I mean. You made the map. It's your creation. It is your responsibility to fill in logical holes. Posting a map that is basically just an OTL WorldA with some tiny differences and then say "I made a COMPLETELY NEW AND ORIGINAL ALTERNATE HISTORY!!!1!" Is just bad form
Map Thread XIX
- Thread starter water123
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Two small QBam/EqualA country map.
This Portugal suffered the Anglo-German partition plan after a bankrupcy in the first decade of the 20th century, losing all its colonies but cape verde. After WW1 the northern German part of angola comes under british and belgian occupation, Both parties agree to sell it to Portugal (along with Sao tomé and British Luanda). Now in possession with a colony the dictatorship in portugal proceeds to flood it with settlers, the small colony would become by the 1960s an european majority place - although most living near the coast and in luanda -, with a thriving export economy based on cheap and inhumane african labor in plantations and farms. The early 60s would see a first quick colonial war that portugal would swiftly win, causing a few dozen thousands african death, the lack of international communism ITTL prevents a long conflict, by the 70s (the country democratized in the 50s) the Alt-UN ask for decolonization, which portugals answer by giving a full independance referendum, the majority white population concentrated in the cities votes to stay, and portugal official enfranchize all the population living in the border but put very strict rules preventing illegal -majority african seeking opportunities- migrants from becoming citizen. There is a second, less intense but longer struggle in the 80s more like the troubles, which portugal manages to calm by giving increased subsidies and promising some far away referendums. Today portuguese Angola is a highly unequal region, with a GINI coefficient comparable to Brazil, a majority of citizens are of european origin, and there is a thriving african middle class in the city, but native living in the countryside or suburbs are signficiantly worse, the situation is particularly bad for african migrants -those that manage to cross the Great Congo Wall, imagine the palestine wall but in Africa - , who are forced to work in the mines of the Lunda Autonomous Region for over a decade to even be able to become residents, let alone citizens. The region has some of the highest alcoholism rate and gun ownership rate in the world, and has the highest violence rate for a developped country. Luanda is home to striking inequalities and is the largest African Business center.
THis is supposed to be a draft of a larger map i'll eventually make where i'm speculating what would have happened if Portugal had the same colonial policies as IRL, but managed to have a sufficiently small colony that they can hold it through sheer demographic - a situation comparable to New Caledonia IRL in France, which is a recent tropical settler colony where the natives are in the minority -, It's quite ugly indeed.
So this is actually a DBWI of a large map i'm currently making, showing a larger french settlement in Louisiana (particularly upper louisiana - to a level comparable to Quebec), i've been working on this map for over a month and originally planned to post it on MOTF but it turned out much harder than planned... One of the event in this Scenario is that a republican revolt (against Spain) is put down in the 1790s, this speculates it succeeds and becomes an independant state at the fringe of the United States, it eventually gets invaded by the US since it controls valuable region in the upper missouri, but gets accepted as a republic, with large autonomy, among other things this sets a precedent for such autonomous republic to be accepted in the US. In this scenario Florida isn't sold to the US, but the american invade it but face far more trouble against seminoles, war weriness results in them being allowed inside the US as a republic (at the same time many of the south-east tribes went there, the Cherokee had at this time also written their own constitution IRL, which i guess they could help the seminole set up this republic).
The presence of this Louisiana Republic diverts some of the midwest migration toward texas, which is more settled and manages to enforce larger border, this california actually rebelled with british help in 1845, but after the gold rush was ̶c̶o̶u̶p̶e̶d̶ peacefuly integrated into the US.
And yes the olympic peninsula exclave was an actual british proposal IRL
And also yes I know that I took heartland maybe a bit too literally
This Portugal suffered the Anglo-German partition plan after a bankrupcy in the first decade of the 20th century, losing all its colonies but cape verde. After WW1 the northern German part of angola comes under british and belgian occupation, Both parties agree to sell it to Portugal (along with Sao tomé and British Luanda). Now in possession with a colony the dictatorship in portugal proceeds to flood it with settlers, the small colony would become by the 1960s an european majority place - although most living near the coast and in luanda -, with a thriving export economy based on cheap and inhumane african labor in plantations and farms. The early 60s would see a first quick colonial war that portugal would swiftly win, causing a few dozen thousands african death, the lack of international communism ITTL prevents a long conflict, by the 70s (the country democratized in the 50s) the Alt-UN ask for decolonization, which portugals answer by giving a full independance referendum, the majority white population concentrated in the cities votes to stay, and portugal official enfranchize all the population living in the border but put very strict rules preventing illegal -majority african seeking opportunities- migrants from becoming citizen. There is a second, less intense but longer struggle in the 80s more like the troubles, which portugal manages to calm by giving increased subsidies and promising some far away referendums. Today portuguese Angola is a highly unequal region, with a GINI coefficient comparable to Brazil, a majority of citizens are of european origin, and there is a thriving african middle class in the city, but native living in the countryside or suburbs are signficiantly worse, the situation is particularly bad for african migrants -those that manage to cross the Great Congo Wall, imagine the palestine wall but in Africa - , who are forced to work in the mines of the Lunda Autonomous Region for over a decade to even be able to become residents, let alone citizens. The region has some of the highest alcoholism rate and gun ownership rate in the world, and has the highest violence rate for a developped country. Luanda is home to striking inequalities and is the largest African Business center.
