Anyone who pays attention to the map thread will know that I like to post big showpiece maps every 28th August on the anniversary of my joining the site.
This year is no exception.
As with the last two maps however, though the map itself is done, all the extra stuff (notes, a key and a write-up) are all still unfinished. The write up is about two thirds done, while I only have a basic outline of the notes and key. All this is coming, but will be posted when its done (hopefully soon) while getting the map out before midnight tonight. So, I'll post the map now, add the write-up tomorrow or the day after depending on when its finished, then it shouldn't take me more than a day to quickly add some notes.
I may as well get some credits out of the way here before the full write-up's added. Used these these maps as a base (I started work on parts of this map/scenario so long ago that the Q-BAM hadn't been extensively patched yet), heavily modified in line with either current work on the Q-BAM improvement and core thread or on coastal/lakes patches of my own devising that I made for this map and never got round to posting. Also pilfered a few borders here and there from this excellent alternate Africa map. The rest is all mine.
I should add that this takes place in the same world as some of my other my other maps. When the write-up's done hopefully it'll shed some light on the rest of the world.
EDIT 1) Added write-up for TTL's WW1 equivalent through the resulting peace treaty and up to the dawn of their version of the Great Depression. More to come shortly.
EDIT 2) Damn, appears that my last edit somehow removed the map file. I've re-added the map, and also added more history for this world covering their Great Depression up to the beginning of the Spectral War (TTL's name for Cold war).
This year is no exception.
As with the last two maps however, though the map itself is done, all the extra stuff (notes, a key and a write-up) are all still unfinished. The write up is about two thirds done, while I only have a basic outline of the notes and key. All this is coming, but will be posted when its done (hopefully soon) while getting the map out before midnight tonight. So, I'll post the map now, add the write-up tomorrow or the day after depending on when its finished, then it shouldn't take me more than a day to quickly add some notes.
I may as well get some credits out of the way here before the full write-up's added. Used these these maps as a base (I started work on parts of this map/scenario so long ago that the Q-BAM hadn't been extensively patched yet), heavily modified in line with either current work on the Q-BAM improvement and core thread or on coastal/lakes patches of my own devising that I made for this map and never got round to posting. Also pilfered a few borders here and there from this excellent alternate Africa map. The rest is all mine.
I should add that this takes place in the same world as some of my other my other maps. When the write-up's done hopefully it'll shed some light on the rest of the world.
When I thought up the TL years ago, my original (mildly cliched) idea for the POD would be to re-route the Tunguska Event asteroid to destroy St Petersburg. As I said, mildly cliche, and introduces some major butterflies very early on (all the people killed in St Petersburg for instance), but with that POD in mind I did a lot of work figuring out what the world was like in 1908 and mapping the result (which I was never able to really finish unfortunately) to give me ideas. Naturally I found a few things I wanted to change from before the POD that I couldn't really get away with, but over time I relaxed my position, still redirecting Tunguska but to a mildly different part of Siberia and deciding that as the POD would really be some pebble colliding with and redirecting the asteroid a few years before the impact to subtly modify its orbit, I could thus get away with a few minor butterflies before the main event. So we're left in the awkward situation of having no firm POD, just a lot of minor modifications through the first decade of the 20th century. Eh, what can you do.
Initially, these butterflies affect Africa in very subtle ways. A different colonial administrator is appointed here, a sliver of land is partitioned differently there, and protectorates and administrative divisions are merged and divided in a myriad of small but nonetheless noticeable ways. Northern and Southern Nigeria are kept as separate colonies, France re-jigs the internal borders of its African possessions, the Lado Enclave is reconstituted as a separate (and rather ephemeral) colony once it defaults to Britain on the death of Leopold II, and South Africa adopts a slightly more liberal constitution on federation. Nothing major, but changes that will snowball given time.
The big change comes when the proposed Anglo-German partition of the Portuguese colonial empire finally goes ahead in late 1914; Germany grabs Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe, northern-most Mozambique and most of Angola (governed as two colonies; German Luanda in the north and German Angola in the south). A good portion of what Britain took was awarded to self-governing territories, with Australia nabbing Portuguese Timor, Portuguese India being subsumed into the Raj and southern Mozambique granted to south Africa (Gazaland as a mandate, while Lourenço Marques was annexed directly). Portuguese Guinea and central Mozambique were established as shiny new colonies, while easternmost Angola was hurriedly organised into the Protectorate of Mbundiland, with a thin sliver of land bisecting the two German Angolan colonies to give British central African possessions access to another coast. Portugal complained profusely but there really wasn't anything they could do.
In Europe, bigger butterflies were brewing. It takes time for a myriad of minor changes and butterflies to percolate up into the corridors of power, but once they do, a different chain of events is set in motion. Gradually, international politics shifts; people of little or no significance IOTL get chance lucky breaks and begin to trickle up the ranks into places occupied by others IOTL, while those we would recognise from our history miss out on opportunities they got in our world. Of course, it takes time for people to percolate upwards, and politicians established before the POD are prominent enough to affect events decades into the future as their ever more divergent careers play out, but piece by piece history as we would recognise it crumbles. Gradually, Europe's politics shifts away from what we would recognise, but such changes take time to build up to truly noticeable levels.
There are three crises over Morocco, that eventually settle on French and Spanish joint puppetisation but not true annexation of the state, with the Germans winning some territorial concessions in Kamerun from France as OTL, while the Italo-Turkish war happens right on cue. The First Balkan war ends in less of an Ottoman defeat (they held their own well, managing to cling onto a decent slice of Thrace), while the Bulgarians nab most of Macedonia at the cost of greater troop losses. Serbia is mollified with an Adriatic coast by way of northern Albania, the Rest of Albania is spun off under an Austrian puppet king, while Greece gets diddly squat, and leaves the Balkan League in a huff, shacking up with the Germans. There is no second Balkan war.
A delayed WW1 (ITTL still known as just the Great War, this world lacking a clearly defined WW2 equivalent) finally happens in 1916. A war of the stray dog type incident sets Greece at war with the Balkan League, and they get rapidly curb-stomped by Serbian and Bulgarian forces who besiege Athens. The Greek royal family take shelter in the German embassy and some ill-informed Bulgarian captain decides to shell the place, with predictable results. The ensuing diplomatic crisis sees declarations of war issued as OTL as the many mutual alliances and treaties spring into action; Germany declares war with the Balkan League, Russia declares war on Germany in defence of their Balkan allies, Austria-Hungary follows up with a declaration of war against both, and a different French administration sees the writing on the wall and preemptively invades Belgium before hastily declaring war on Germany. As the Germans also pull that trick as OTL, all this results in is France and Germany effectively partitioning Belgium between them. Italy stays neutral for a few months as OTL before deciding to honour their commitments to Germany and Austria-Hungary (A-H had to offer them territorial concessions in the form of Italian-majority areas of the empire to keep them sweet), invading France just as 1917 dawned. Romania also remained neutral for a period as OTL, eventually being won over to the Central Powers by the immediate prizes of Bessarabia and Bulgarian Dobruja, while reasoning that the war would do-in A-H anyway, and that all they had to do to grab Transylvania was wait. Britain and the Ottomans would for the time being remain neutral
I'll mostly skip the events of TTL's European theatre, and instead focus on Africa. Several German colonies were in a vulnerable position surrounded by or bordering those of France, and fell relatively quickly. Togoland was occupied after just over a month, though Kamerun put up an unexpectedly tough fight under the command of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was by chance posted to Kamerun instead of East Africa as happened IOTL, holding onto a portion of the Kamerun interior for Germany right up to the end of the war (and ensuring that Germany retained at least part of the colony in the final peace treaty). For the short-term at least, the rest of Germany's African colonies remained out of reach, bordered by either still neutral Britain or effectively neutered Belgium. Fighting between France and Italy in North Africa mostly stalemated when both sides were distracted by a particularly vigorous Sennusi attempt to wrest at least part of North Africa from European colonial hands. In Ethiopia, the pro-German Emperor-designate Iyasu V won the short civil war against his aunt that he lost OTL once the world descended into war, seizing the crown and aligning his state with the Central Powers, before invading and annexing French Somaliland (modern Djibouti) in less than a month. With Italy in the Central Powers and Britain neutral, there was very little France could do about the loss of a rather insignificant colony at that stage. The Ethiopians also covertly backed the Dervish State in the Somali interior against both Britain and the Italians, though never to any great extent to avoid antagonising either neutral Britain or theoretically allied Italy.
With the whole 'look at what the Germans are doing to Belgium' argument undermined by the fact the French were doing the same thing, plus two more years of Anglo-German rapprochement and Russian meddling in Central Asia meant that back in 1916 Britain was quite torn over what side to take in the Great War, eventually electing to stay neutral. Of course, circumstances would eventually force Britain's hand when in 1918 a German U-boat accidentally sinks the Titanic, forcing Britain to declare war on Germany (the weather is such an easy thing to butterfly, so the Titanic makes its maiden voyage without a hitch ITTL. As the OTL disaster proved however that ship was a death-trap, and sinking the titanic to bring the UK into the war was too deliciously ironic an opportunity to ignore).
Britain's entry into the war had an instant effect; many as-yet-unconquered German colonies in Southern Africa directly bordered British colonies, and were ripe for the taking. The paltry garrison in German Sofala was steamrollered in less than a month, while German Angola, though it proved to be a more difficult nut to crack, was finally rolled up by the end of 1919. Promises to grant back some of what had been lost to Germany in 1914 brought Portugal on side, eventually retaking Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe and the coastal half of German Luanda with British help, while the rest of German Luanda was occupied by the Belgians operating out of the Congo. In East and South Africa however, more complex situations brewed.
In South Africa, tensions that had been building within the Federation between the slightly more liberal, British aligned Cape and the more conservative Boer states in the interior whose memories of the Boer Wars remained raw exploded rather spectacularly soon after the UK declared war on Germany. IOTL these tensions boiled over into a relatively minor rebellion where Boers who had come to align themselves with Germany against Britain tried to break away and was crushed quickly. Here however, butterflies and blind luck allow the revolutionaries to roll all sixes, attracting substantial domestic support in the Boer heartlands and rapidly taking hold of large tracts of land in Transvaal and the Orange Free State, kicking off a conflict variously called either the South African Civil War or the Third Boer War ITTL. Though it was almost inevitable that the South African government in Cape Town would prevail against the separatists with the full might of the British Empire behind them in time, as the Great War was raging on everywhere else the conflict was able to drag on for two long years, and incidentally distracted British forces in the region enough that no major offensive was made on German South West Africa during the War, keeping the region German till the final peace conference.
