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Yes, if only because: who else is going to settle Australia? (A France that wethers the *Revolutionary period aside, as notoriously horrible as the French were at settler colonialism) And, a British America will probably play a major economic and demographic role in the colonization of this...

A surviving Muslim Iberia (say the Almohads) would do the trick. Say dynastic or religious schism causes Iberia to be cut off from the eastern trade, so they would have a similar motivation to seek an alternate route to the spice trade once maritime technology is up to snuff. Otherwise, Boss is...

I mean really Lakes Huron and Michigan are one lake if we want to be technical (otherwise the UP would have three lakes :P). And there are other examples of peninsulas surrounded by multiple bodies of water - Anatolian and Balkan peninsulas, frex, though Michigan still stands out and you may be...

Cismackinac and Transmackinac come to my mind as descriptions for the peninsulas themselves given their relative positions to the Straits of Mackinac. Likewise on a Masonian plan of three mega-states, I would imagine "Peninsular Ohio", etc. would be used?

I am wondering about the possibility of a Portuguese-Netherlands personal union under the Habsburgs. The timeline I am working on (with a POD at the Battle of Pavia in 1525) involves Charles V having a second son as a major early butterfly. This son, Infante Juan/Johan van Spanje, will inherit...

I think the Netherlands is still your best bet. If you butterfly the Dutch Revolt through a different Habsburg succession (a second son surviving adulthood to Charles V is the main divergence in the timeline I'm currently toying with) you'd have the Netherlands as an economic superpower that...

One thing you fail to consider here is whether this second son will motivate Charles to acquire additional territory in the Netherlands. There's some ripe pickings to the east. Regardless, I can see Charles slipping just such a proposal into the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, which already bundled...

Spanish and Afrikaans are in very different social situations. Dutch South Africa was an independent settler colony with a single isolated population that became contrasted to English. Meanwhile, Spanish governance in The New World continually privileged and depended on a ruling class of...

As far as Google has shown me, no post on this forum has pursued the electoral implications if Louis II survives in 1526. In short, the inevitability of Ferdinand's election is thrown into question. Assuming Louis II survives the Battle of Mohács and retains his titles (King of Bohemia and...

If there are competing scientific paradigms, perhaps not. Cultural differences c/would beget fundamental conceptual differences, especially in medicine, social science, and engineering that produce divergent, competing sets of knowledge. It will depend a lot on the divergence, though. If we're...

De Soto's route overlaps substantially with locations of Appalachian gold (in Georgia, the Carolinas, into Virginia, and eastern Tennessee). Presumably the indians therein were smart enough not to reveal it.

I have just returned from a trip to Madgascar, including Kilimanjaro National Park, the two capitals, and Morgabim(1). It made me think about what Afro-Asian imperialism would be like if Madagascar hadn't rapidly modernized under Radama I and II. It seems that Madagascar was uniquely positioned...