If economic and social factors were set aside, East Africa and Tsarist Russia's scale should not have corresponded to such a vast gap in steel output compared with the United States and Germany. East Africa had an understandable excuse—its development history was short. Yet reaching fourth place in the world in steel production was already an exceptionally impressive achievement.
Tsarist Russia, meanwhile, lacked no resources. In the early stages of industrialization especially, its resources were even richer than East Africa's. The difference behind East Africa overtaking Tsarist Russia lay in East Africa's ability to use state power to integrate its mineral deposits, energy, and land resources.
Of course, conditions created by the opportunities of the age also played a part. From the 1880s onward, East Africa had already become one of the world's largest infrastructure-building nations, and in the 1890s it surpassed the United States to become the world's greatest builder of infrastructure. Roads, water conservancy networks, urban construction, railways, and countless other fields all entered an explosive period. What supported East Africa's immense infrastructure projects was the coming of age of its population scale and demographic structure.
Infrastructure construction, in turn, drove sustained demand for steel, cement, timber, and other materials. This was one of the key internal reasons why East Africa's steel industry had risen like a strange army from nowhere.
Without a mature demographic structure and a breakthrough in population scale, East Africa could not have caught up with those old-established great powers even if it whipped its horse to death. Of course, Black labor was also an important factor that could not be overlooked. Black workers' contribution to East African infrastructure even surpassed that of the corvée laborers who served under Emperor Yang of Sui in the construction of the Grand Canal.
Under the First Five-Year