Meanwhile a rather unusual situation that had been developing in East Africa for a while finally exploded on the onset of hostilities between Germany and the British Empire. When war was declared in 1916, the then governor of German East Africa, terrified of invasion from British East Africa to the north and the Belgian Congo to the east, declined to recognise the declaration of war lest his domains be quickly invaded and annexed as at that point it seriously looked like Britain was about to join the war. Though it would in fact take two more years of provocations before that happened, the governor was nevertheless scared enough at the time to prepare for the worst, and after a rather farcical stand-off, Germany backed down, allowing their colony to not take part in the conflict. For the next two years British influence gradually grew in this colony trapped in limbo, and by 1918 when the UK was finally pulled into the war, they were able to use the considerable influence they had built in East Africa to strong-arm the colonial government into declaring independence (under British protection of course). Surrounded on all sides by hostile powers and offered a chance to maintain his power and authority, at least for a time, and the governor said yes. Thus was the Republic of Ostafrica declared in 1918. Ostafrica would see a brief civil war between British-backed colonial forces and German loyalists, taking possession of its entire territory in 1919.
Having rolled up Ostafrica the year previously, Britain chose 1920 to attempt an invasion of German-aligned Ethiopia. It did not end well. The new Emperor won the decisive battle of Gardula (the WW1-era name for the town of Gidole) against a British expeditionary force (whether it was won through luck or skill is still debated), that then decided to cut its losses and fall back to East Africa. No other invasions or attempts on Ethiopian sovereignty were made for the rest of the war with British forces distracted on other fronts and the allies tacitly recognising the result of the civil war. Needless to say the Battle of Gardula ITTL has been just as highly mythologised as the preceding Battle of Adowa has been IOTL.
Last to join the war were the Ottomans. Butterflies as early as the 1908 Young Turk Revolution saw different factions from OTL come to power in the Ottoman Empire, refusing to join either power block during the build-up and taking a neutral line for most of the war. The Ottomans would however join the Central Powers in 1920 when it became abundantly clear to everyone that Russia was imploding, and that some decent loot could be easily won in the Caucasus and Balkans if they joined the war now. A shaky republic in Transcaucasia was quickly batted aside by Ottoman troops, and new vassal states established in its place, while Ottoman troops took the last remnants of Bulgarian resistance by surprise, occupying half the country.
More importantly for this write-up, the Ottoman entry into the war briefly opened up new fronts in the Middle East between the UK and the Ottoman Empire before the final peace put an end to the stalemated fighting. Britain saw the initial successes; after aligning with the Ottomans, the pseudo-independent Sultanate of Darfur was rather quickly invaded and directly annexed as a protectorate of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, while a sizeable region of southern Palestine was occupied following an invasion from British Egypt, though after an initial good start British efforts began to flag. Attempts to provoke the Arabs into revolt ended in abject failure (A certain archaeologist named Lawrence was instead stationed in Persia, well away from the fighting in Arabia), the Emirate of Jabal Shammar was able to kurbstomp the nascent Saudi state with Ottoman help, while a British expedition into Mesopotamia up the Fertile Crescent to capture Baghdad ended in disaster similarly to OTL.
Aside from those instances already mentioned, across Africa the colonial powers would be tested by a series of revolts and rebellions on the part of the native peoples. The Sennusi ran rings around French, Italian and British forces in North Africa, attacking with impunity, while the Tuareg's would rebel against French control on two separate occasions. Sub Saharan Africa saw equivalents of the OTL uprisings in the Volta region of French West Africa and Nyasaland, while regions of Northern Nigeria, British East Africa and the Belgian Congo would see either much larger uprisings than IOTL or new revolts altogether that were never triggered IOTL.
The South African Civil War ends in an inevitable Boer defeat in early 1921, just before the Zurich Truce was signed, with the Boers being punished in the peace settlement. Administration of Gazaland was transferred directly to Britain, while Lourenço Marques was similarly detached from South Africa, to be administered as a separate British colony with significant Portuguese oversight. Meanwhile in an attempt to dilute the Boer vote a property qualification was brought in across South Africa, high enough to exclude most Blacks but low enough to give Whites, a fair number of Asians and a few Blacks the right to vote.
This would have far reaching consequences, breaking Boer political power and enfranchising just enough natives to forestall the development of apartheid as the century wore on. That's not to say that everything would be easy from then on, as racism is, unfortunately, a particularly difficult beast to kill, but it would mean a smoother ride through the turbulence of the 20th century as property qualifications were gradually reduced until universal suffrage was reached in the early 60's. Think more OTL US civil rights movement than the apartheid and bantustans of OTL; not peaceful by any means but by far better than OTL. Of course, just because South Africa dodged the apartheid bullet didn't mean other nations wouldn't make the same mistakes South Africa did OTL, though more on that later.
By 1921, the civil wars had even spread to Europe, where the rigours of war were taking their toll, as both Russia and Austria-Hungary collapsed into civil war.
In Russia, massive popular discontent against the monarchy finally boiled over as OTL (though delayed somewhat) in 1919, with many subtle divergences. The initial revolution for example just led to the abdication of the Tsar, not the Abolition of the monarchy, with the Tsar's younger brother duly being crowned in his place. Things failed to improve under the new Tsar however, and when the Germans shipped Lenin et al in from Switzerland as OTL the crap hit the fan, plunging the country into a brutal three-way civil war between the radical communist Bolsheviks, the more moderate Mensheviks (who finally got round to toppling the monarchy and establishing a Republic a week before the Bolsheviks stole their thunder with a parallel revolution) and the imperial remnants of the old regime that would in OTL be called the Whites but ITTL are just referred to as Monarchists, plus dozens of local separatist movements (Germany gleefully propped up and puppetised many of the states that emerged on Russia's western periphery, imposing kings from the German monarch farms on many of them).
In Austria-Hungary on the other hand it was discontent against the modernising tendencies of the newly crowned Emperor Francis-Ferdinand I (yup, a certain famed assassination is butterflied ITTL, eventually putting a reformist on the Austro-Hungarian throne) that pushed the country over the edge. The Hungarian nobles balked at the removal of special privileges while the Hungarian people were riled by the talk of splitting off Transylvania, Slovakia and Croatia and everyone weary of the continuing war, all the while communists spread the word that the war would only end with a global proletarian revolution. Thus in the right conditions and with a bit of luck, a minor revolt was able to spiral into a major revolution, with large stretches of Hungary cleaved from the Empire and the far eastern regions of Galicia and Bukovina attempting to break away under Ukrainian and Romanian nationalists respectively.
When the unrest spread across the rest of Europe, it became increasingly clear that a truce had to be called to prevent the entire continent from being consumed by the fires of revolution. And so a truce was called, and Europe started down the bumpy road that would eventually lead to the Treaty of Aachen.
Initially, these butterflies affect Africa in very subtle ways. A different colonial administrator is appointed here, a sliver of land is partitioned differently there, and protectorates and administrative divisions are merged and divided in a myriad of small but nonetheless noticeable ways. Northern and Southern Nigeria are kept as separate colonies, France re-jigs the internal borders of its African possessions, the Lado Enclave is reconstituted as a separate (and rather ephemeral) colony once it defaults to Britain on the death of Leopold II, and South Africa adopts a slightly more liberal constitution on federation. Nothing major, but changes that will snowball given time.
The big change comes when the proposed Anglo-German partition of the Portuguese colonial empire finally goes ahead in late 1914; Germany grabs Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe, northern-most Mozambique and most of Angola (governed as two colonies; German Luanda in the north and German Angola in the south). A good portion of what Britain took was awarded to self-governing territories, with Australia nabbing Portuguese Timor, Portuguese India being subsumed into the Raj and southern Mozambique granted to south Africa (Gazaland as a mandate, while Lourenço Marques was annexed directly). Portuguese Guinea and central Mozambique were established as shiny new colonies, while easternmost Angola was hurriedly organised into the Protectorate of Mbundiland, with a thin sliver of land bisecting the two German Angolan colonies to give British central African possessions access to another coast. Portugal complained profusely but there really wasn't anything they could do.
In Europe, bigger butterflies were brewing. It takes time for a myriad of minor changes and butterflies to percolate up into the corridors of power, but once they do, a different chain of events is set in motion. Gradually, international politics shifts; people of little or no significance IOTL get chance lucky breaks and begin to trickle up the ranks into places occupied by others IOTL, while those we would recognise from our history miss out on opportunities they got in our world. Of course, it takes time for people to percolate upwards, and politicians established before the POD are prominent enough to affect events decades into the future as their ever more divergent careers play out, but piece by piece history as we would recognise it crumbles. Gradually, Europe's politics shifts away from what we would recognise, but such changes take time to build up to truly noticeable levels.
There are three crises over Morocco, that eventually settle on French and Spanish joint puppetisation but not true annexation of the state, with the Germans winning some territorial concessions in Kamerun from France as OTL, while the Italo-Turkish war happens right on cue. The First Balkan war ends in less of an Ottoman defeat (they held their own well, managing to cling onto a decent slice of Thrace), while the Bulgarians nab most of Macedonia at the cost of greater troop losses. Serbia is mollified with an Adriatic coast by way of northern Albania, the Rest of Albania is spun off under an Austrian puppet king, while Greece gets diddly squat, and leaves the Balkan League in a huff, shacking up with the Germans. There is no second Balkan war.
