A pirate colony cannot exist in the long run without giving up the piracy. You could certainly delay problems by giving the appearance of being a normal colony that pirates just happen to do business with even if they were the ones to start it up but if the piracy continues eventually somebody...
It was not actually a total blockade of all goods, it was an extended blockade where materials that were not normally regarded as war material were treated as such with an extremely extensive list of contraband. Said blockade was not actually illegal and nobody seriously considered it as such at...
You'd have a point if the enemy bombed it as an attempt to target the legitimate target. If they target a civilian structure and only afterwards realise that it was a legitimate target, it's still an atrocity because the intent was to target an illegitimate target.
And that is actually the case...
The vast majority of organised witch trials were done for... secular? definitely temporal reasons. Catholics and Protestants both exploited hatreds to purge the region of groups they disliked and secure their religious authority over the region. The worst point in Europe of it was during the 30...
The idea that there was a "witch mania" isn't really held up in history. It's a common narrative, but there was no unified persecution of witches. Even the idea that it was misogyny ignores the reality that a notable minority of "witches" were actually men.
The historical reality is that if...
You're sort of right and sort of wrong.
The Arquebus was invented in the early 1400s. The first standing armies since Western Rome in Europe were formed in the Early 1400s. But they weren't fully "professional" for another century.
The first Standing Army to utilise infantry as a standard...
We're a forum about alt-history and this is a topic where there's a disturbing trend on a lot of sites to treat colonialism as a uniquely European evil.
You shouldn't be surprised that a site where the majority of the userbase has more information than that bring it up when it's relevant.
And...
While it's true that even the worst tank is better than no tank at all, just because you create a box of scrap metal and make it move doesn't really make it a tank.
There were armoured cars in production as early as the 30s with thicker armour than the base version. And depending on whether the...
Personally, I'd just use A.D./B.C. on the basis that it's what the majority of the world currently uses. Anything else is completely arbitrary and at that point if we're all being arbitrary we might as well go full egotism and declare that the calendar started the year we were each born.
There's also the fact that it would tell both Britain and France that Italy was now firmly on Germany's side if war breaks out. It would most likely lead to a different plan being used by the French which could either lead to France doing better if not outright holding out or falling faster...
Strategic goals can be decided as early as decades in advance, and the Japanese pushed themselves OTL so much that there isn't much give in when they could choose to do things once war started.
Made worse by the fact the interservice rivalries in the Imperial Japanese Military were incredibly...
I strongly disagree with this point. While the colonisation of India and China were heavily linked, the EIC was acting as a megacorp: It had access to it's own wealth and what it could get from investors, not "the entire wealth of their empire and industry" and "drowning China in opium" was not...
That requires a hindsight view of history.
If things were reversed and say, India was colonising Europe in the late 1700s/Early 1800s, do you think that Britain, France, Prussia and Austria would look at each other, say "We should ally to deal with them" and follow through instead of working...
You still have the problem that Poland is surrounded on all sides by hostile neighbours and the Baltic Sea is easily closed.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it had to be partitioned, but I would say that a "megapoland" is highly unlikely simply because if it becomes too strong without a way...
The problem with Versailles is that it was both too harsh and not harsh enough to accomplish any of the goals of any of the powers involved.
The fundamental problem is that what the various sides at Versailles wanted were incompatible, so they ended up with the worst of all possible worlds.
To...