Would the ENA take them? I'm wondering lately if they're going to end up as bad guys, with a view of the best of humankind being WASPY New Englanders.

Yeah. You have an even whiter and more homogenous America destined for an ideology that celebrates the importance of national and (to an extent) racial differences, that's going to have to take in impoverished black refugees who want to *bleck* assimilate and be treated the same as everyone else. Clearly they're infected with Societist groupthink. Can't have any of that.
 

Thande

Donor
Very subtly. I confess I still don't see it.

Well to put it another way it's meant to imply that South American Societism is less of a clean break with the past than it thinks it is, with its symbolism still influenced by what came before.
 
How 'Dutch' are the Batavian and the Guyana republics at this point (mid-1860s) anyway?
Both were founded by exiled Dutch who are only a small minority in their new countries.
The elite of the Guyana Republic is supposedly already half-Spanish-speaking.

I personally would have considered Batavia and Guyana as part of the 'Dutch speaking world'. Even if Dutch is only one of the main languages (in Guyana) or the lingua franca within a country (for Batavia), I'd still say those countries are part of it. There aren't many places left on the planet where a new fully Dutch-speaking country can be set up. Maybe New Holland is such, though.

And as for a powerful Mexico timeline, Disaster at Leuthen has that. (It's not Mexico-centrix timeline, though.)
 
Yeah, basically they're adding 'you must comply with these 'Meridian Values' as a requirement for being in the Hermandad'. Carolina merely declaring itself no longer a part of the Hermandad would therefore be legal, just a pre-emptive move before they would be expelled for refusing to end slavery, but the Meridians use the fact that it was a coup government issuing the declaration to justify taking it as illegal and 'taking military action to restore the legitimate government'.

Well, in theory, though this:

Both [Brazil and Carolina] now attempted to backpedal on their membership and were met with both a steel-backed warning from Cordoba and, in Carolina’s case, some loud and pointed military manoeuvres in what had once been imperial Carolina.

seems to indicate that No, You Can't Leave, even if you can afford to. Though to use the US/Latin America analogy, maybe that's just an implication that the Meridians can always find a "legitimate" government that happens to be pro-Cordoba.
 
I just wanted to say that the last chapter was the first time I've ever felt like I was seeing the USA with an outsider's perspective.

Great job Thande
 
Just finished rereading the whole timeline. A few comments.

1) Wow, the Italian unification happened straightforwardly. Maybe it's just the contrast to the height of the Great American War in presentation (instead of an update on, say, the subnational political causes and effects of one or two campaigns, a single update on the whole Peninsular War), though, that makes it seem like it happened in a hurry.

2) I like the way the Hapsburg lines are continuing and gradually spreading away from the center of Europe: from Bavaria-Bohemia-Austria-Hungary to Austria-Hungary-Wallachia-Slavonia; from Lorraine-Padania to Italy and Greece; from Tuscany to Catalonia. I almost expect Portugal or Louisiana to restore a monarchy under a Catalonian cadet line.

3) The downside to those changes, of course, is the elimination of the Kingdom of the Three Sicilies. I wonder--if Sicily and Catalonia had hung together, would that count as Two Sicilies again? That could be confusing.

4) I noticed that, for roughly half the time this timeline has been running, (i.e. since Part 106 in January 2011), it has been known that the Moronites engage in "unorthodox sexual practices", yet AFAICT we haven't gotten any positive hint as to what those are.

5) I'm also amused by the fact that South Carolina is by now on the northern border of Carolina.

6) Does "aydub" stand for "all wright"?

7) We've gotten a fair amount of detail (in aggregate) about shady Batten-Hale dealings, enough that I'm suspicious of the possibility they're all connected, and our bold explorers will be inextricably entangled in them by the end of the volume.
 
Just finished rereading the whole timeline. A few comments.

1) Wow, the Italian unification happened straightforwardly. Maybe it's just the contrast to the height of the Great American War in presentation (instead of an update on, say, the subnational political causes and effects of one or two campaigns, a single update on the whole Peninsular War), though, that makes it seem like it happened in a hurry.

I took it as another case of Europe increasingly drifting onto the sidelines of the world stage. Sort of:

"Yeah, there was a rebellion in China led by a man who said he was Jesus' brother. It was around the same time of the US Civil War, which was a very complicated and interesting conflict, let me tell you. You can learn a lot just studying the individual commanders' relationships with their troops. Sorry? Oh. Sure, the Taiping, right - second most lethal war ever. Anyway, the county-by-county proportion of slave ownership in Kentucky...."