A delayed WW1 (ITTL still known as just the Great War, this world lacking a clearly defined WW2 equivalent) finally happens in 1916. A war of the stray dog type incident sets Greece at war with the Balkan League, and they get rapidly curb-stomped by Serbian and Bulgarian forces who besiege Athens. The Greek royal family take shelter in the German embassy and some ill-informed Bulgarian captain decides to shell the place, with predictable results. The ensuing diplomatic crisis sees declarations of war issued as OTL as the many mutual alliances and treaties spring into action; Germany declares war with the Balkan League, Russia declares war on Germany in defence of their Balkan allies, Austria-Hungary follows up with a declaration of war against both, and a different French administration sees the writing on the wall and preemptively invades Belgium before hastily declaring war on Germany. As the Germans also pull that trick as OTL, all this results in is France and Germany effectively partitioning Belgium between them. Italy stays neutral for a few months as OTL before deciding to honour their commitments to Germany and Austria-Hungary (A-H had to offer them territorial concessions in the form of Italian-majority areas of the empire to keep them sweet), invading France just as 1917 dawned. Romania also remained neutral for a period as OTL, eventually being won over to the Central Powers by the immediate prizes of Bessarabia and Bulgarian Dobruja, while reasoning that the war would do-in A-H anyway, and that all they had to do to grab Transylvania was wait. Britain and the Ottomans would for the time being remain neutral
I'll mostly skip the events of TTL's European theatre, and instead focus on Africa. Several German colonies were in a vulnerable position surrounded by or bordering those of France, and fell relatively quickly. Togoland was occupied after just over a month, though Kamerun put up an unexpectedly tough fight under the command of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was by chance posted to Kamerun instead of East Africa as happened IOTL, holding onto a portion of the Kamerun interior for Germany right up to the end of the war (and ensuring that Germany retained at least part of the colony in the final peace treaty). For the short-term at least, the rest of Germany's African colonies remained out of reach, bordered by either still neutral Britain or effectively neutered Belgium. Fighting between France and Italy in North Africa mostly stalemated when both sides were distracted by a particularly vigorous Sennusi attempt to wrest at least part of North Africa from European colonial hands. In Ethiopia, the pro-German Emperor-designate Iyasu V won the short civil war against his aunt that he lost OTL once the world descended into war, seizing the crown and aligning his state with the Central Powers, before invading and annexing French Somaliland (modern Djibouti) in less than a month. With Italy in the Central Powers and Britain neutral, there was very little France could do about the loss of a rather insignificant colony at that stage. The Ethiopians also covertly backed the Dervish State in the Somali interior against both Britain and the Italians, though never to any great extent to avoid antagonising either neutral Britain or theoretically allied Italy.
With the whole 'look at what the Germans are doing to Belgium' argument undermined by the fact the French were doing the same thing, plus two more years of Anglo-German rapprochement and Russian meddling in Central Asia meant that back in 1916 Britain was quite torn over what side to take in the Great War, eventually electing to stay neutral. Of course, circumstances would eventually force Britain's hand when in 1918 a German U-boat accidentally sinks the Titanic, forcing Britain to declare war on Germany (the weather is such an easy thing to butterfly, so the Titanic makes its maiden voyage without a hitch ITTL. As the OTL disaster proved however that ship was a death-trap, and sinking the titanic to bring the UK into the war was too deliciously ironic an opportunity to ignore).
Britain's entry into the war had an instant effect; many as-yet-unconquered German colonies in Southern Africa directly bordered British colonies, and were ripe for the taking. The paltry garrison in German Sofala was steamrollered in less than a month, while German Angola, though it proved to be a more difficult nut to crack, was finally rolled up by the end of 1919. Promises to grant back some of what had been lost to Germany in 1914 brought Portugal on side, eventually retaking Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe and the coastal half of German Luanda with British help, while the rest of German Luanda was occupied by the Belgians operating out of the Congo. In East and South Africa however, more complex situations brewed.
In South Africa, tensions that had been building within the Federation between the slightly more liberal, British aligned Cape and the more conservative Boer states in the interior whose memories of the Boer Wars remained raw exploded rather spectacularly soon after the UK declared war on Germany. IOTL these tensions boiled over into a relatively minor rebellion where Boers who had come to align themselves with Germany against Britain tried to break away and was crushed quickly. Here however, butterflies and blind luck allow the revolutionaries to roll all sixes, attracting substantial domestic support in the Boer heartlands and rapidly taking hold of large tracts of land in Transvaal and the Orange Free State, kicking off a conflict variously called either the South African Civil War or the Third Boer War ITTL. Though it was almost inevitable that the South African government in Cape Town would prevail against the separatists with the full might of the British Empire behind them in time, as the Great War was raging on everywhere else the conflict was able to drag on for two long years, and incidentally distracted British forces in the region enough that no major offensive was made on German South West Africa during the War, keeping the region German till the final peace conference.
Meanwhile a rather unusual situation that had been developing in East Africa for a while finally exploded on the onset of hostilities between Germany and the British Empire. When war was declared in 1916, the then governor of German East Africa, terrified of invasion from British East Africa to the north and the Belgian Congo to the east, declined to recognise the declaration of war lest his domains be quickly invaded and annexed as at that point it seriously looked like Britain was about to join the war. Though it would in fact take two more years of provocations before that happened, the governor was nevertheless scared enough at the time to prepare for the worst, and after a rather farcical stand-off, Germany backed down, allowing their colony to not take part in the conflict. For the next two years British influence gradually grew in this colony trapped in limbo, and by 1918 when the UK was finally pulled into the war, they were able to use the considerable influence they had built in East Africa to strong-arm the colonial government into declaring independence (under British protection of course). Surrounded on all sides by hostile powers and offered a chance to maintain his power and authority, at least for a time, and the governor said yes. Thus was the Republic of Ostafrica declared in 1918. Ostafrica would see a brief civil war between British-backed colonial forces and German loyalists, taking possession of its entire territory in 1919.
Having rolled up Ostafrica the year previously, Britain chose 1920 to attempt an invasion of German-aligned Ethiopia. It did not end well. The new Emperor won the decisive battle of Gardula (the WW1-era name for the town of Gidole) against a British expeditionary force (whether it was won through luck or skill is still debated), that then decided to cut its losses and fall back to East Africa. No other invasions or attempts on Ethiopian sovereignty were made for the rest of the war with British forces distracted on other fronts and the allies tacitly recognising the result of the civil war. Needless to say the Battle of Gardula ITTL has been just as highly mythologised as the preceding Battle of Adowa has been IOTL.
Last to join the war were the Ottomans. Butterflies as early as the 1908 Young Turk Revolution saw different factions from OTL come to power in the Ottoman Empire, refusing to join either power block during the build-up and taking a neutral line for most of the war. The Ottomans would however join the Central Powers in 1920 when it became abundantly clear to everyone that Russia was imploding, and that some decent loot could be easily won in the Caucasus and Balkans if they joined the war now. A shaky republic in Transcaucasia was quickly batted aside by Ottoman troops, and new vassal states established in its place, while Ottoman troops took the last remnants of Bulgarian resistance by surprise, occupying half the country.
More importantly for this write-up, the Ottoman entry into the war briefly opened up new fronts in the Middle East between the UK and the Ottoman Empire before the final peace put an end to the stalemated fighting. Britain saw the initial successes; after aligning with the Ottomans, the pseudo-independent Sultanate of Darfur was rather quickly invaded and directly annexed as a protectorate of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, while a sizeable region of southern Palestine was occupied following an invasion from British Egypt, though after an initial good start British efforts began to flag. Attempts to provoke the Arabs into revolt ended in abject failure (A certain archaeologist named Lawrence was instead stationed in Persia, well away from the fighting in Arabia), the Emirate of Jabal Shammar was able to kurbstomp the nascent Saudi state with Ottoman help, while a British expedition into Mesopotamia up the Fertile Crescent to capture Baghdad ended in disaster similarly to OTL.
Aside from those instances already mentioned, across Africa the colonial powers would be tested by a series of revolts and rebellions on the part of the native peoples. The Sennusi ran rings around French, Italian and British forces in North Africa, attacking with impunity, while the Tuareg's would rebel against French control on two separate occasions. Sub Saharan Africa saw equivalents of the OTL uprisings in the Volta region of French West Africa and Nyasaland, while regions of Northern Nigeria, British East Africa and the Belgian Congo would see either much larger uprisings than IOTL or new revolts altogether that were never triggered IOTL.
The South African Civil War ends in an inevitable Boer defeat in early 1921, just before the Zurich Truce was signed, with the Boers being punished in the peace settlement. Administration of Gazaland was transferred directly to Britain, while Lourenço Marques was similarly detached from South Africa, to be administered as a separate British colony with significant Portuguese oversight. Meanwhile in an attempt to dilute the Boer vote a property qualification was brought in across South Africa, high enough to exclude most Blacks but low enough to give Whites, a fair number of Asians and a few Blacks the right to vote.
This would have far reaching consequences, breaking Boer political power and enfranchising just enough natives to forestall the development of apartheid as the century wore on. That's not to say that everything would be easy from then on, as racism is, unfortunately, a particularly difficult beast to kill, but it would mean a smoother ride through the turbulence of the 20th century as property qualifications were gradually reduced until universal suffrage was reached in the early 60's. Think more OTL US civil rights movement than the apartheid and bantustans of OTL; not peaceful by any means but by far better than OTL. Of course, just because South Africa dodged the apartheid bullet didn't mean other nations wouldn't make the same mistakes South Africa did OTL, though more on that later.
By 1921, the civil wars had even spread to Europe, where the rigours of war were taking their toll, as both Russia and Austria-Hungary collapsed into civil war.
In Russia, massive popular discontent against the monarchy finally boiled over as OTL (though delayed somewhat) in 1919, with many subtle divergences. The initial revolution for example just led to the abdication of the Tsar, not the Abolition of the monarchy, with the Tsar's younger brother duly being crowned in his place. Things failed to improve under the new Tsar however, and when the Germans shipped Lenin et al in from Switzerland as OTL the crap hit the fan, plunging the country into a brutal three-way civil war between the radical communist Bolsheviks, the more moderate Mensheviks (who finally got round to toppling the monarchy and establishing a Republic a week before the Bolsheviks stole their thunder with a parallel revolution) and the imperial remnants of the old regime that would in OTL be called the Whites but ITTL are just referred to as Monarchists, plus dozens of local separatist movements (Germany gleefully propped up and puppetised many of the states that emerged on Russia's western periphery, imposing kings from the German monarch farms on many of them).
