Some people on this board are describing things as "cliches" which are entirely predictable. Haiti, for example, has an incredibly dire starting point. Race is irrelevant: any society where 95%+ of the population have been used as slaves in non-technical tasks for generations is in a near impossible starting place. The only people with education or administrative experience are going to be (understandably) hated and chased out the country when the inevitable revolt happens, and the rest of the population will not have the skills or wealth to build something from that. If you have a tiny population, you can try to avoid the first by being a tax haven, but when you have a big population that capital is going to be spread far too thinly to have any impact. Oh, and that's before you add-in the fact you get hit by deadly hurricanes fairly regularly too.
Worst 19th Century Alternate History Cliches
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Some people on this board are describing things as "cliches" which are entirely predictable. Haiti, for example, has an incredibly dire starting point. Race is irrelevant: any society where 95%+ of the population have been used as slaves in non-technical tasks for generations is in a near impossible starting place. The only people with education or administrative experience are going to be (understandably) hated and chased out the country when the inevitable revolt happens, and the rest of the population will not have the skills or wealth to build something from that. If you have a tiny population, you can try to avoid the first by being a tax haven, but when you have a big population that capital is going to be spread far too thinly to have any impact. Oh, and that's before you add-in the fact you get hit by deadly hurricanes fairly regularly too.
Toussaint louverture actively retained white former plantation owners for their expertise and multiple people in favor of slavery described his (free, black) reign positively.
That's true, but it doesn't always have to be utterly dire. I don't doubt that Haiti is bound to suffer for decades after independence (including that French indemnity). But even by 1900, Haiti can be on the way to something more, even if not much more than a standard Latin American country. And it isn't hard to imagine a 21st century Haiti which isn't much less developed than the Dominican Republic.
And then of course the more flavorful Haiti's, like the Kingdom of Haiti and such, could always exist. It isn't like every wannabe Napoleon has to be a Bokassa-type and have an utterly disastrous reign.
In my TL, I have hitler himself admitted by art school and volunteered for WW1.
For some reason, a world without Hitler just seems..... wrong.
I once sw someone suggesting a Polish axis scenario with a polish analogue to Hitler to start WWII and take over europe
What do they seek to achieve? Greater Poland or Greater Commonwealth?
A Poland from the elbe to the volga, I'm not kidding
The scenario was dropped because they convinced him that Poland, being less populated than Germany and France wouldn't be able to make conquests
I am losing IQ as I read this paragraph.
I thought my GreaterReich was ASB enough.
Isn't that the main plotline of the HoI4 Deluge mod? Where Sikorski is that timeline's equivalent of Hitler?
Oh, well then. If we can have a Polish Hitler, then I shall make a timeline about a Lithuanian Hitler.
I once had a idea of something close to that, the PoD would be to have Lithuania to break away from the commonwealth in the 1400s for some reason, and they proceed to seize control of Ukraien from the collapsing Golden horde and the ukrainian grain allow Lithuania to have a population boom, and so in the following centuries they surpass Poland and became a strong power until Poland and Russia splits lithuania, but during the Napoleonic wars Napoleon still invades Russia (and Poland, that is a member of the coalition) and he re stabilishes the kingdom of Lithuania in the way, that turns into a military state in the following decades to prevent it's re annexation, something like a mix of napoleonic France with Frederick the great prussia
This is not so unplausible, since Lithuania was so big in comparation to Poland, they just lacked the population to overcome the poles
I once had a idea of something close to that, the PoD would be to have Lithuania to break away from the commonwealth in the 1400s for some reason, and they proceed to seize control of Ukraien from the collapsing Golden horde and the ukrainian grain allow Lithuania to have a population boom, and so in the following centuries they surpass Poland and became a strong power until Poland and Russia splits lithuania, but during the Napoleonic wars Napoleon still invades Russia (and Poland, that is a member of the coalition) and he re stabilishes the kingdom of Lithuania in the way, that turns into a military state in the following decades to prevent it's re annexation, something like a mix of napoleonic France with Frederick the great prussia
This is not so unplausible, since Lithuania was so big in comparation to Poland, they just lacked the population to overcome the poles
Yeah, but they'd just be Belarusian or Ukrainian and not Lithuanian/Balts.
