Map Thread XXI
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To be honest, I just saw an OTL map in this format and decided to make something similar.
Is this some kind of No-WW2 world, in which a bunch of buildings that were planned IOTL but were never built were built?
To be honest, I just saw an OTL map in this format and decided to make something similar.
On one hand, Germania means Nazi Germany and apparently a reduced Poland, but from the looks of it, France still has Alsace and other changes so no European war (WW2) ? But, Japan's apparently split into 2, a united Korea, and a free Tibet, so maybe an Asian war instead ?
Yeah, sort of. Asian war instead of World War II, different Great Depression, successful Watkin, etc. Although these are just excuses, of course, the buildings are still quite unrealistic.
Saqa - the Green Hermit Kingdom of the North
As climate change ravaged most of the world, Saqa, with its geographic and economic isolation, rich natural resources, and bitterly cold baseline climate, was well-positioned to benefit. Under the guiding hand of the populist-personalist Fatherland party, which slowly smothered the country's fragile democracy after it won power through a free election, Saqa provides the prime example of eco-fascism - a combination of indigenous ultranationalism and a command economy which has swept the poles as communities like Nunavut, Greenland, and Patagonia seek to preserve their cultures and husband their resources in the face of rising numbers of climate refugees.
At present, the greatest threat to the regime's stability is the long-simmering Lena conflict with the Baikal Federation, which limits access to and pollutes Saqa's most important river. Poor performance of the Saqa military in clashes in Lensk region and the government's recent decision to expand conscription to bolster the country's weak military has sapped the government's popularity. In the last election, despite intense repression and fraud, the opposition Today party, which advocates for liberalization and Russian ethnic interests, won a seat in suburban Djokuskay. Nevertheless, as temperatures continue to rise and the balance of global power continues to shift further north, few Sakhans are yet convinced now is the time to change horses.
Made for the reddit contest. Based on this scenario from a long time ago.
As climate change ravaged most of the world, Saqa, with its geographic and economic isolation, rich natural resources, and bitterly cold baseline climate, was well-positioned to benefit. Under the guiding hand of the populist-personalist Fatherland party, which slowly smothered the country's fragile democracy after it won power through a free election, Saqa provides the prime example of eco-fascism - a combination of indigenous ultranationalism and a command economy which has swept the poles as communities like Nunavut, Greenland, and Patagonia seek to preserve their cultures and husband their resources in the face of rising numbers of climate refugees.
At present, the greatest threat to the regime's stability is the long-simmering Lena conflict with the Baikal Federation, which limits access to and pollutes Saqa's most important river. Poor performance of the Saqa military in clashes in Lensk region and the government's recent decision to expand conscription to bolster the country's weak military has sapped the government's popularity. In the last election, despite intense repression and fraud, the opposition Today party, which advocates for liberalization and Russian ethnic interests, won a seat in suburban Djokuskay. Nevertheless, as temperatures continue to rise and the balance of global power continues to shift further north, few Sakhans are yet convinced now is the time to change horses.
Made for the reddit contest. Based on this scenario from a long time ago.
These giant monuments look beautiful to me, especially that of Christopher Columbus and the Third International. Can we have images, certainly fictitious, but more concrete?
To be honest, I just saw an OTL map in this format and decided to make something similar.
Urbanites and Boyars would certainly be annoyed. Nobles generally own land in a number of locations, towns are built along rivers in expectation of being able to trade with the other side and larger ones may extend across them.
Establishing a border along a river always messes up human geography. If it involves rewriting existing borders, it inevitably will leave valuable cities and possibly strategic locations on the wrong side, (really, that's such a long line of river that it being established in a peace agreement is just crazy: it would require slicing through historical Russian states and principalities [1] and extensive exchanges of territory ) and in any case it's not a very good barrier in a case where the enemy has the technology known as "boats." Perhaps another example is China, where when China was divided borders generally ran _between_ the Yellow and the Yangtze, not along them.