6) Does "aydub" stand for "all wright"?

That was my guess.

7) We've gotten a fair amount of detail (in aggregate) about shady Batten-Hale dealings, enough that I'm suspicious of the possibility they're all connected, and our bold explorers will be inextricably entangled in them by the end of the volume.

Yeah, I keep trying to put the pieces together into a coherent picture, and failing. What is up with this guy?

It seems the longer I read this timeline, the worse I get at predicting it.
 

Thande

Donor
Part #212: Acts of God

“It is thanks to the appalling safety record of the last Democratic Unionist government and Terry Blake/Daniella Laughton’s lack of investment in infrastructure (Mary, double check if most plausible smoking gun happened under Blake or Laughton) that Croham Hall suffered such damage in the recent floods. A New Doradist government would ensure proper investment to ensure that all public buildings are fully compliant with the National Building Safety Code and equipped with (Mary, put smoking gun component here—foundations, drainage, whatever) that will last for 10/15/20 years (Mary, put in a quick quist to Professor Douglas at New College, or Mick Davis from Greele and Solomon’s if you can’t get the Prof – find out what a plausible timescale is) For now we will work together to rebuild from this tragedy but I ask you, do not entirely allow this memory to fade when it comes time once again to choose those who represent you at the highest level of government...”

—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)​


*

(Dr. David Wostyn)

Forty-five minutes have now passed and Lieutenant Tindale and I still have yet to hear from Captain MacCauley’s team. I will keep you updated but there is little we can do but evacuate if anything has gone wrong. With a heavy heart I would ask the Institute to begin considering alternative rescue plans—and possibly with more of our people to rescue. And furthermore, I find myself running short of proper history books, for Bes. Batten-Hale’s collection is proving thinner than I had hoped...

*

From: “The Breakspear Compendium of World Records” (2014 Edition)—

WORLD’S BIGGEST DOG. Digby, an Irish Wolfhound who resides with Mr and Mrs W. Vandusen of Ticonderoga, New England, ENA, is a staggering 41.3 English inches tall. However, if we are talking about mass rather than height—

*

(Dr. David Wostyn)

Er, sorry about that, fed the wrong page into the digitiser. Here we are...

*

From: “The Breakspear Compendium of World Records” (2014 Edition)—

SECTION 8: NATURAL DISASTERS

There are some records we don’t like to see broken, and many of them fall under this category: the number of people killed, the number of houses destroyed, the number of fields poisoned. But as the world’s population grows, sadly the death toll of such disasters tends to grow with it—even as we improve our technology and practices to try to prevent or mitigate such events. Often, despite our best efforts, they are beyond our control...

HISTORY’S DEADLIEST EARTHQUAKE. Although many of us may think of the Cometa earthquake of 1906 or the Zone14Urb2 earthquake of 1960, in fact the quake which led to the single largest loss of life occurred in China’s Shaanxi Province in the year 1556—exacerbated by the fact that many of those who died were living in artificial dwellings called yaodongs excavated from caves. This quake, known as the Jiajing Great Earthquake, killed an estimated minimum of 800,000 people, around 60% of the province’s population as well as many from neighbouring provinces and effectively destroyed an entire region of China. It is estimated to have measured approximately J2 on the Benevento scale, very high but still less than the K1 of the aforementioned Combine earthquake of 1960. This ignores examples of earthquakes triggering marémotos [1] in oceanic regions, which can often be more devastating that the original quake—as the world learned to its horror ten years ago when the Fiesta de San Esteban Massacre killed over 250,000 people in countries bordering the Indian Ocean and set back the Global Reconstruction Programme by years. This was the deadliest marémoto in history. Prior to this point, the holder of the dubious crown is disputed between the explosion of Thera/Santorini circa 1600 BC and its devastation of the Minoan culture (a possible inspiration for the legend of Atlantis) and, more recently, the marémoto stemming from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that killed not only people in Portugal but as far away as the British Isles. Both of these are estimated to have killed approximately 100,000, so sadly this is one record smashed in recent years we did not want to see.

VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS. A definitive answer cannot be given for the largest volcanic eruption in history, as many of them have taken place out of direct sight of human eye and early records are often spotty and reconstructed based on secondary evidence. For example, the eruption of Zone13Mont19 (Huaynaputina) in the year 1600 is estimated to be the largest volcanic explosion in South American history but its impact was mostly noted by the secondary impact that the volcanic ash and dust it spewed in the atmosphere caused crop failures and a devastating famine in Russia. Two centuries later in 1815, Zone7Mont1 (Mount Tambora) on the island then called Sumbawa erupted in an explosion heard as far away as Zone7Urb1 (Batavia), almost 800 miles away. This eruption is not only believed to have destroyed an indigenous culture on the island, but once again injected such high levels of ash and dust into the atmosphere that it let to the so-called ‘Year Without A Summer’ of 1816, when crops failed across much of the world and famine and starvation ensued. The devastation was particularly acute in Europe and in China, both recovering from recent major wars, and the global death toll is estimated to be approximately 100,000. The largest human death toll directly attributable to a volcanic eruption is generally believed to be that of Krakatoa in 1883, which killed at least 30,000 people. The Laki eruption in Iceland in 1783 also deserves mention, as (as well as indirectly leading to many deaths through its effects on the atmosphere) it killed over 9,000 people in Iceland itself, which was a quarter of the island’s small population and led to a new settlement drive by its new British overlords, in many ways leading to the Icelandic culture we know today.[2] But probably the most famous of all volcanic eruptions in the West remains Vesuvius in AD 79, which of course destroyed the town of Pompeii and killed approximately 18,000 people. Despite several overly dramatic films which might make one think otherwise, the 1980 eruption of Mount North/Loowit in Drakesland, ENA led to ‘only’ 63 deaths.[3]

DELUGES AND OTHER FLOODS. The rivers are China for notorious for changing course erratically and causing floods as their beds are subject to elevation (in part due to man-made effects). The Yellow (Huanghe) River in particular is poetically known as ‘the Scourge of the Sons of Han’ due to its impact on the country. It is only because of some of the most ambitious canal and irrigation water control systems attempted from the ancient world onwards that China has not faced more devastation than it has, but it nonetheless seizes most of the top spots on the unenviable list of deadliest floods. The most devastating Chinese flood recorded is that of 1939, when the Yangtze and Huai Rivers both burst their banks after heavy rainfall. The city of Jiangning on its floodplain was particularly badly hit and water flooding down the Grand Canal (one of the aforementioned ancient waterworks of China) broke flood defences on the lake between Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. The exact death toll remains disputed but may be as high as 3 million. Though less deadly, the Chinese floods of the 1850s are also worth noting here as they came together with the Yellow River changing its course so radically that it severed the Grand Canal connection at Shandong and the region’s economy was changed forever; furthermore the floods also altered the course of history by forcing both the Chinese factions at the time to focus on recovering from their devastation, leading to a period of piece between the two appropriately named ‘Riverine Wars’. At the end of the second, though it was over a decade after the Yellow River had shifted, the lack of detailed surveys due to the intermittent civil war meant that postwar borders were drawn based on the known former course of the river, leading to some disputes later on. By contrast, the deadliest flood outside China remains the St Felix’s Flood of 1530 in Belgium (another country which has by necessity produced brilliant works of water control) and the death toll is estimated at approximately 100,000.[4]

BIGGEST HYPERSTORMS. Since records began, hyperstorms (also known as Typhoons in the Pacific and Huracáns in the Atlantic) have caused devastation in countries bordering those oceans with both numbing inevitability and yet erratic irregularity. The death toll is much higher for most Pacific Typhoons than Atlantic Huracáns, partly because of the generally higher and denser population in the countries bordering the former. The only Huracán even to get into the top 30 is the Great Huracán of 1790, which killed over 20,000 people in the British West Indies—leading to assistance from Carolina and probably a major cause in some of the islands later becoming part of it.[5] This figure nonetheless pales into insignificance beside the Typhoon death tolls, such as the Hooghly Cyclone of 1737 (approx. 300,000) the Annam Typhoon of 1877 (est. 250,000) and the Hainan Disaster of 1860 (50,000) which ultimately led to European colonial withdrawal from the island and it becoming Chinese again. Many other hyperstorms have also had political impact, such as the Great Gujarat Storm of 1979 causing the food shortages which were a major cause in the popular overthrow of the Ram Kumar regime in Panchala in 1982. Unfortunately, the deadliest such hyperstorms are not restricted to past centuries, and the Calcutta Typhoon of 2009 remains the biggest single loss of life to a natural disaster since the Fiesta de San Esteban Massacre in 2004. It is worth noting that while the Huracáns of the Atlantic have not inflicted such devastating losses of life, they have continued to wreak devastation on buildings, agriculture and other wealth along the east coast of the Americas. Indeed, this devastation was so visible that for years many assumed that the reports of few deaths from the Combine Zones bordering the ocean were nothing but VoxHumana propaganda—despite occasional instances such as the Boston Storm of 1970 demonstrating the same effects to the Free World. Huracán deaths are as often due to people ignoring timely warnings from the authorities, or being unable to flee due to other crises such as wars and fuel shortages, as they are unavoidable losses of life. Unfortunately, in the case of the Pacific Typhoons, many of their deaths remain in the categoty of unavoidable—until technology advances to the point that the countries in question are able to construct better defences and warning systems.

