Alternate history question: How would the course of history have been affected if gunpowder had never been invented?Here is my brief speculation. I'll start with Africa: The African continent would never have been colonized. After all it was improvements and innovations in gunpowder weaponry (the maxim gun for example) that enabled small European-led armies to defeat much larger hosts of African soldiers. Traditional African fighting systems that relied on bows, spears and various implements of close quarter combat, would continue to be used. African states and societies that grew powerful due to their embrace of gunpowder arms would either remain irrelevant, or they would be forced to look to other means to maximise the potential of their armies.African states that expanded and flourished before their encounters with gunpowder weapons in our reality, would be longer lived in the alternate world. For example, the Songhay Empire, with its formidable cavalry would continue to reign supreme in the Western Sudan. The Zulu kingdom would not only be a larger entity, but the infantry tactics of its army would be duplicated by armies across a wider swath of Africa.African trade relations with the rest of the world would continue as always. East Africa would be commercially linked to Asian states as far away as China, while the transSaharan trade would link West Africa to North Africa, the near East and Europe.European traders would be present in Africa, but they would pose no long term threat to the sovereignty of any African power they interacted with due to an absence of gunpowder weapons.
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