States were in no way inferior to Europe, so its ability to develop was within reason.

However, when they tried to probe into the internal causes behind East Africa, they ran into all kinds of setbacks. Taking the automobile industry as an example, it was common knowledge that East Africa’s automobile industry stood in the world’s first echelon, yet it was very hard to identify the reasons for its success.

This was because East Africa was a closed country. Its seven major automobile plants were all located in inland regions, places that foreigners simply had no access to. The coastal areas were relatively open, but from the coast one could only see several small automobile factories similar in type to those in Europe and America, with no essential differences.

The automobile production base closest to foreign diplomatic personnel was New Frankfurt City, but the ”barrier” around Rhein City kept them from traversing those mere dozens of kilometers.

Fortunately, East Africa’s automobile industry kept itself relatively restrained; if it were truly integrated with the international market, it would absolutely spell disaster for the automobile industries of other countries.

Compared with European and American diplomats, diplomats from backward countries such as the Far East Empire naturally lacked this ”discriminatory” filter. Even if East Africa’s degree of industrialization was still comparatively low, from a global perspective it was nonetheless a top‑tier industrial power, second only to the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. As things stood, French industry no longer enjoyed much of an advantage over East Africa.

France was roughly equivalent to the developed central and eastern regions of East Africa, but East Africa’s territory was vast, and many areas were not highly developed; this dragged down East Africa’s overall level of industrialization, rather than indicating that French industry was stronger than East Africa’s.

If one set aside per‑capita considerations, East African industry, whether in scale or quality, had already surpassed France’s, and the gap with the United Kingdom was not large either—though in light industry, East Africa could not yet be directly compared with those two countries.

The reason East African industry could rise so quickly was in fact closely tied to the tide of the Second Industrial Revolution; like Germany and the United States, East Africa was one of the outperformers of this second industrial wave.

It was just that Germany and the United States had already laid their foundations back in the era of the First Industrial Revolution, and this was the main reason East Africa found it hard to compete with Germany and the United States in traditional industrial categories.

In fact, Japan was also a major beneficiary of the Second Industrial Revolution; it was just that at present, in the eyes of other industrial nations, Japanese industry was still far from reaching a level that would make people ”gasp in amazement.”

The impact of the Second Industrial Revolution on the world pattern was extremely powerful. Germany and the United States achieved a leap over the old powers of the United Kingdom and France; Japan also rose quickly in the Far East, while at the same time giving birth to the ”African monster” that was East Africa.

As long as late‑developing countries seized the opportunity of the Second Industrial Revolution, they generally achieved a leapfrog increase in their own strength; otherwise, they could only continue to crawl slowly before the Great Powers.

From its colonial era to the current stage, East Africa’s trajectory was intimately bound up with the Second Industrial Revolution. The Second Industrial Revolution originated in the 1870s, and by then East Africa had completed its initial colonial construction, acquiring a certain economic scale and weight.

The 1870s also happened to be the period when East Africa, taking advantage of the economic crises in Europe and America, seized the major opportunity to introduce industry on a large scale. At that time, East Africa’s industrial construction was difficult due to limits on human resources, but relying on the spillover of educational resources from the German Region—namely, universal primary‑school education—East Africa’s industry still managed to complete the building of its framework, which was then continuously refined in the 1880s and 1890s.

At the same time, East Africa’s domestic education sector continued to develop, and finally by the late 1890s East Africa began to bear fruit in the fields of scientific research and talent.

On this basis, East Africa smoothly implemented its First Five‑Year Plan, and its industrial capacity expanded at an accelerated pace, making East Africa formally one of the leading countries of the Second Industrial Revolution.

By the time the First Five‑Year Plan ended, East Africa had already formed a complete domestic circulation in key fields such as human resources, industry, scientific research, and the market. Even if other countries had imposed sanctions or blockades on East Africa at that time, they could not have stopped East Africa’s rise.

Through several decades of effort, East Africa had turned itself into a semi‑industrial Great Power; although its achievements were questioned by European and American societies, they were enough to evoke envy and jealousy in all the countries outside Europe and America.

The Far East Empire’s ambassador Li Ling said: ”Three or four decades ago, we were full of misunderstandings about East Africa. At that time, our country knew very little about overseas affairs, which led us to think East Africa was no different from other Western World countries. Only later did we learn that East Africa was simply the country with the shortest history in the world, even more so than the United States. Yet in less than fifty years, East Africa transformed a completely uncultivated land into a world Great Power with a vast territory, a huge population, and a strong industrial base.”

”The experience of East Africa’s development provides our country with extremely valuable lessons. That this country could complete such a transformation in so short a time is of course partly due to Africa’s natural wealth, but at the founding of its regime, it did not even have a basic population to rely on and still needed to introduce large numbers of immigrants from our country.”

”So the East African model absolutely cannot be summarized in a few simple words. Its institutions are very different from those of the European and American countries, yet it manages to stand out on its own; without a doubt this offers major inspiration for our own national revival.”

It was perfectly natural that the Far East Empire’s diplomatic personnel took an interest in East Africa. At that time the Far East Empire was still a Monarchy, so government officials naturally tended to favor maintaining the Monarchy.