INFOBOX: FASCINATING FACT: Though hyperstorms can be devastating, they can also bring people together. (Painting of three men in military uniforms of green, tan and grey, all with impressive sideburns, shaking hands in front of suspiciously artificial-looking display of three crossed flags, all tattered and torn by a stylised storm in the background). The Santa Eufemia Huracán of 1872 made landfall on September 16th (St Euphemia’s Day) not far from the city of Nouvelle-Orléans. French rule in what was left of Louisiana had been increasingly shaky since the Great American War and enforced only by excessive numbers of troops that effectively meant the colony was always run at a steep loss from the point of view of the Comptroller-General’s treasury. Even worse, Governor Laurent Lequiller was slain in the early hours of the Huracán’s impact when his boat was overturned: his supporters claimed that he was crossing Lake Pontchartrain to bring orders to those on the southern peninsula closer to the storm, but popular belief was that he had been trying to escape and abandon the people of the city to the storm’s ravages. Many people in the city rose up against those who were often now seen as ‘occupiers’, metropolitan Frenchmen selected so as to have no ties to the city. There was fighting even as the high-velocty winds tore the city apart. Floods drowned some while a possibly apocryphal story said two men held a long swordfight atop the towers of St Louis Cathedral, only for both to be struck by lighting as the storm swept over them and toppled the towers. Such tales of ‘fighting in a burning house’ would be used by Raúl Caraíbas as parables in his books. In the devastating aftermath of the storm (which is believed to have killed perhaps 2,000 people, though the fighting makes it hard to differentiate the numbers) no help came from France, at the time obsessed with a phantom German invasion. Meridian, Carolinian and American troops gathered at the border, eyeing each other while the Orléanais drowned and starved. Then the Carolinian General Roderick Peters (also sometimes known as Rodrigo Pérez; he had married a Meridian wife) took the first move, approaching his American counterpart Henry Day with a flag of truce and threw down his weapons as a token of honesty. Day, the son of a Great American War general who had bitterly fought the Carolinians, hesitated but in the end accepted Peters’ mission. Together with Alonso Fernández, a Mexican officer with Meridian connections of his own, the three agreed not to quarrel over the city (regardless of what their government Lectels told them) but to cooperate in a humanitarian mission to save its people. An attempted court-martial of General Day by fire-breathing Supremacists in Parliament led to a public outcry and then-obscure future President Michael Chamberlain rising to prominence as Day’s biggest defender in Parliament. As well as saving thousands of lives and establishing the Free City of Nouvelle-Orléans—relegating a humiliated France’s final American possessions to its islands in the Lesser Antilles—the Santa Eufemia Intervention led to a warming of relations between the ENA and Carolina, and ultimately the UPSA—the so-called Seventies Thaw. For the first time in years Novamundine politicians began to focus on promoting peaceful trade and prosperity rather than banging the drum of brinksmanship, and the Long Peace became the Gilded Age. Later generations would so name it as they would look back in nostalgia on such a time of peaceful cooperation. For years afterwards descendants of the principals involved in the rescue effort have met every year in Nouvelle-Orléans on the anniversary of the disaster to honour their ancestors. Though this custom was held in abeyance during the worst Black Scare periods of the twentieth century, it has recently been revived...






[1] A Spanish term for tsunami, literally ‘the sea moves’ (by analogy to terramoto for earthquake). Tsunami, being a Japanese name, is not widely known in TTL and ‘tidal wave’ has been discouraged for the same reasons as OTL (i.e. it’s a misleading term stemming from the fact that a tsunami has a high tidal bore, but it has nothing to do with tides themselves).

[3] “New” is a bit misleading considering the island had been British for decades at this point.

[3] This is of course OTL’s Mount St Helens; it was named for Captain North of the Enterprize mission in TTL and there remains some political argument over whether to use this name or the native one (rather, one of the native ones) Loowit—named along with two neighbouring mountains for members of a mythical love triangle of gods transformed into mountains by their chief.

[4] Like similar works in OTL, this just uses the name of the current nation state in which the flood happened—at the time of the flood it was part of the ‘Burgundian Circle’ of Charles V’s Holy Roman Empire.

