The North African Railway was an important model project in East Africa's national railway construction program of 1931, as well as a representative achievement in the export of East African overseas railway standards. It stood on equal footing with the South American Railway, the Asuncion-Lima Railway, as an overseas railway project of the same period.
This also reflected East Africa's proactive and open policy in responding to the economic crisis. As one of the world's foremost industrial powers, the United States stood in stark contrast to East Africa in this regard.
In June 1930, the United States passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. By 1931, it had fully implemented the act, imposing high tariffs of nearly 60 percent on more than twenty thousand imported goods.
Americans hoped to use it to protect the development of their own industry and agriculture and avoid foreign competition. As for the act's effects, they were difficult to assess.
The United States in its previous life had also implemented this kind of trade protectionist policy, yet it not only failed to ease the domestic economic crisis, but instead produced the opposite of the desired result.
After all, in its previous life, once World War I ended, the United States had unquestionably become the world's strongest industrial nation. Germany, the only country capable of threatening American industry, had essentially been taken out of the game by its defeat in the war.
Thus, during this period in its previous life, the United States had actually held an advantageous position in global trade. No country could compete with it in industry, and voluntarily abandoning free trade was itself a tremendous weakening of the American economy.
But in this timeline, the United States was merely the world's second-largest industrial nation, while facing fierce competition from East Africa, Germany, and other