Hmm, well:I once had a idea of something close to that, the PoD would be to have Lithuania to break away from the commonwealth in the 1400s for some reason, and they proceed to seize control of Ukraien from the collapsing Golden horde and the ukrainian grain allow Lithuania to have a population boom, and so in the following centuries they surpass Poland and became a strong power until Poland and Russia splits lithuania, but during the Napoleonic wars Napoleon still invades Russia (and Poland, that is a member of the coalition) and he re stabilishes the kingdom of Lithuania in the way, that turns into a military state in the following decades to prevent it's re annexation, something like a mix of napoleonic France with Frederick the great prussia
This is not so unplausible, since Lithuania was so big in comparation to Poland, they just lacked the population to overcome the poles
- Lithuania already held "Ukraine" in the 1400s (as in, the core of the territory of OTL Ukraine, there was no "Ukraine" back then)
- There was no Commonwealth in the 1400s, only a personal union, and that union was pretty much only limited to the same monarch, and otherwise the two countries were separate until the late 16th century (they didn't even usually help in each other's wars). A personal union can very easily be broken and indeed had been temporarily broken twice IOTL, but it would also be just as possible to outright avoid it.
- Lithuania's primary goal in foreign policy was conquering all of Russia (Grand Duke Kęstutis even said "All of Rus' must belong to the Lithuanians"), and an independent Lithuania would continue that policy, I think.
- Would Napoleon even exist in this TL? No Commonwealth would have huge implications on the history of Central Europe, and butterflies from there would likely reach France way earlier than the 18th century.
In my Lithuania TL (in my sig), I prevented that by creating an enmity between the Slavs and the Lithuanians during the events of the timeline, creating a sort of "Qing Empire" scenario, where the Lithuanians/Manchus are relatively separate from the Slavs/Chinese while still remaining in control for now.
samcster94
Banned
that too, started by the same country{and not against a racist settler white ethnic society that had been around around for centuries, but against indigenous Africans who'd been there longer}
The boer war was white people attacking other white people.
I need to read the rest of it sometime.
ZULUS ATTACK, FIGHT BACK TO BACK is hard to beat (even if it didn't get played live when I saw the band in question last month, even though it should've been).
Gah, I had one chance to reference Rorke's Drift and I blew it on a historical mistake.
Deleted member 67076
-Nothing ever happens in Latin America other than the Eternal Yanqui stomping on it forever.
-Latin America will always take a presidential model that dooms it to Caudilloismo
-Nothing ever happens in Africa except for being carved up in the 1880s
-The US is always immune to internal instability. (Wonder what would happen if someone did a timeline where the US had the political instability of Mexico)
-New Imperialism is guaranteed, nevermind the impact of the Long Depression of the 1870s and how Free Trade was the predominant mentality of the 1860s.
-The Middle East and China are as fragile as glass
-American annexation of Central America/Spanish Caribbean (Granted that's also my personal bias, particularly against the 1870 annexation attempt at Santo Domingo because no one seems to realize the guy who drafted the treaty was only in charge for Four Months and barely controlled the capitol)
-Spain always keeps some remnant of their empire until its snatched away by another Great Power.
-Latin America will always take a presidential model that dooms it to Caudilloismo
-Nothing ever happens in Africa except for being carved up in the 1880s
-The US is always immune to internal instability. (Wonder what would happen if someone did a timeline where the US had the political instability of Mexico)
-New Imperialism is guaranteed, nevermind the impact of the Long Depression of the 1870s and how Free Trade was the predominant mentality of the 1860s.
-The Middle East and China are as fragile as glass
-American annexation of Central America/Spanish Caribbean (Granted that's also my personal bias, particularly against the 1870 annexation attempt at Santo Domingo because no one seems to realize the guy who drafted the treaty was only in charge for Four Months and barely controlled the capitol)
-Spain always keeps some remnant of their empire until its snatched away by another Great Power.
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