Recent content by Cináed

There was a settlement before the Norse arrived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_Iceland#Gaelic_monks Though, naturally, none of said hermits lived to tell the tale.

Well, slave trading aside, it would make a certain amount of political/strategic sense to control both sides of the Atlantic at its narrowest point between Rio Grande do Norte and Guinea Bissau/Sierra Leone. Given that Brazil is very closely placed to do just that, it's not inconceivable that a...

I'm hard pressed to think of any justification for any Latin American country other than Brazil to grab said colonies - I suppose, if Brazil got Angola, either Chile or La Plata might grab something in Namibia, but I don't know what purpose it would serve. Namibia isn't regarded as prime...

Agreed with Abhakhazia, Brazillian West Africa would be fairly logical, at least. Brazil could pick up Angola from a crumbling Portuguese Empire or, if it wanted, strike across the Atlantic to Sierra Leone, Liberia, or possibly the Niger Delta where there are already Lusophone African...

The USA never expanded meaningfuly beyond the Rockies until the advent of the railway, and it was doing it a) as the source of most of the emigrants and b) as the power recognised in possession of the land in question. Chile already exists, and isn't full of Argentines. The Chileans have an...

Bring Korea into the Russian orbit definitively, and you could extend the Trans-Siberian down to Pusan. You won't get it by 1900, but that really would be an 'Orient Express'. You could even branch it into China, if there's enough Russian influence there. The problem with any railway passing...

The problem with a Chile-Argentina union is that their union is a microcosm of the wider geographical problem of a united South America. They're separated by the Andes, and will chafe against eachother in any political arrangement. Chile is genuinely awkward to be governed from anywhere else...

A Napoleonic South America could conceivably be created, but I doubt whether it would endure. It would a) invite the unmitigated wrath of the UK, Borboun France, Spain and the Netherlands and b) the same centrifugal forces - geography, language, transportation - would be at operation as in OTL...

You could get a less balkanized south America conceivably, but given the barriers to trade and communication, as well as the linguistic divide between Brazil and the Spanish colonies, I can't see 'one big country' happening. Nearest you can come to such a scenario would, I think, be a stable...

I'd doubt that would be a viable option any time in the short-medium term. Even a victorious Bolivia will have been stretched to the utmost of its capacity. No doubt a victory against Paraguay will act as a galvanising internal force, but you'll be looking at, fundamentally, an exhausted...

Pretty much. That's rather why I think the best the Bolivians might expect from the war is a somewhat more favourable stalemate. It would take an incredible mobilisation of their economy and manpower resources to win outright.

Bolivia is left disappointed by the uselessness of its newly acquired territory. Both are even more comprehensively wrecked than they were in OTL, given the scale of the sacrifice both had made. For Bolivia to win, it requires more manpower, more casualties, and more debt. Expect a severely...

This is, I think, is one of the most significant elements of the problem. The Columban Church was a Gaelic church, and the evidence seems to suggest that much of the Christianisation which took place in Pictavia was at the hands of Gaelic priests. If Pictavia was already becoming Gaelicised, the...

I doubt you'd have complete separation of the two. More likely, you'd get some kind of Scandinavian-Pictish cultural synthesis - much like what happened in OTL in the Western Isles, though with a Gaelic emphasis rather than a Pictish one. Depends how heavy the settlement is. One of the things...

Oh, it was recorded. But bear in mind that the records were sparse, and kept in monasteries, which are notoriously combustible when there are Vikings, Angles and history-rewriting Gaels in the vicinity. To get the Picts to survive as a distinct kingdom, you need two things. Firstly, King...