An eastern border along the Rhine made some sense for France: it establishes a logical stopping point for French expansion to the east, finishes up a French border already well defined geographically by seas and mountains to the south, southeast, and west, it demarcates between the French "us" and the German "them" and it's a call-back to the Roman empire, always cool with empire-minded Latin language speakers. (And France actually expanding to swallow the Rhinelands probably would have not gone well at all, in any case. Look how much fuss Alsace alone caused OTL). This has no geographic, cultural, or historical logic to it.
[1] I'm fairly sure if one looks at a map of Russia during its long period of fragmentation, there won't be much in the way of looong borders defined by rivers.
It is a concept by Alberto Palacio for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893.
This article has an image of the Christopher Columbus monument https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/palacio-s-plan-for-colossal-monument-to-columbus-1890
I almost want to live in a world where all of these ridiculous megamonuments were built, but surviving Nazi Germany gives me second thoughts....
To be honest, I just saw an OTL map in this format and decided to make something similar.
Of course, nowadays everyone would want it demolished or renamed.
(I'm really doubtful that could be built with 1890s technology. A hollow sphere of that size, combined with Chicago weather...)
Well, we can assume in this scenario that Hitler died before 1940, since otherwise there's no way we have the Soviet Union and French empire and a Germany with those borders.
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I'm in absolute awe at the sheer size of that *Soviet Union.Did a bit of an update on an old map for an internet project I'm working on, so I thought I might as well post it.
Based (a bit loosely [1]) on H.R. Percy's "Letter from America", in the Sandra Ley-edited "Beyond Time" collection.
The French were more successful in their colonial efforts early on, Louis XIV getting the colonization bug from some of his advisors and after the 1670s spent some money on funding colonization efforts as well as wars and ornamental fountains, moving "underemployed" French groups to the Americas rather than using them as forced labor Colbert-style at home, while some key naval victories in the 1690s and early 1700s left all of what we would call the Canadian Maritimes in French hands. This gave French America enough of a demographic and geographical edge by the mid-18th century to win the equivalent of the French and Indian wars, confirming French control of Louisiana and Canada and pinning the British colonies east of the Appalachians. Another demographic boost came after an alt-French revolution, with the French monarchy fleeing to America like the Portuguese in Brazil in our world, followed by a cavalcade of loyalists. A generation later, the monarchy returned to Europe, and the colonists did not greatly appreciate returning to "exploited colony" status after being the center of the French world for a while.
New France would afore too long rise in revolt, joined and supported in a pan-north American effort to expel European overlords by some of the British colonies (they'd already tried once to break away, and been crushed [2]), and afterwards a "republican union" of the French and British colonies would take place. Alas, the British colonies, ravaged by the struggle (which had been as much a civil war as a revolt against British rule), soon found themselves the junior partner: revolts against French dominance began as early as the 1860s, which led to repression, which led to more revolts...French-Anglo conflict was a serious internal problem for a long time, with separatist terrorism taking place as late as the 1970s, but rapid economic growth over the last four decades and some political compromises have greatly lessened tensions by 2010 (although visitors from the French-majority states grumble a great deal about everything having to be bilingual in New France while the "Onglays" can't be bothered to learn good French).
The French-speaking population has been boosted by a very open policy towards Catholic immigrants from wherever, while the English-speaking regions have generally been less attractive to settlers due to native hostility to non-Protestants and political turbulence. People descended from English-speaking populations (well, English, Scots, and anglified Irish and Welsh) still make up over 25% of the population of New France, but only 17% or so of the population speak English as a first language, including third-language speakers and their descendants settled in the Anglophone majority eastern provinces: people whose ancestors mostly came from the British isles are scattered far and wide across New France, but cultural and economic pressures mean that those who move outside the "Old Six" generally abandon English for French within a generation. Native Americans have generally done better than in our world, although the government has long tried to make good French-speaking Catholics of them (there are a _lot_ of what we would call "Metis" people), and there are some huge areas at least theoretically belonging to the Amerindian nations. [3] The black population is also somewhat better assimilated than in our US (slavery came to an end in the 1870s fairly peacefully, the institution never having become as deeply rooted in New France as it did in the southern US of our world.)
The Republic was the leader of a coalition of nations in a cold-war type situation versus the Russian-led Collectivist Union, similar to Soviet Communism but bigger on anti-nationalism and Maoist popular mobilization. The Union has recently collapsed, rather more messily than our Soviet Union, and political fragmentation and civil wars are still ongoing.