[5] This is another weasel-words comment, as such books don’t go into detail on the possesion of islands coming and going over time.
 
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Thande

Donor
Yes, we're back! Well I couldn't let Christmas go by without an update. Why have I not updated for ages? Well, mainly because I've been hyper-busy with RL work. However, there is another reason and one you'll like more.

Those excellent chaps Meadow and Roem have started an online publishing house for Kindle books, Sea Lion Press. I already have a couple of shorter stories up on there if you're interested, The Curse of Maggie and The Unreformed Kingdom. It was suggested a while back that I finally publish LTTW on there, one volume at a time. I've always viewed the idea with trepidation because I didn't want to go back to the way I wrote in 2007 to review the early parts of the TL and fix problems etc. However that's exactly what I've been doing, and at some point in the early new year (perhaps February) Volume I of LTTW will launch on SLP, based on parts 1-50 of the timeline here.

Why buy it when you've already read it here? It is fully revised and reformatted, with corrected mistakes, some new ideas here and there and some clever[citation needed] calls-forward for later events in the TL I had not planned at the time. It will also come with a full Chronology and some excellent maps made by Mr Alex Richards which can actually be viewed properly on a Kindle. I hope you will be glad to hear this and soon I will have completed my revision work so I can spend more time on doing new parts of 'current' LTTW. And there is the possibility of a print version in future...

I want to thank everyone for their support over the years in persuading me to stick with this TL and take it to new places - now we go to another one indeed. Stay tuned - and have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thande
 
Well, this was unexpected. :D

Oh, those foreshadowings... I like how you made something that you couldn't really affect part of the timeline, nice job! ;)

Global Reconstruction Programme

So I'm guessing the Last War of Supremacy will be pretty bad.

Zone14Urb2

Those are some terrible naming conventions right here. At least use spaces for god's sake!

the number of fields poisoned

Fields poisoned? Now this is a new one for me. I've never heard of anything like this before.

Oh, and Viva la Free Louisiana!
 
A Christmas update - *and* news of publication! Huzzah, huzzah and thrice huzzah!

I like the 'creative' forms of research Dr Wostyn is being forced into by Bes. Batten-Hale's limited library. And once again, you tantalise us with hints of a part of the world we haven't yet seen...

The Societist system of un-naming is really alien, by the way - but then, I'm kind of surprised nobody's tried it in OTL.
 
This work is extraordinary. I love all of the differences in this world, like a self-declared "Empire of North America" -was that inspired by all of those people who talk of the US being the "American Empire"? - and a Saxony-led Germany - it shows that Germany does not have to be unified by Prussia or Austria.

There's one thing that I have been meaning to ask. While I was reading one of the parts on science, you talked of nitric acid being "azeltic acid". How did such a term arise?

Also, the bit about phlogiston theory remaining relevant was interesting, once again breaking our expectations.
 
Excellent update Thande, and thanks for the nod there.

Looking through, I think I can decipher that you've moved the 1931 Chinese floods to 1939, and of course the hurricane patterns are completely different. The Free City of New Orleans looks like a fun one for a few decades time, though I'm now trying to work out if the American troops were stationed in the ENA, on the metaphorical border (as in not directly bordering but nearby), or if that's a hint of further American territorial gains (which seems unlikely).

Also, that Combine naming system is crazy, though from that it's apparent that zones 7, 13 and 14 correspond to (part of) the Meridian East Indies, (Lower?) Peru and Chile respectively.

I'm also trying to work out if that 2004 Tsunami is the Boxing Day one from OTL 2004 or a manmade event that dwarfed it in scale.
 
I am surprised that Carolinian troops were available despite the low-level civil war in their country.
Does the Free City of Nouvelle-Orléans include all territory of French Louisiana?

So I'm guessing the Last War of Supremacy will be pretty bad.

No less than 38 nuclear weapons were used in that war.

The Societist system of un-naming is really alien, by the way - but then, I'm kind of surprised nobody's tried it in OTL.

It is no more alien than Thouret's reorganisation of Republican France into square départements based on lines of latitude and longitude and named after the Revolutionary calendar’s days.
 
Dwarfing? The numbers are in the same range as the Boxing Day tsunami.

But for the Indian Ocean not to be mentioned at all and the Pacific only, if it's not the Boxing Day Tsunami then either it didn't happen or it had a much smaller impact than OTL.
 
This work is extraordinary. I love all of the differences in this world, like a self-declared "Empire of North America" -was that inspired by all of those people who talk of the US being the "American Empire"?

I think that was because Frederick was based in America during the British War of Succession, but I don't know.
 
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