In Austria-Hungary on the other hand it was discontent against the modernising tendencies of the newly crowned Emperor Francis-Ferdinand I (yup, a certain famed assassination is butterflied ITTL, eventually putting a reformist on the Austro-Hungarian throne) that pushed the country over the edge. The Hungarian nobles balked at the removal of special privileges while the Hungarian people were riled by the talk of splitting off Transylvania, Slovakia and Croatia and everyone weary of the continuing war, all the while communists spread the word that the war would only end with a global proletarian revolution. Thus in the right conditions and with a bit of luck, a minor revolt was able to spiral into a major revolution, with large stretches of Hungary cleaved from the Empire and the far eastern regions of Galicia and Bukovina attempting to break away under Ukrainian and Romanian nationalists respectively.
When the unrest spread across the rest of Europe, it became increasingly clear that a truce had to be called to prevent the entire continent from being consumed by the fires of revolution. And so a truce was called, and Europe started down the bumpy road that would eventually lead to the Treaty of Aachen.
In the end nobody really won the Great War; all it did was drive the countries of Europe to the brink. The strains of warfare were apparent four years into the conflict; when a new decade dawned in 1920, two of Europe's great powers had descended into civil war and revolution, and it increasingly looked like the rest would follow them.
The Zurich Truce came about when popular discontent against the war reached such high levels in all the major combatants that a truce became a necessity so that everyone could get their houses in order. It helped that the Bolsheviks had finally released the communist genie from the bottle, raising the spectre of global revolution and concentrating minds across the continent. With the Bolsheviks at their maximum territorial ebb at the time and similar factions rapidly gaining ground across Europe, the powers that be were faced with the serious possibility that if the war continued for much longer they would all be duly overthrown by communist revolutions. Russia and Austria-Hungary were already in a state of civil war, Germany in the grip of an alternate German Revolution, France similarly crippled by a parallel uprising, Italy paralysed by a general strike and Britain dealing with a delayed Easter Rising equivalent in Ireland. Ironically considering events of OTL, the only power not suffering large-scale discontent were the Ottomans, who during their short war had already grabbed enough land and shiny new puppet states to mostly satisfy any dreams of territorial expansion without the genocides of OTL.
Thus did a half a year of tense truce morph into the uneasy Stockholm accords and the eventual peace treaty signed at Aachen in 1922.
The treaty of Aachen was a masterclass in compromise. None of the signatory nations had clearly lost, but all involved could see that any further attempt to continue the war would culminate in bloody revolution, so agreed to recognise and formalise the situation as it then stood to bring the war to an end, with a fair amount of horse trading behind the scenes to resolve minor details and squabbles, and occasionally throwing minor allies under the bus in the name of peace. With no universally recognised government, Russia was not present at the talks, though the German-backed Austro-Hungarian government (on the verge of victory thanks to German help, and now billing itself as the Liethanian Commonwealth under a reformed government) was able to attend.
Mostly what was recognised was the status quo. For the Central Powers, it was a mixed bag. Germany was reconciled to the loss of most of their colonial empire in return for wider European recognition of the sizeable constellation of Eastern European puppet states gained from the wreckage of Russia, with the rest of Europe recognising the results of an alternate Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Germany with the Menshevik faction in Russia's then ongoing civil war. As such, Europe recognised German overlordship of the new nations of Finland, the Baltic Duchy, Lithuania, Byelorussia, Poland, Ukraine, the Crimea and Georgia, with the Unified Baltic Duchy entering into a personal union with Germany, with the Kaiser as head of state of an otherwise parallel government. German colonies were variously annexed by Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium. Likewise Ottoman territorial conquests in the former Russian Caucasus were recognised (mostly in the form of new puppet states in Armenia, Shirvan (OTL Azerbaijan) and the Northern Caucasus, though the north-western border was shifted north to regain land lost during the Russo-Turkish war) by the international community, as was Ottoman territorial expansion in Thrace at the expense of Bulgaria. Romania would annex Bulgarian Dobruja and Bessarabia from Russia, though were thoroughly annoyed when Austria-Hungary failed to collapse, denying then Transylvania. Apart from the Italian-speaking regions of Austria Hungary and some trivial border adjustments to the Franco-Italian border, Italy gained diddly squat in the talks. So little gain for such great loss would rankle the Italians as OTL, with the 20's giving rise to a myriad unpleasant nationalist and communist ideological variants, vying with each other for the attention of the Italian public as the perceived wounds of the war continued to fester.
For the Allies it was a similar story of mixed fortunes. By 1922 France was in a bad way - without British help the first two years were harder fought, with France ITTL fighting a two-front war against Germany and Italy. An extra year of war and the exertion of putting down an admittedly weak domestic revolution in 1921 had further sapped French strength. To compound matters, France gained little in the peace talks; small portions of colonial Africa and half of Alsace-Lorraine. Indeed, after the dust settled they actually made a net loss of territory in Europe; the Savoy was intensely contested during the war between Italy and France, with the international community eventually deciding to put the territory's future to a plebiscite to end the dispute. The people of Savoy bucked expectations however, voting to become an independent Republic rather than remain in France or join Italy. As in Italy, France would prove fertile ground for a diverse array of unpleasant new ideologies to flower, especially after the coup of 1924.
In the Balkans, the Balkan League lay broken. Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro would all be reduced to their pre-Balkan War borders, with Bulgaria further shorn of their portion of Dobruja. Serbia and Montenegro remained under joint Leithanian-German occupation for over a decade, while Bulgaria would for a period be partitioned between German and Ottoman occupation zones. Albania would take all of Albania proper plus Kosovo from Serbia, while Macedonia went to Greece and the rest of Thrace to the Ottomans. Britain came out of the war having annexed sizeable new colonial holdings but with little more to show for the millions of dead soldiers. As such, the Tory government that pulled Britain into the war was slaughtered at the next general election, widely blamed for pulling the country into a pointless war they should not have joined. To prevent a repeat, the UK drifted into a period of loose isolationism from the rest of Europe to focus (not entirely successfully) on the needs of the Empire. Ireland would emerge as an unusually tightly bound Dominion.
As mentioned, Russia had no influence on the proceedings, while the shiny new but still weak Leithanian government could only tag along as an important but nevertheless subsidiary part of Germany's vision for Eastern Europe.
One of the most important developments to come from the Treaty of Aachen was the commitment by all signatory parties to establish an international organisation to mediate conflicts between governments and hopefully prevent another continent-spanning war from occurring in the future, that would be christened the Accord of Nations (AoN for short) at a later conference. The AoN would of course fill the role played IOTL by the UN and League of Nations before it, eventually growing into a sprawling intergovernmental bureaucracy tasked with jobs as various as international peacekeeping and disaster relief to setting international regulatory standards and monitoring the development of WMD's. It was decided the organisation would be based in Zurich (a major city but not national capital of a traditionally neutral power), and would take on administration of various already existent international projects; the free city of Salonica (established after the Balkan war as a compromise to prevents the Greeks and Bulgarians squabbling over it), the Tangier international zone in northern Morocco (set up in one of the Moroccan crises in 1914) and the international concessions in China, most prominently in Shanghai and Kulangsu Island. Over time, some of these territories would be granted independence, while other international territories would be created to be administered by the AoN.
The AoN would play many important roles in the post-war history of Africa and the Middle East, but more on that later. Instead it's time to focus on the direct effects of the treaty on those areas after it was signed.
Germany lost most of her colonies to those powers that had occupied them, retaining only South West Africa (thanks to the South African Civil War), Kamerun, reduced to it's pre-1914 borders (thanks to Lettow-Vorbeck) and Togoland (though French occupied, it was returned to Germany as part of the horse trading that eventually ceded the francophone half of Alsace Lorraine to France as a compromise). The rest was lost to Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium (though this didn't matter as much as the newly established Belgian government was in Germany's pocket) as detailed above. As an aside, European powers would also recognise Ethiopia's annexation of French Somaliland, and the independence of both the Dervish State in what was formerly British Somaliland and the Republic of Ostafrica. The Dervish state would alternate between the Ethiopian and Ottoman spheres of influence depending on what suited them best at the time, while Ostafrica, though retaining German as an official language and attracting a fair number of German immigrants over the years, would drift under British influence.
In the middle east again the status quo mostly prevailed. The Ottomans won territory and puppet states in Thrace and the Caucasus, while officially signing over Cyprus and Egypt (formerly legally Ottoman possessions 'leased' indefinitely to Britain). Kuwait was recognised as a British protectorate while the Rashidi's were recognised as the rulers of central Arabia, defeating and conquering the upstart Saudi Emirate of Nejd. The loose government established in British occupied Palestine was expanded and made a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire in a compromise insisted on by the European powers to allow for greater religious freedom in the area. Yemen and Asir, that rose in British-sponsored rebellion late in the war were also organised as Ottoman protectorates. Persia was divided into three, with Britain claiming a sphere of influence in their occupied territory in the South, the Ottomans getting a sphere of influence in the north west and the Qajar dynasty being left with firm control only over the lands north and east of Tehran, cutting out the collapsing Russians from the previous division of the country. Otherwise Britain and the Ottomans agreed to default to a parallel of OTL's Violet_Line to deliminate their respective spheres of influence on the Arabian peninsula, and agreeing to divide Persia into spheres of influence.
Gradually, things would settle down through the 20's, though the seeds of later conflicts would be sown during this otherwise peaceful time. The Mensheviks eventually won the Russian civil war, after aligning with the monarchists to put down the Bolsheviks then in turn beating the monarchists through both German aid (the monarchists refused to accept the creation of German puppet states in the Ukraine and Belarus) and a fair amount of backstabbing (the Mensheviks offered the Cossack hosts of the Caucasus independence if they turned on their monarchist co-belligerents, thus leading to the independence of the Don and Kuban Republics and the Kalmyk Khanate). In 1923, a cash-strapped Belgian government would sell Katanga to Britain at a knock-down price, while later that year the fateful decision was made to merge the Lado Colony with the protectorates of Uganda and East Africa to form a new Colony and Protectorate of Kenia. No further territorial adjustments would be made in Africa for the period, though the colonial powers continued to tinker with administrative divisions and skew the borders later inherited by independent African states further from OTL.