Important allies include China, a 40% Christian (more or less: there are some odd local offshoots) republic - a working democracy, but a protectionist, import-substituting, bureaucratic one whose "lite socialism" has left the country, like our world's India, relatively poor. And then there is the empire of Japan, "bastards, but our bastards" while the conflict with the Collectivists was going on, but now increasingly a *fascistic embarrassment. The Republic of Great Britain [4] has a relationship with New France as prickly as our world's France has with the US, but is still an ally and militarily formidable. The kingdom of France is nowadays something a satellite of its overgrown offspring.
Central Europe is still scarred by the Short War of '77, which involved both chemical and radiological weapons. Post-war, the Allied Powers created the "MittelEuropa Recovery Zone" as a framework for the economic rebuilding of the region, which been renamed the "MittelEuropa Development Zone" as the local economy has picked up: the expansion of the union to the rest of western Europe has been often talked about, but the current free-trade regime seems sufficient to most without adding in a meddlesome Prague bureaucracy.
Latin America is more closely economically tied to New France than it is with the US OTL - free-trade arrangements with fellow Catholics and Latins came into effect fairly early on. [5] The Spanish Empire's efforts to devolve control in Latin America by creating sub-kingdoms within a overall Spanish Empire were only partly successful, with much of Latin America eventually going republican (or beyond, in the case of Gran Columbia, which is an anarcho-socialist republic).
Africa is largely post-colonial, only the Italians holding stubbornly onto their mineral-rich holdings. It is broken up into somewhat fewer and larger chunks than in our world, some pro-democracy (at least in theory), some still Collectivist, more English and Dutch and less French(French colonization efforts were confined here to North Africa and the Senegal-through-central-Sahel area). South Africa, never snatched from the Netherlands by Britain, is a loose federation of African and Dutch (well, at least Dutch/Boer-speaking-plurality) states. The continent is poor and messed up, but not as relatively badly off as in our world.
The Arab Federation is more or less a democracy, but oddly the same party keeps winning the elections(although at least the Presidents don't overstay their terms). The south Indian republic is a prosperous democracy, and formed a keystone in the Indian Ocean portion of the democratic alliance's military plans: it still hosts a lot of British and New French troops, since the North Indian situation is to say the least fluid.
Democratic leftism is more anarchist, anti-state than OTL, and has even less patience with the Collectivists than our Social Democrats had with the Communists. Technology is a bit behind our timeline, varying from late 1960s to mid-80s depending on the field: the first satellite wasn't put in orbit until 1983, and nobody has been to the moon.
[1] Although we do have an unreliable narrator, there was a definite smell of "French America is greatly inferior to British America! The Commies are going to do much, much better with weak-ass French north America rather than the US" about the story which I found a bit annoying. Not to mention the bits about the French putting black French-speakers above white English speakers and using Indian troops to repress said English speakers come across as a bit triggery nowadays, although I suppose this could be interpreted as progressive "historical irony" if you squint.
[2] Struggling to finance their long struggle with revolutionary France, Great Britain squeezed their American colonies pretty hard.
[3] In actually practice, if a mining or timber company wants rights, the Federal government will give it to them, and the indigenous inhabitants don't get much choice in the matter, although they at least they get a slice of the profits if they don't complain too much.
[4] Britain had a rather more troubled 19th century than in our world.
[5] Not that relations always have been rosy. New French corporations have been voracious in their exploitation of Latin American resources, generating a great deal of populist resentment towards Le Colosse du Nord.
Also, Russian Northern India as seen here and in Tony Jone's Puritan World should be an althistory trope.
Apparently, it was a real & constant fear of the British back in the Empire days. Hence the Great Game.
Alternate World set before an alt-WWI with a POD in 1830.
Disclaimer: I used borders and what not from many different sources but I unfortunately cannot who made those maps. So please let me know if you recognize any of your borders (or anybody else's for that matter) so I can give the credit due.
Feel free to ask questions so that I can answer and build some lore in this world!
What are the major alliances, and who rules France?
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