Ok: this is (mostly) not mine, just a prettied up version of Tony Jones’s Gurkani Alam world in the present day. (
http://www.clockworksky.net/gurkani_alam/ah_mughal_world.html and more awesome scenarios at
http://www.clockworksky.net/alternate_history_top.html ) I’ve made a few modifications due to my quibbles with the TL. It is a world where the Mughals got their shit together and didn’t overextend themselves to the south or succumb to Islamic religious intolerance, and survive to this day as the world’s greatest power.
The world is complex and multi-polar, and is divided up in various ways by political theorists. The most powerful political alliance is the Dharmic Block, an alliance centered on the Mughal state, which includes six of the nine most powerful nations and federations on Earth. The Dharmic block is an alliance of nations combining (in theory) a Dharmic philosophy of religious co-existence with generally capitalistic economics and (usually) lawful government. Aside from political, economic and religious compatibility, fear and dislike of the Holy Russians has also been a unifying element.
Influenced by a powerful Sufi movement and Hindu mysticism, Dharmic philosophy tends to accept the validity of many paths to God and for the less mystical, the thinking is sorta on the lines of Aslan’s statement by way of CS Lewis (
Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted), allows Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs (a less bellicose bunch here) to comfort themselves that God will be forgiving of disbelievers, making conversion by fire (and the sword) mostly unecessary.
Of course, there are fundamentalists in the Empire and elsewhere who disagree strongly, but they are not the dominant faction. To some extent the importance of tolerance in religion has been reinforced by the bloody history of the Holy Russian Empire, a no-bones-about-it theocracy.
The world is generally more religious than OTL, in that religious tolerance rather than secularism is the norm, and there’s a great deal of religious synecticism, wooly mysticism, popular cults, psychics, theists, deists, etc. around. European states that are members of the Dharmic Block tend to be less secular than their OTL equivalents.
Perhaps in reaction, there are also a few deliberately secularist, even atheistic states around, the dominant tradition being a North German, anti-Catholic one. Led by the technocratic dictatorship of Prussia, the “Freethinker” states seemed like a possible wave of the future a while back, but the increasing influence of a powerful and secular UN-type organization, the Oikoumene council, combined with continued success of the Dharmic block nations and their allies and the defeat of the Holy Russians in the Long War have taken a lot of wind out of their sails. Prussia has become less autocratic and increasingly tolerant of ‘wooly mysticism’, and in the increased economic unity of all of Europe west of the Russians is seen as a possible future member of the Block. To some extent the Freethinkers Association, whose representatives meet in the Dutch-speaking African state of Oranjestaat (the world’s only officially atheist monarchy), has become something of a talking club with little effective power.
Aside from the Mughals, the major members of the Block include France, a largely post-racial state busy building a federal empire: the kingdom of Canada-Louisiana, the greatest industrial power in the Americas (reunion with Olde France hardly ever comes up anymore), the Dakshina Nad, a confederation of states originally founded as a defensive league against Mughal domination and over time consolidating into a union about as close as the Swiss Confederation (with some very varied internal forms of government), the somewhat looser anti-Russian Sarajevo Pact nations, and the Ling Chinese empire, a bit of an embarrassment to the rest of the Block due to its reactionary social customs (to some extent a reaction to Russian destruction of Chinese culture in the north) and the overweening power of the Emperor.
First-world states generally tend to have more limited democracy than OTL liberal democracies: monarchs often retain considerable power, and although some sort of balancing Parliament exists in all cases, it may not be filled by direct election, or positions in government may be restricted to those above a certain level of wealth or fulfilling certain requirements of education, training, etc. Although there are some true republics with universal suffrage, these are not in a majority. Some states are dominated by the wealthy or by corporate interests. Although socialistic ideas exist, there are no true “socialist” states, and the poor and lower classes have a tough time of it in many quite wealthy nations.