In 1924, the cabal of generals who had formed during the war as a parallel military government and subsequently steered France through the unrest at the end of the war finally made their move, couping and neutering the civilian government, and reducing it to a puppet rubber stamp administration. Though hard-right in their outlook, the new puppet-masters of the French Third Republic never officially defined their political position to maintain the legal fig leaf that the elected government remained in control. Make no mistake though, the regime leaned hard to the right, with any even vaguely left-wing ideologies repressed mercilessly, and a broad range of right and hard-right ideologies flourishing and spreading with the tacit approval of the powers that be. Ideologies as widely dispersed as conservatism and traditionalism grew alongside more radical variants, like ultra-catholicism, Integralism and Sorelianism. From this mess of hard-right ideologies developed Lysism, TTL's most popular far-right xenophobic ideology, filling the role fascism played IOTL. Though it was only one among many such ideologies established at the time, it would go on to spread across the world, bringing death, dictatorship and in many cases genocide and ethnic cleansing where it went. Thoroughly unpleasant, but depressingly people believe this shit, so in the absence of OTL fascism and in a similar political climate something similar was bound to emerge. The hard-right political climate in France was further bolstered in 1926, when an abortive right-wing coup in Italy forced a crackdown by the Italian government, forcing most of the plotters and ideologues abroad.
Aside from the development of Lysism in France, little of note happened for the rest of the 20's; Russia gradually rebuilt itself, the sub-kingdoms of Leithania gradually gained more autonomy, German monarchs got settled on newly minted thrones across Central and Eastern Europe and gradually the continent recovered. Further afield, America's intervention in the Mexican Civil War (OTL's Mexican Revolution), that incidentally had kept them too busy to join the Great War in Europe ITTL evolved into propping up an immensely unstable puppet government, in Asia Japan would continue to rise, backing half a dozen factions in TTL's parallel to the Chinese Warlord era following the abolition of the Qing, while in Africa the dull oppression of colonialism continued to grind on. In the Middle East, the Ottomans remained regional hegemons, with tentative reforms to improve the lot of ethnic minorities gradually enacted, while in Persia the Qajar Dynasty was overthrown right on cue but with no faction able to effectively monopolise power, leading to seven years of turmoil before Persia eventually stabilised under a lefty Russian-backed government. The Nations of the world got complacent; yes there were problems on the horizon, but nothing that the AoN couldn't fix.
How wrong they were.
The Zurich Truce came about when popular discontent against the war reached such high levels in all the major combatants that a truce became a necessity so that everyone could get their houses in order. It helped that the Bolsheviks had finally released the communist genie from the bottle, raising the spectre of global revolution and concentrating minds across the continent. With the Bolsheviks at their maximum territorial ebb at the time and similar factions rapidly gaining ground across Europe, the powers that be were faced with the serious possibility that if the war continued for much longer they would all be duly overthrown by communist revolutions. Russia and Austria-Hungary were already in a state of civil war, Germany in the grip of an alternate German Revolution, France similarly crippled by a parallel uprising, Italy paralysed by a general strike and Britain dealing with a delayed Easter Rising equivalent in Ireland. Ironically considering events of OTL, the only power not suffering large-scale discontent were the Ottomans, who during their short war had already grabbed enough land and shiny new puppet states to mostly satisfy any dreams of territorial expansion without the genocides of OTL.
Thus did a half a year of tense truce morph into the uneasy Stockholm accords and the eventual peace treaty signed at Aachen in 1922.
The treaty of Aachen was a masterclass in compromise. None of the signatory nations had clearly lost, but all involved could see that any further attempt to continue the war would culminate in bloody revolution, so agreed to recognise and formalise the situation as it then stood to bring the war to an end, with a fair amount of horse trading behind the scenes to resolve minor details and squabbles, and occasionally throwing minor allies under the bus in the name of peace. With no universally recognised government, Russia was not present at the talks, though the German-backed Austro-Hungarian government (on the verge of victory thanks to German help, and now billing itself as the Liethanian Commonwealth under a reformed government) was able to attend.
Mostly what was recognised was the status quo. For the Central Powers, it was a mixed bag. Germany was reconciled to the loss of most of their colonial empire in return for wider European recognition of the sizeable constellation of Eastern European puppet states gained from the wreckage of Russia, with the rest of Europe recognising the results of an alternate Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Germany with the Menshevik faction in Russia's then ongoing civil war. As such, Europe recognised German overlordship of the new nations of Finland, the Baltic Duchy, Lithuania, Byelorussia, Poland, Ukraine, the Crimea and Georgia, with the Unified Baltic Duchy entering into a personal union with Germany, with the Kaiser as head of state of an otherwise parallel government. German colonies were variously annexed by Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium. Likewise Ottoman territorial conquests in the former Russian Caucasus were recognised (mostly in the form of new puppet states in Armenia, Shirvan (OTL Azerbaijan) and the Northern Caucasus, though the north-western border was shifted north to regain land lost during the Russo-Turkish war) by the international community, as was Ottoman territorial expansion in Thrace at the expense of Bulgaria. Romania would annex Bulgarian Dobruja and Bessarabia from Russia, though were thoroughly annoyed when Austria-Hungary failed to collapse, denying then Transylvania. Apart from the Italian-speaking regions of Austria Hungary and some trivial border adjustments to the Franco-Italian border, Italy gained diddly squat in the talks. So little gain for such great loss would rankle the Italians as OTL, with the 20's giving rise to a myriad unpleasant nationalist and communist ideological variants, vying with each other for the attention of the Italian public as the perceived wounds of the war continued to fester.
For the Allies it was a similar story of mixed fortunes. By 1922 France was in a bad way - without British help the first two years were harder fought, with France ITTL fighting a two-front war against Germany and Italy. An extra year of war and the exertion of putting down an admittedly weak domestic revolution in 1921 had further sapped French strength. To compound matters, France gained little in the peace talks; small portions of colonial Africa and half of Alsace-Lorraine. Indeed, after the dust settled they actually made a net loss of territory in Europe; the Savoy was intensely contested during the war between Italy and France, with the international community eventually deciding to put the territory's future to a plebiscite to end the dispute. The people of Savoy bucked expectations however, voting to become an independent Republic rather than remain in France or join Italy. As in Italy, France would prove fertile ground for a diverse array of unpleasant new ideologies to flower, especially after the coup of 1924.
In the Balkans, the Balkan League lay broken. Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro would all be reduced to their pre-Balkan War borders, with Bulgaria further shorn of their portion of Dobruja. Serbia and Montenegro remained under joint Leithanian-German occupation for over a decade, while Bulgaria would for a period be partitioned between German and Ottoman occupation zones. Albania would take all of Albania proper plus Kosovo from Serbia, while Macedonia went to Greece and the rest of Thrace to the Ottomans. Britain came out of the war having annexed sizeable new colonial holdings but with little more to show for the millions of dead soldiers. As such, the Tory government that pulled Britain into the war was slaughtered at the next general election, widely blamed for pulling the country into a pointless war they should not have joined. To prevent a repeat, the UK drifted into a period of loose isolationism from the rest of Europe to focus (not entirely successfully) on the needs of the Empire. Ireland would emerge as an unusually tightly bound Dominion.
As mentioned, Russia had no influence on the proceedings, while the shiny new but still weak Leithanian government could only tag along as an important but nevertheless subsidiary part of Germany's vision for Eastern Europe.
One of the most important developments to come from the Treaty of Aachen was the commitment by all signatory parties to establish an international organisation to mediate conflicts between governments and hopefully prevent another continent-spanning war from occurring in the future, that would be christened the Accord of Nations (AoN for short) at a later conference. The AoN would of course fill the role played IOTL by the UN and League of Nations before it, eventually growing into a sprawling intergovernmental bureaucracy tasked with jobs as various as international peacekeeping and disaster relief to setting international regulatory standards and monitoring the development of WMD's. It was decided the organisation would be based in Zurich (a major city but not national capital of a traditionally neutral power), and would take on administration of various already existent international projects; the free city of Salonica (established after the Balkan war as a compromise to prevents the Greeks and Bulgarians squabbling over it), the Tangier international zone in northern Morocco (set up in one of the Moroccan crises in 1914) and the international concessions in China, most prominently in Shanghai and Kulangsu Island. Over time, some of these territories would be granted independence, while other international territories would be created to be administered by the AoN.
The AoN would play many important roles in the post-war history of Africa and the Middle East, but more on that later. Instead it's time to focus on the direct effects of the treaty on those areas after it was signed.
Germany lost most of her colonies to those powers that had occupied them, retaining only South West Africa (thanks to the South African Civil War), Kamerun, reduced to it's pre-1914 borders (thanks to Lettow-Vorbeck) and Togoland (though French occupied, it was returned to Germany as part of the horse trading that eventually ceded the francophone half of Alsace Lorraine to France as a compromise). The rest was lost to Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium (though this didn't matter as much as the newly established Belgian government was in Germany's pocket) as detailed above. As an aside, European powers would also recognise Ethiopia's annexation of French Somaliland, and the independence of both the Dervish State in what was formerly British Somaliland and the Republic of Ostafrica. The Dervish state would alternate between the Ethiopian and Ottoman spheres of influence depending on what suited them best at the time, while Ostafrica, though retaining German as an official language and attracting a fair number of German immigrants over the years, would drift under British influence.
In the middle east again the status quo mostly prevailed. The Ottomans won territory and puppet states in Thrace and the Caucasus, while officially signing over Cyprus and Egypt (formerly legally Ottoman possessions 'leased' indefinitely to Britain). Kuwait was recognised as a British protectorate while the Rashidi's were recognised as the rulers of central Arabia, defeating and conquering the upstart Saudi Emirate of Nejd. The loose government established in British occupied Palestine was expanded and made a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire in a compromise insisted on by the European powers to allow for greater religious freedom in the area. Yemen and Asir, that rose in British-sponsored rebellion late in the war were also organised as Ottoman protectorates. Persia was divided into three, with Britain claiming a sphere of influence in their occupied territory in the South, the Ottomans getting a sphere of influence in the north west and the Qajar dynasty being left with firm control only over the lands north and east of Tehran, cutting out the collapsing Russians from the previous division of the country. Otherwise Britain and the Ottomans agreed to default to a parallel of OTL's Violet_Line to deliminate their respective spheres of influence on the Arabian peninsula, and agreeing to divide Persia into spheres of influence.
