For East Africa itself, the Ottoman Empire was not much of a problem. But with the European Axis powers group led by Germany standing behind it, the situation was entirely different.
This meant that once war broke out in Europe, the Axis powers could immediately control—or at least threaten—the three shipping routes through the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and Gibraltar.
This was clearly an issue East Africa regarded with deep apprehension.
East Africa's trade with Europe was basically sustained by these three routes. As for the Atlantic shipping routes or land corridors such as the North African Railway, their share was far too small compared to the first three.
September 1938.
Nairobi city.
As East Africa's former textile capital, Nairobi city had been remarkably prosperous in the nineteenth century. The textile industry itself was an important foundational industry, and before the twentieth century, East Africa had still been merely an agricultural nation. Riding the growth of textiles, nineteenth-century Nairobi had long been one of East Africa's foremost great cities.
But after entering the twentieth century, as the East African economy developed across the board, Nairobi's status had steadily declined as well.
The gap could be understood like this: in the early days after the Far East Empire was founded in his previous life, owning a bicycle was enough to make everyone green with envy. Yet in the twenty-first century, it was utterly commonplace.
In the nineteenth century, Nairobi had become East Africa's most important textile center through its textile industry, and at the time, it had naturally basked in boundless glory.
But by 1938, it was no exaggeration to say that any East African city of even modest size had a textile industry. So-called textile centers were blooming everywhere, and their prestige had plummeted.
Of course, industries that