THis is supposed to be a draft of a larger map i'll eventually make where i'm speculating what would have happened if Portugal had the same colonial policies as IRL, but managed to have a sufficiently small colony that they can hold it through sheer demographic - a situation comparable to New Caledonia IRL in France, which is a recent tropical settler colony where the natives are in the minority -, It's quite ugly indeed.
So this is actually a DBWI of a large map i'm currently making, showing a larger french settlement in Louisiana (particularly upper louisiana - to a level comparable to Quebec), i've been working on this map for over a month and originally planned to post it on MOTF but it turned out much harder than planned... One of the event in this Scenario is that a republican revolt (against Spain) is put down in the 1790s, this speculates it succeeds and becomes an independant state at the fringe of the United States, it eventually gets invaded by the US since it controls valuable region in the upper missouri, but gets accepted as a republic, with large autonomy, among other things this sets a precedent for such autonomous republic to be accepted in the US. In this scenario Florida isn't sold to the US, but the american invade it but face far more trouble against seminoles, war weriness results in them being allowed inside the US as a republic (at the same time many of the south-east tribes went there, the Cherokee had at this time also written their own constitution IRL, which i guess they could help the seminole set up this republic).
The presence of this Louisiana Republic diverts some of the midwest migration toward texas, which is more settled and manages to enforce larger border, this california actually rebelled with british help in 1845, but after the gold rush was ̶c̶o̶u̶p̶e̶d̶ peacefuly integrated into the US.
And yes the olympic peninsula exclave was an actual british proposal IRL
And also yes I know that I took heartland maybe a bit too literally
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New Caledonia also had two other things which made it so screwed up: a policy of exporting natives to work on plantations elsewhere, and being used as a prison colony
I didn't claim to have a history behind it, nor did I claim it was realistic. If you want to call me out on something, do it on a claim i i never fulfilled
Are the American Pan-Nationalists in favor of rejoining the Union?
This looks like a bad time for the Confederates.
make them (the confederate government) suffer.
Also, I suggest that until it's finished, you post it the WIP thread (we've got one of those somewhere, don't we?)
Trust me, they will suffer.
Also I completely forgot about the wip thread.
Aha! You've activated my trap card! /sCould just be claiming it rather than actually occupying it. After all, most maps of Spanish Latin America don't have a blank space there. And of course they could get to Peru by way of Central America, same as the Spaniards did. (Once you swallow them crossing the Atlantic, that is.)
But in all seriousness, this is a fantastic microcosm of what I think is the biggest failings with the WorldA series of maps: It is really, really difficult to present non-Westphalian systems of government. For example, there were a multitude of extremely powerful native nations in areas that are considered "Terra Incognita." The Iroquois Confederacy, for example, was an absolutely pivotal nation in the history of the Americas and it was really a major fluke that it ended up in a civil war in the one time that it really, really mattered. Another example is Alexander McGillvary's Muscogee Empire. "WI North American Meiji" is one of the most common questions asked by people moving on from rather basic civil war/WWII/WWI type questions in Alternate History. However, McGillvary basically was able to do it. He introduced the Muskogee Empire to Western styles of growing crops, Southern style slavery, etc. Hell, the slavocratic societies of the Cherokee and Muskogee are to the South as the Iroquois and Powhatan are to the North. Hell, if McGillvary had been able to live long enough to handle the situation with the Redsticks, especially if the Revolutionary Era in Europe is butterflied or changed, the Muskogee may have been able to continue as an American bullwark to a powerful independent state similarly to Paraguay. However, neither of these states are on so many maps. Instead, it's like there's this race to paint the map in pink, blue, and...whatever the fuck Spain's color is. Every colony is considered to be the same as the mass settler colonies of the United States and Australia, even where it doesn't make any sense. I know this is just kind of a nitpick but it kind of annoys me.