Gradually, things would settle down through the 20's, though the seeds of later conflicts would be sown during this otherwise peaceful time. The Mensheviks eventually won the Russian civil war, after aligning with the monarchists to put down the Bolsheviks then in turn beating the monarchists through both German aid (the monarchists refused to accept the creation of German puppet states in the Ukraine and Belarus) and a fair amount of backstabbing (the Mensheviks offered the Cossack hosts of the Caucasus independence if they turned on their monarchist co-belligerents, thus leading to the independence of the Don and Kuban Republics and the Kalmyk Khanate). In 1923, a cash-strapped Belgian government would sell Katanga to Britain at a knock-down price, while later that year the fateful decision was made to merge the Lado Colony with the protectorates of Uganda and East Africa to form a new Colony and Protectorate of Kenia. No further territorial adjustments would be made in Africa for the period, though the colonial powers continued to tinker with administrative divisions and skew the borders later inherited by independent African states further from OTL.
In 1924, the cabal of generals who had formed during the war as a parallel military government and subsequently steered France through the unrest at the end of the war finally made their move, couping and neutering the civilian government, and reducing it to a puppet rubber stamp administration. Though hard-right in their outlook, the new puppet-masters of the French Third Republic never officially defined their political position to maintain the legal fig leaf that the elected government remained in control. Make no mistake though, the regime leaned hard to the right, with any even vaguely left-wing ideologies repressed mercilessly, and a broad range of right and hard-right ideologies flourishing and spreading with the tacit approval of the powers that be. Ideologies as widely dispersed as conservatism and traditionalism grew alongside more radical variants, like ultra-catholicism, Integralism and Sorelianism. From this mess of hard-right ideologies developed Lysism, TTL's most popular far-right xenophobic ideology, filling the role fascism played IOTL. Though it was only one among many such ideologies established at the time, it would go on to spread across the world, bringing death, dictatorship and in many cases genocide and ethnic cleansing where it went. Thoroughly unpleasant, but depressingly people believe this shit, so in the absence of OTL fascism and in a similar political climate something similar was bound to emerge. The hard-right political climate in France was further bolstered in 1926, when an abortive right-wing coup in Italy forced a crackdown by the Italian government, forcing most of the plotters and ideologues abroad.
Aside from the development of Lysism in France, little of note happened for the rest of the 20's; Russia gradually rebuilt itself, the sub-kingdoms of Leithania gradually gained more autonomy, German monarchs got settled on newly minted thrones across Central and Eastern Europe and gradually the continent recovered. Further afield, America's intervention in the Mexican Civil War (OTL's Mexican Revolution), that incidentally had kept them too busy to join the Great War in Europe ITTL evolved into propping up an immensely unstable puppet government, in Asia Japan would continue to rise, backing half a dozen factions in TTL's parallel to the Chinese Warlord era following the abolition of the Qing, while in Africa the dull oppression of colonialism continued to grind on. In the Middle East, the Ottomans remained regional hegemons, with tentative reforms to improve the lot of ethnic minorities gradually enacted, while in Persia the Qajar Dynasty was overthrown right on cue but with no faction able to effectively monopolise power, leading to seven years of turmoil before Persia eventually stabilised under a lefty Russian-backed government. The Nations of the world got complacent; yes there were problems on the horizon, but nothing that the AoN couldn't fix.
How wrong they were.
The high years finally ended not with a bang but a whimper, with the American stock market crash of 1933 kicking off a period of prolonged economic downturn, in turn heralding an extended period of revolution and war commonly termed The Reckoning. Starting with the Brazilian Revolution in 1936 and ending with the conclusion of the Ottoman civil war in 1955, the states, nations and systems of the old order would be successively torn down and replaced during a period of heightened international tension, war and revolution, though one universal two sided war like WW2 IOTL would fortunately fail to materialise. It was a period characterised by large regional conflicts, civil wars and general mayhem, with the Spectral War between communism and capitalism taking shape during and influencing the final decade of the period. Old great powers would fall, or otherwise be brought low by revolution or civil war, while those nations that successfully rode the wave would go on to define the rest of the century as the great powers of the Spectral War. No nation would be left unscathed.
Little need be said here of the Brazilian Revolution of 1936 (that would see the birth of the Workers Socialist Confederation of Brazil, and unleash a wave of communist-on-capitalist wars throughout Latin America popularly termed the Brazilian Wars), though its immediate successor, the French Civil War (French Revolution was already taken) had immense implications for the African political landscape, as fragments of the pre-civil war government fled into exile in the colonies.
The economic collapse hit the Third Republic hard; having borrowed heavily from American banks both during and after the war, the collapse of the American economy thus also dragged France down as well. So began a short period of rising unemployment, discontent and general misery coupled with government ineptitude and a ruthless crackdown on whatever left-wing elements remained in France. Of course, the whole world suffered the effects of the economic collapse, but in France the government-led purge of all things left-wing is ironically widely credited with bringing about the French Workers Republic two years down the line. The purge went too far you see; by 1937 all genuine left-wingers had been forced to either flee abroad or go to ground so thoroughly that any purge would be unlikely to snare them, so when the government upped the oppression in a paranoid quest to root out conspiracy and subversion, all they actually found were random bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time or even just scapegoated and framed to keep arrest records high. In such an environment, with a cash-strapped, weakened and paranoid government investing almost all its resources lashing out at its own citizens, and a revolution became almost inevitable. Grumblings became discontent, that morphed into anger against the government.
The crap finally hit the fan in 1937, when soldiers in Marseilles used live ammunition against peaceful protesters complaining about the price of bread. Germany decided to repeat the same trick that had worked a decade before on Russia and sent in any and all genuine French communists they could find to hopefully bring the scarily irridentist French government down a notch, and the rest, as they say, is history (of course, this ended up blowing up in Germany's face when the commies won, but hindsight is a wonderful thing). Unlike its counterpart in Russia a decade earlier, the French Civil war was short; a government consumed by paranoia imploding as it tore itself apart purging 'agitators' and 'subversives', while the revolutionaries rapidly gained ground and the military rank and file deserted en-masse rather than shoot protesters for a wage made worthless by rampant inflation. A rival 4th Republic was proclaimed in the streets of Paris, mostly displacing the prior dictatorship and holding nominal sway over a good portion of the country for a few months before coming into conflict with the revolutionaries who found it too moderate for their liking, and duly being conquered in turn.
By 1938, France lay shattered. Though the Metropole was firmly in the hands of the revolutionaries, the colonies would for the most part remain under the control of no less than seven different colonial administrations all claiming to be the legitimate government of France. Aside from the mainland the only other French territory taken by the communists were three of the four directly integrated communes of French West Africa in Dakar, with subsequent actions against the then shaky regime in Saint-Louis netting them a substantial slice of southern Senegal (that would be granted significant autonomy, and go on to form the core of the Workers Confederation of West Africa a decade down the line).
The most substantial rival was initially the Provisional Government of the French Republic, established in Algiers and controlling Algeria, Tunisia, and Corsica. France Algiers would ride high for a few years as the German-backed faction against the communists and receiving recognition as the 'legitimate' French government-in-exile from most of Central and Eastern Europe before German defeat in the Belgian war plunged them into an extended period of decline, culminating in revolution in 1974.
Then there was the 4th Republic, proclaimed in Paris during the Civil War before being booted out by the communists and fleeing to the few colonies that had come to recognise it, mostly in the South Pacific. As the faction backed by the British Empire, further colonial territory would be added over the following decade with British help, until all French possessions in the Indo-Pacific were under their control.
Beyond those two widely-recognised governments, and the factions became increasingly petty. The colonial government in West Africa (after hurriedly departing Saint-Louis for Porto-Novo in Benin) took an annoyingly ambiguous stance, refusing to conclusively recognise any of the factions as the legitimate government of France while continuing to insist they were only a mere colony of the theoretical government they would be administered by. Remnants of the Third Republic took French Equatorial Africa, to some extent resurrecting the government sidelined by the coup a decade before, and gradually going native in Libreville. Another faction coalesced in French Indochina, though France-Hanoi would make the mistake of accepting Japanese protection, being later deposed by Japan and then conquered by anti-Japanese factions in the Second Russo-Japanese war, having its territory handed over to the administration of the 4th Republic. The former French Caribbean, sold to America to alleviate war debts in the 20's, broke away when America itself fell to Civil War in 1940, making a half-hearted claim to be the legitimate French government for a few years in the 40's before throwing in the towel. Most ephemeral of all was the Kingdom of France, founded in 1937 when Orléanists crowned their claimant to the French throne in the first cathedral they could get their hands on while no one was looking during the chaos of the Civil War, before fleeing to St Pierre and Miquelon (the only colony that would take them), where they continue to reside to this day. Madagascar was quickly lost to revolution, and it would be some time before international powers recognised the Malagasy Republic as independent of France.
The rest of Europe would not be spared from its fair share of revolution. Spain fell to civil war right on cue, with the French-backed communists eventually coming out on top and forcing the lysist-leaning monarchy into exile in the colonies, though loosing Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque country and half of Aragon in the process. Italy would also see revolution, when another coup attempt by Lysist elements of the military kicked off a civil war pitting most of the army and the monarchy against a hastily convened Republican government from the remnants of the previous government, that relied on French-backed Communists and Syndicalists as fighting progressed. The Lysists would quickly be forced off the Italian peninsula, fleeing to Sardinia and Sicily while maintaining control of the colonies. Unfortunately, this brief victory would instead only presage the second round of fighting when the government came into conflict with the French-backed Syndicalists, with the Syndicalists eventually winning (with a significant dollop of French help). Meanwhile the Lysist Kingdom of Italy would maintain a loose grip on the colonies for another decade before losing them to revolution and invasion, finally reduced to Sicily and Sardinia.
