Recent content by Matthew Craw

Well, unless butterflies somehow accelerate James's death, the throne will pass to Anne rather than Mary, who pre-deceased him OTL. This almost certainly means British neutrality in the Nine Years War, which should allow the French to retain all their gains of the 1680s, maybe even expand on...

Well, the War of jenkins' Ear was already breaking out in 1739 and without continental distractions France will intervene openly on Spain's side in that conflict. This leads to An Anglo-Bourbon maritime war which probably ends indecisively, setting up the two sides for a rematch a few years...

If Sverdlov hadn't died in 1919 I think it's safe to assume that he would have been Lenin's successor. He was Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, with effective control over the party apparatus, and was arguably the predominant voice in civil administration as well. Filling...

The Japanese in the 1930s actually had an industrial base about twice the size of Italy's, without taking into account the industrial productiojn of Japanese controlled Korea aand Manchuria. Of course they didn't have an engineering base on the same level as Germany or America, but they were on...

I'd have to agree, the army was large enough to secure London and make it very difficult fo any large-scale armed opposition to coalesce, though not to actually establish military rule over the nation as a whole. Plus there'd be French support and no prospect of anyone else in Europe being able...

Closer links with France and a role in the destruction of a protestant republic might well make the Exclusion crisi worse for Charles - leading to the outbreak of a second English civil war in 1678, with William of Orange taking advantage of the opportunity to tear off the mask and lead a Dutch...

This ATL doesn't require the british to be more whole-heartedly engaged on the French side, just (by luck) more successfully so. Actually the real POD seem to be France holding onto and attacking through the Southern Netherlands rather than relying on a precarious route through German allies...

Well, the Anglo-French agreement to partition the Netherlands is historic, so that objection doesn't really hold. IIRC Louis XIV plannes either to annex the Netherlands outright or reorganise it into a monarchy under . . . William of Orange!, which might actually have been possible if the Dutch...

Except that that's absurd - the Serbs' responsse to the Austrian ultimatum represented a real humiliation for them - and went about as far as chastisemane could without becoming an assault on the independent existence of the Serb state, which certanily had no command role in the assassination...

Actually, it occurs to me that calling the ententes "appeasement" is absurd. Appeasement is supposed to involve making concessions to a hostile power in the hope that this will make them more friendly. But the ententes were tough negotiations involving concessions by both parties. In 1904...

It's undeniably true that British colonial disputes with France and Russia were far more serious than those with Germany, and that most British politicians believed that a war with the Dual Alliance would be an extremely hazardous proposition. This led to the ententes of 1905 and 1907 but these...

No, the Habsburgs are extinct. The major reason a relatively minor lineage was chosen in OTL was the need to prevent a takeover of the Habsburg line by outsiders. Here, the Wittlesbachs (?) dominate central Europe. When the Silesian wars begin Prussia will be much more isolated than in OTL...

As a self-respecting European monarch George II would more or less have had to negotiate the return of Hannover - you simply do not let a foreign ruler carry off your family's patrimony. As to what would have been given up in exchange it's worth bearing in mind that the Franch didn't want...

I can't see any motivation for Hitler to invade Poland before his defeat, which (for all the reasons cited above) will probably come in 1939. Soviet involvement on the Czech side seems to be a certainty, but so is a Soviet attempt to grap the Baltics to "secure them from Fascist aggression"...

If France is sending troops north to maintain order that must mean that france itself is not suffering anything like the instability of OTL, which implies a surviving Orleanist monarchy which would in turn be very unlikely to do anything this provocative. At any rate, in so drastically...