Sometime between the 1890's and 1930's if I had to guess.
How would there be any chance for the CSA to have communist uprising before the USSR really got their war machine going?
*Shoulder shrug* I don't know, because a Communist Confederacy amuses me.
I think that's all a casualty of the fact that alternate history as a whole tends to be simplistic retellings of a different past. Most AH focuses on war and violence, presents things in a black-and-white mentality, and either makes the world into a utopia, a dystopia, or a reflection of our personal political beliefs. Real history, meanwhile, is neither nearly as fun nor nearly as up front about its leanings. The taming of the Wild West didn't rely on gun-toting cowboy outlaws and shootouts at high noon, but rather railroads and barbed wire. Wars are fought in shades of gray. There was no one "bad guy" in World War One--both sides did wrong, even if the Central Powers did arguably more wrong than the Entente. The only war I would without question apply the term "bad guy" to is World War Two, because the guys with skulls on their hats and mass genocide camps in their backyards definitely fall in the shade of pitch black. And you'll be lucky in any alternate timeline to find out who invented the airplane, or the steam engine. You'll be lucky to find out who invents the light bulb.
We tend to see history as a straight line of events, dominoes falling in place one after another, when in reality, it's a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey... stuff. A million things are happening at once. Wooly mammoths were still alive when the pyramids were being built. Constantinople, and with it the Roman Empire, fell in 1453; thirty-nine years later, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The French used the guillotine for the final time on September 10, 1977; four months earlier, Star Wars had debuted on the big screen for the first time. It's hard to capture all of that in a timeline, things happening simultaneously across the world and making no sense, having no rhyme or reason, just as it's hard to capture all the crap going on in maps. Even in using something other than a WorldA, it would be extremely difficult to capture all the intricacies happening in colonial America.
I mean, Imperial Germany did also have skulls on their uniforms.
I honestly wish we got to see more Rhodesia style nations in AH, but with ties to the home nation like we have here. Having a dynamic of the UN trying, and characteristically failing, to enforce basic human rights in a dysfunctional hellhole with a first world country trying to keep the control of the state would be actually rather fun.
Just don't make the colonial government sympathetic in these scenarios for the love of god
To be fair, with the amount of shit that was going on in the European Colonial Powers, WWI is arguably Black vs Black.
Back on point, @HeX, you're not wrong. "Random Shit that makes no fucking sense being amplified to infinity with the butterfly effect" is the biggest driving force of history, bigger than basically everything else. However, the WorldA map is meant to capture the situation of polities on earth at a certain point in time, usually January 1st of a certain year. The issue is, this goal cannot be completed in truth unless all parties involved in global politics are at least somewhat represented. There is a vast difference between the "terra incognita" of, say, the American Midwest or rural Africa and that of northern Baffin Island. However, these areas all tend to get lumped together as "yummy lebensraum" for the colonizing power of the day. And I mean, I get it. Researching these areas is really, really, really difficult. I had a professor who specialized in Native American history and even he really couldn't precisely tell every single area of the Southeast's pre-columbian and pre-british settlement. However, just seeing the same waves of pink and blue and grey and green and gold(?) wash over 3/4ths of the world over and over and over again without accounting for the fact that most of those areas were inhabited by far more than just Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, and a few other people kinda irks me. That's not even mentioning groups such as Maroon communities that existed outside of traditional colonial society, some of which grew extremely powerful in their own right.
I've always thought about writing some "quick guides for neglected areas" but I don't quite have the time right now, but as the next semester continues on I might consider it.
TheScottishMongol
Banned
I've felt the same way for a while, I've been rather nitpicky especially about Worlda being an excuse to fill in bits on a map, especially when people try to represent "settlement" by making sequentially larger blobs or, God forbid, those hideous little scatterings of color that look like someone used the spray can tool...because that isn't how settlement patterns or borders work.
And it really irks me when people leave blank areas within nations' borders because "it hasn't been settled yet" or whatever. By that logic, large swathes of the US, Canada, and Australia in 2019 should be the color of Virgin Earth because "nobody lives there". The map is not the territory, people!
Not to mention, the Americas aren't the only ones who get shafted - how often do you see Sub-Saharan Africa with more than half a dozen "nations"?
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