Though the rest of Europe avoided outright revolution, it would be impacted in other ways. The German sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe constructed at such cost during the Great War gradually imploded; the weak as hell German democracy established at the end of the Great War was hobbled by political violence, polarisation and chaos somewhat comparable to that suffered by the Weimar Republic at the same time in our history, with the difference that the radicals were never truly able to grab the reins of power (any that became too powerful would be couped by the still powerful army), leading to nearly a decade of political gridlock and civilian governments flip-flopping from left to right with every election, all moderated by a military shadow administration that cared only for the maintenance of its own political power. The German sphere would drift apart minus decisive German management, mostly reforming around a resurgent Russia as the decade wore on. Meanwhile, the toxic ideology of Lysism spread its tendrils far afield having been booted out of France, finding fertile ground in eastern Europe; though most states resisted the tide, both Romania and Poland would fall to Lysist coups.
In the Balkans, Leithania responded to the crisis by devolving ever more power to the constituent kingdoms, that acted less like administrative divisions and more like sovereign states with every passing day (the Liethanian government even allowed them to take seats on the AoN in 1944 for crying out loud), while Leithania's puppet kingdoms in the Balkans gradually regained their independence. In the Ottoman Empire, the reforms of the Uneasy Peace were undone at a stroke following a military coup in 1936 to weaken constitutional power and install a new pliant Sultan who would be willing to acquiesce to the demands of the coup plotters. From 1936 life for ethnic minorities became increasingly difficult in the Ottoman Empire as civil liberties took a nosedive in favour of rampant Turkish nationalism, militarism and irridentism, all fuelled by copious amounts of oil money. That the regime was increasingly pissing off its Arab and Kurdish subjects (on whose land most of the oil could be found) somehow passed the regime by. In 1940 someone had the bright idea of cramming troublesome ethnic minorities into 'homelands' from where they could more easily be monitored and controlled, and thus the 'Autonomous Ethnic Homelands' (see this map for the full set just before the Ottoman collapse) would be born, going on to inspire the Segregationists states of TTL to create a parallel of the South African Bantustans of OTL, though here most commonly called 'Autonomous Native Reserves'.
1940 would see the beginning of two major wars on opposite sides of the world that would both radically reshape their respective continents; The Second Russo-Japanese War and the Greater American Civil War.
The Second Russo-Japanese War was the largest conflict to come from the upheaval of the Reckoning, mostly fought in the chaotic mess of Warlord-era China. Tensions had been building between the regional hegemon and the recovering power with a grudge to settle for some time (it didn't help that Japan continued to prop up several civil war legacy states in the Russian far east), and tensions finally boiled over in Transbaikalia in 1940. Japan would have itself, Thailand, a Philippine government established as soon as America itself fell to civil war, a puppet Manchurian government and the most powerful of the Chinese factions in Nanjing, with territory in the Central Plains and along the Yangtze River, while Russia would have the rest of the Chinese warlords and the might of an admittedly distracted and noncommittal British Empire. The land war was won by 1944 (the warlords victorious, Thailand switching sides at the right time, the Chinese government in Nanjing burning itself out in civil war and Korea and Manchuria liberated), while Japan itself would not be subdued till 1947 by nuclear fire. Russia did inordinately well from the war, proving itself as a Great power once more, and establishing a string of allied governments throughout Asia, while the switch to a wartime economy without taking any damage in their industrial heartland did wonders for the Russian economy, pulling the same trick the US did during WW2 OTL. During this time of Russian resurgence, many former German puppet states in Eastern Europe thus drifted over to Russia as German power waned.
On the other side of the world in 1940, America would fall into civil war, collapsing under the strains of this alternate Great Depression. The war would drag on for seven long years, with no less than eight factions vying for control of the lower 48 and America's more far-flung domains going their separate ways. America had been forced to abandon their Mexican puppet when Wall Street crashed, and the unpleasant Lysist regime that rapidly emerged in its place once American troops were north of the Rio Grande decided it wanted a little vengeance, glory and territorial expansion. To this end Guatemala was invaded and annexed while the rest of Central America was unified into a puppet Lysist Federation of Central America. Mexico's little Empire would rapidly collapse however when they tried to simultaneously intervene in the American Civil War and invade British Honduras. Though divided, the American factions were still strong enough to repel the invasion and eventually turn it on its head, establishing puppet governments in the north under their own respective ideologies, while Britain (under an emergency Labour government for the majority of the Reckoning) would intervene in Mexico proper, backing a lefty Mexican Federation in the South. While the larger American War would be over by 1945, the Second American Civil War would drag on for two more years before ending inconclusively. As no single faction was able to muster enough support to win the war outright, from the unofficial truce of 1947 to the Seattle Accords of 1955, America lay broken.
In 1944, Europe once again went to war. A French-backed revolution in the German puppet of Belgium sent the two titans crashing together once again, though this time the tables had turned. The rest of Eastern Europe only sent token support having drifted into isolationism or Russian orbit (even the Leithanians abandoned them), while France could call on allied regimes in Spain and Italy to aid their war (though Spain would only contribute from 1945, having become embroiled in a parallel war with Portugal that they quickly won).
In the end, the Belgian war would be won by France through a mixture of subterfuge, backstabbing and German disunity. In a polarised political climate, large sections of the German population resisted the war, and continued to make problems for the military-dominated government once it had begun. Though first attempting to gradually sideline the civilian authorities, after two years factions within the German military had had enough and attempted a coup against the elected government, that they bungled. Though the coup plotters seized control of Berlin, fragments of the civilian government were able to escape the purge and regroup in the west, thus kicking of the brief but brutal German Civil War. The communists, formerly locked out of power before the war and repressed during it came out of the woodwork, proclaiming Worker's Republic's left right and centre that gladly welcomed in French troops. Meanwhile, a French invasion through the formerly neutral Netherlands knocked out the rival German government established in Hamburg, while a new front was opened in the east when Lysist Poland invaded Posen in a bid to gain a Baltic coastline (France had previously made a secret deal with the devil with their ideological polar opposites in newly Lysist Poland, as part of their pre-war hunt for any advantage over Germany in a future conflict).
German government remnants collapsed through late 1946 as the rigours of fighting a two-front war and a civil war simultaneously took their toll, with a republican government falling back to Silesia and East Prussia as the French rolled over the North German plain and the Poles pushing to the sea through Posen and West Prussia. Denmark was invaded almost on a whim by French forces flushed with victory, finally drawing Russia into the conflict to prevent the closure of the Oresund to Russian shipping and blocking Russia out from international trade. By 1947, Russia had only just won the Second Russo-Japanese War by effectively firebombing most of Japan and nuking what was left, and began making stern threats in the direction of France that nukes could be used again if they didn't hold off their invasions of Denmark and Germany. If Russia had hoped to force France to back down by threatening the use of nuclear weapons they were sadly mistaken; France responded by escalating the confrontation, detonating their own nuke over Berlin and finally putting the beleaguered military regime out of its misery.
Though the France only had a handful of prototype nukes at their disposal, dropping one on Berlin and bluffing that they had more was just enough to force Russia to back down from the confrontation, with conditions. Thus the Spectral War began even before the Reckoning was over, in this stand off between the two newly nuclear and diametrically opposed powers in Russia and the French alliance system.
Little need be said here of the Brazilian Revolution of 1936 (that would see the birth of the Workers Socialist Confederation of Brazil, and unleash a wave of communist-on-capitalist wars throughout Latin America popularly termed the Brazilian Wars), though its immediate successor, the French Civil War (French Revolution was already taken) had immense implications for the African political landscape, as fragments of the pre-civil war government fled into exile in the colonies.
The economic collapse hit the Third Republic hard; having borrowed heavily from American banks both during and after the war, the collapse of the American economy thus also dragged France down as well. So began a short period of rising unemployment, discontent and general misery coupled with government ineptitude and a ruthless crackdown on whatever left-wing elements remained in France. Of course, the whole world suffered the effects of the economic collapse, but in France the government-led purge of all things left-wing is ironically widely credited with bringing about the French Workers Republic two years down the line. The purge went too far you see; by 1937 all genuine left-wingers had been forced to either flee abroad or go to ground so thoroughly that any purge would be unlikely to snare them, so when the government upped the oppression in a paranoid quest to root out conspiracy and subversion, all they actually found were random bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time or even just scapegoated and framed to keep arrest records high. In such an environment, with a cash-strapped, weakened and paranoid government investing almost all its resources lashing out at its own citizens, and a revolution became almost inevitable. Grumblings became discontent, that morphed into anger against the government.
The crap finally hit the fan in 1937, when soldiers in Marseilles used live ammunition against peaceful protesters complaining about the price of bread. Germany decided to repeat the same trick that had worked a decade before on Russia and sent in any and all genuine French communists they could find to hopefully bring the scarily irridentist French government down a notch, and the rest, as they say, is history (of course, this ended up blowing up in Germany's face when the commies won, but hindsight is a wonderful thing). Unlike its counterpart in Russia a decade earlier, the French Civil war was short; a government consumed by paranoia imploding as it tore itself apart purging 'agitators' and 'subversives', while the revolutionaries rapidly gained ground and the military rank and file deserted en-masse rather than shoot protesters for a wage made worthless by rampant inflation. A rival 4th Republic was proclaimed in the streets of Paris, mostly displacing the prior dictatorship and holding nominal sway over a good portion of the country for a few months before coming into conflict with the revolutionaries who found it too moderate for their liking, and duly being conquered in turn.
By 1938, France lay shattered. Though the Metropole was firmly in the hands of the revolutionaries, the colonies would for the most part remain under the control of no less than seven different colonial administrations all claiming to be the legitimate government of France. Aside from the mainland the only other French territory taken by the communists were three of the four directly integrated communes of French West Africa in Dakar, with subsequent actions against the then shaky regime in Saint-Louis netting them a substantial slice of southern Senegal (that would be granted significant autonomy, and go on to form the core of the Workers Confederation of West Africa a decade down the line).
The most substantial rival was initially the Provisional Government of the French Republic, established in Algiers and controlling Algeria, Tunisia, and Corsica. France Algiers would ride high for a few years as the German-backed faction against the communists and receiving recognition as the 'legitimate' French government-in-exile from most of Central and Eastern Europe before German defeat in the Belgian war plunged them into an extended period of decline, culminating in revolution in 1974.