Somewhat off to one side is the Atlantic Alliance of the Anglo-Danish monarchy and their Brazealian allies (the imperial capital moved from Portugal to Brazeal a while back, and there is now a Free Portugal movement). The British are intolerant towards non-Christians and the state is dominated by giant corporate combines: with great social inequalities and the world’s least regulated industrial pollution, the Anglo-Danish Empire has something of a cyberpunk feel. Brazeal is a militarist dictatorship (the army is dominated by the nobility, and the king is Top Noble) and somewhat intolerantly Catholic. National and upper-class self-interest supersede religion, however, and the powerful alliance plays complex games of influence with neutrals, Dharmics, Freethinkers and the One Truth nations.
The One Truth nations do not actually form an alliance, although political thinkers of this world sometimes talk as if they do. What they share is a combination of religiosity with intolerance, and although some hate eachothers guts (particularly the Holy Russians and their former subjects in China and Nihon), they have in recent decades come to appreciate what they have in common in the face of the awful Dharmic heresy and the rampant secularism which increasingly seems to be infecting the Dharmic nations even as it becomes less virulent in the Freethinker nations. They therefore often form a voting block in favor of the most reactionary policies in the Oikoumene Council (think of the mutual support of US Christian fundies and Iranian Mullahs fighting against abortion and birth control abroad), which leads people to see a common purpose that is not really there. This is excerbated by religious fundamentalist movements, Catholic in South America, Greek Orthodox in Eastern Europe, Sunni in the Ottoman Empire, everything under the sun in the Mughal Empire, and the Holy Russian tendency to back anti-Dharmic revolutionary movements with a fine disregard for their system of belief.
African colonization started earlier than OTL, and was more drawn out, giving some local regimes enough “breathing time” to manage to avoid conquest (they were also aided in this by the generally lower racism of this world: with the aggressive competition given to Europeans by dark-skinned people from India and their neighbors, black Africans, although seen as backwards, have generally not been seen as actually subhuman. (It is ironic under the circumstances that colonization has lasted longer in this world: but then Africans in Mughal and south Indian colonies are generally fully equal to people from the subcontinent and culturally assimilated, the ones in France-over-seas are getting there, and Catholicism and money whiten in Brazeal’s colonies. The Anglo-Danish empire has been far more sluggish about giving its colonies internal self-government, and is currently reaping a reward in increasingly violent unrest in such places as Senegambia and the “Dominion” of Nigritia, with its London-appointed President.
The Long War, set off when a panicky Holy Russian Empire sought to destroy the Mughal atomic weapons program (after generations of demonizing the Mughals, the Russian leadership had fooled itself into thinking the Mughals would be quick to use such an advantage to destroy Holy Russia), lasted over most of two decades as both sides tried to avoid expanding it into a full-blown nuclear exchange and fighting shifted between multiple fronts. Finally, after losing nearly half their male population, a coup in Russia made an armistice possible: the size of the country and the fanatical resistance of the population made outright occupation impossible, and the Mughals were simply too civilized to carry out a program of outright extermination, so a negotiated peace ensued: some territory in the west and south was lost, and the Nihonese (converted by fire and sword to Orthodoxy, but far from convinced that they were Russian) broke off, as did their North Chinese puppet. (This was rather delayed by the fact that the very brutal Ling occupation of much of the North temporarily threw the Holy Chinese Empire back into the arms of the Russians). The "Orthodox dissenters" (dissenting with the authority of the Patriarch-Czar) the Nihonese and a shrunken Holy Chinese Empire, united by Orthodoxy and antipathy to the Russians and the South Chinese (mostly the Russians, in the Nihonese case) have formed a military alliance.
Currently, fears arise that the Russians, having shifted back to a more reactionary religiosity after an interval of reform and rebuilding, are working to secretly build up their nuclear arsenal in contravention of Oikoumene arms limitation pacts.
With its larger “first world”, this world is more than a generation ahead of ours technologically, and there are bases on the Moon, fusion power plants, lots more use of wind and solar power, prosthetic limbs, etc. It is also more populous, the Mughal Empire alone having close to a billion inhabitants. Russia is much more populous than OTL, Being Fruitful and Multiplying being both a divine mandate and a legal requirement: even with the terrible wartime casualties and the territorial losses, population recently passed 450 million. Western Europe is also more densely population, although the difference is not so great. China, on the other hand, is somewhat less densely populated.
Bruce