Then there was the 4th Republic, proclaimed in Paris during the Civil War before being booted out by the communists and fleeing to the few colonies that had come to recognise it, mostly in the South Pacific. As the faction backed by the British Empire, further colonial territory would be added over the following decade with British help, until all French possessions in the Indo-Pacific were under their control.
Beyond those two widely-recognised governments, and the factions became increasingly petty. The colonial government in West Africa (after hurriedly departing Saint-Louis for Porto-Novo in Benin) took an annoyingly ambiguous stance, refusing to conclusively recognise any of the factions as the legitimate government of France while continuing to insist they were only a mere colony of the theoretical government they would be administered by. Remnants of the Third Republic took French Equatorial Africa, to some extent resurrecting the government sidelined by the coup a decade before, and gradually going native in Libreville. Another faction coalesced in French Indochina, though France-Hanoi would make the mistake of accepting Japanese protection, being later deposed by Japan and then conquered by anti-Japanese factions in the Second Russo-Japanese war, having its territory handed over to the administration of the 4th Republic. The former French Caribbean, sold to America to alleviate war debts in the 20's, broke away when America itself fell to Civil War in 1940, making a half-hearted claim to be the legitimate French government for a few years in the 40's before throwing in the towel. Most ephemeral of all was the Kingdom of France, founded in 1937 when Orléanists crowned their claimant to the French throne in the first cathedral they could get their hands on while no one was looking during the chaos of the Civil War, before fleeing to St Pierre and Miquelon (the only colony that would take them), where they continue to reside to this day. Madagascar was quickly lost to revolution, and it would be some time before international powers recognised the Malagasy Republic as independent of France.
The rest of Europe would not be spared from its fair share of revolution. Spain fell to civil war right on cue, with the French-backed communists eventually coming out on top and forcing the lysist-leaning monarchy into exile in the colonies, though loosing Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque country and half of Aragon in the process. Italy would also see revolution, when another coup attempt by Lysist elements of the military kicked off a civil war pitting most of the army and the monarchy against a hastily convened Republican government from the remnants of the previous government, that relied on French-backed Communists and Syndicalists as fighting progressed. The Lysists would quickly be forced off the Italian peninsula, fleeing to Sardinia and Sicily while maintaining control of the colonies. Unfortunately, this brief victory would instead only presage the second round of fighting when the government came into conflict with the French-backed Syndicalists, with the Syndicalists eventually winning (with a significant dollop of French help). Meanwhile the Lysist Kingdom of Italy would maintain a loose grip on the colonies for another decade before losing them to revolution and invasion, finally reduced to Sicily and Sardinia.
Though the rest of Europe avoided outright revolution, it would be impacted in other ways. The German sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe constructed at such cost during the Great War gradually imploded; the weak as hell German democracy established at the end of the Great War was hobbled by political violence, polarisation and chaos somewhat comparable to that suffered by the Weimar Republic at the same time in our history, with the difference that the radicals were never truly able to grab the reins of power (any that became too powerful would be couped by the still powerful army), leading to nearly a decade of political gridlock and civilian governments flip-flopping from left to right with every election, all moderated by a military shadow administration that cared only for the maintenance of its own political power. The German sphere would drift apart minus decisive German management, mostly reforming around a resurgent Russia as the decade wore on. Meanwhile, the toxic ideology of Lysism spread its tendrils far afield having been booted out of France, finding fertile ground in eastern Europe; though most states resisted the tide, both Romania and Poland would fall to Lysist coups.
In the Balkans, Leithania responded to the crisis by devolving ever more power to the constituent kingdoms, that acted less like administrative divisions and more like sovereign states with every passing day (the Liethanian government even allowed them to take seats on the AoN in 1944 for crying out loud), while Leithania's puppet kingdoms in the Balkans gradually regained their independence. In the Ottoman Empire, the reforms of the Uneasy Peace were undone at a stroke following a military coup in 1936 to weaken constitutional power and install a new pliant Sultan who would be willing to acquiesce to the demands of the coup plotters. From 1936 life for ethnic minorities became increasingly difficult in the Ottoman Empire as civil liberties took a nosedive in favour of rampant Turkish nationalism, militarism and irridentism, all fuelled by copious amounts of oil money. That the regime was increasingly pissing off its Arab and Kurdish subjects (on whose land most of the oil could be found) somehow passed the regime by. In 1940 someone had the bright idea of cramming troublesome ethnic minorities into 'homelands' from where they could more easily be monitored and controlled, and thus the 'Autonomous Ethnic Homelands' (see this map for the full set just before the Ottoman collapse) would be born, going on to inspire the Segregationists states of TTL to create a parallel of the South African Bantustans of OTL, though here most commonly called 'Autonomous Native Reserves'.
1940 would see the beginning of two major wars on opposite sides of the world that would both radically reshape their respective continents; The Second Russo-Japanese War and the Greater American Civil War.
The Second Russo-Japanese War was the largest conflict to come from the upheaval of the Reckoning, mostly fought in the chaotic mess of Warlord-era China. Tensions had been building between the regional hegemon and the recovering power with a grudge to settle for some time (it didn't help that Japan continued to prop up several civil war legacy states in the Russian far east), and tensions finally boiled over in Transbaikalia in 1940. Japan would have itself, Thailand, a Philippine government established as soon as America itself fell to civil war, a puppet Manchurian government and the most powerful of the Chinese factions in Nanjing, with territory in the Central Plains and along the Yangtze River, while Russia would have the rest of the Chinese warlords and the might of an admittedly distracted and noncommittal British Empire. The land war was won by 1944 (the warlords victorious, Thailand switching sides at the right time, the Chinese government in Nanjing burning itself out in civil war and Korea and Manchuria liberated), while Japan itself would not be subdued till 1947 by nuclear fire. Russia did inordinately well from the war, proving itself as a Great power once more, and establishing a string of allied governments throughout Asia, while the switch to a wartime economy without taking any damage in their industrial heartland did wonders for the Russian economy, pulling the same trick the US did during WW2 OTL. During this time of Russian resurgence, many former German puppet states in Eastern Europe thus drifted over to Russia as German power waned.
On the other side of the world in 1940, America would fall into civil war, collapsing under the strains of this alternate Great Depression. The war would drag on for seven long years, with no less than eight factions vying for control of the lower 48 and America's more far-flung domains going their separate ways. America had been forced to abandon their Mexican puppet when Wall Street crashed, and the unpleasant Lysist regime that rapidly emerged in its place once American troops were north of the Rio Grande decided it wanted a little vengeance, glory and territorial expansion. To this end Guatemala was invaded and annexed while the rest of Central America was unified into a puppet Lysist Federation of Central America. Mexico's little Empire would rapidly collapse however when they tried to simultaneously intervene in the American Civil War and invade British Honduras. Though divided, the American factions were still strong enough to repel the invasion and eventually turn it on its head, establishing puppet governments in the north under their own respective ideologies, while Britain (under an emergency Labour government for the majority of the Reckoning) would intervene in Mexico proper, backing a lefty Mexican Federation in the South. While the larger American War would be over by 1945, the Second American Civil War would drag on for two more years before ending inconclusively. As no single faction was able to muster enough support to win the war outright, from the unofficial truce of 1947 to the Seattle Accords of 1955, America lay broken.
In 1944, Europe once again went to war. A French-backed revolution in the German puppet of Belgium sent the two titans crashing together once again, though this time the tables had turned. The rest of Eastern Europe only sent token support having drifted into isolationism or Russian orbit (even the Leithanians abandoned them), while France could call on allied regimes in Spain and Italy to aid their war (though Spain would only contribute from 1945, having become embroiled in a parallel war with Portugal that they quickly won).
In the end, the Belgian war would be won by France through a mixture of subterfuge, backstabbing and German disunity. In a polarised political climate, large sections of the German population resisted the war, and continued to make problems for the military-dominated government once it had begun. Though first attempting to gradually sideline the civilian authorities, after two years factions within the German military had had enough and attempted a coup against the elected government, that they bungled. Though the coup plotters seized control of Berlin, fragments of the civilian government were able to escape the purge and regroup in the west, thus kicking of the brief but brutal German Civil War. The communists, formerly locked out of power before the war and repressed during it came out of the woodwork, proclaiming Worker's Republic's left right and centre that gladly welcomed in French troops. Meanwhile, a French invasion through the formerly neutral Netherlands knocked out the rival German government established in Hamburg, while a new front was opened in the east when Lysist Poland invaded Posen in a bid to gain a Baltic coastline (France had previously made a secret deal with the devil with their ideological polar opposites in newly Lysist Poland, as part of their pre-war hunt for any advantage over Germany in a future conflict).
German government remnants collapsed through late 1946 as the rigours of fighting a two-front war and a civil war simultaneously took their toll, with a republican government falling back to Silesia and East Prussia as the French rolled over the North German plain and the Poles pushing to the sea through Posen and West Prussia. Denmark was invaded almost on a whim by French forces flushed with victory, finally drawing Russia into the conflict to prevent the closure of the Oresund to Russian shipping and blocking Russia out from international trade. By 1947, Russia had only just won the Second Russo-Japanese War by effectively firebombing most of Japan and nuking what was left, and began making stern threats in the direction of France that nukes could be used again if they didn't hold off their invasions of Denmark and Germany. If Russia had hoped to force France to back down by threatening the use of nuclear weapons they were sadly mistaken; France responded by escalating the confrontation, detonating their own nuke over Berlin and finally putting the beleaguered military regime out of its misery.
Though the France only had a handful of prototype nukes at their disposal, dropping one on Berlin and bluffing that they had more was just enough to force Russia to back down from the confrontation, with conditions. Thus the Spectral War began even before the Reckoning was over, in this stand off between the two newly nuclear and diametrically opposed powers in Russia and the French alliance system.
EDIT 1) Added write-up for TTL's WW1 equivalent through the resulting peace treaty and up to the dawn of their version of the Great Depression. More to come shortly.
EDIT 2) Damn, appears that my last edit somehow removed the map file. I've re-added the map, and also added more history for this world covering their Great Depression up to the beginning of the Spectral War (TTL's name for Cold war).
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