Recent content by Siculi

It's not really backwards, Tudor England was absolutist to begin with - look at the special administrations used by the Tudor kings, all the while parliament was essentially treated as a rubber stamp. The problem of the Stuarts was not strictly absolutism, that was nothing new for the islands...

That 150 million gold francs the french required them to pay, which led to loans, instabilities, more loans, etc. It took 140 years to pay off that debt, and it represents more gold than there is currently in the Brazilian reserves (45 tons of pure gold give or take). Let's face it, the peace...

At the same time, the provinces were not any person, but the crown, thus my rising eyebrows.

That was true of many countries, however most landfall after fishing in the Grand banks was done in Iceland.

Wikipedia tells me it was done in 1939, at which point Canada was long independent and the decision would have been done by a provincial legislature as a sovereign entity (well sort of, there was Canada above but the federal government didn't seem to protest, or is my understanding of Canadian...

That green leaf strikes me as rather ugly, also why not France Moderne on the arms quartered with England if you're going to have that device?

Not even the Europeans did anywhere like that and they didn't have to cross the world's largest mass of water on fragile junks. Additionally, it's very hard to make landfall and actually reach anywhere with "plentiful silver" on the Pacific coast of Mexico in the 1420s, let alone survive (Cortez...

This is the fall of the Ming, even assuming the ships can cross the Pacific at counter current, there's not going to be enough long-term contact. Besides the Chinese crop package is not particularly superior to the new world one. Rice is going to be worth crap in California and the Andes.

Portugal was just one of many, sailors from the west coast of Europe were already fishing in the grand banks of Newfoundland, and it would take about a century after discovery for a permanent settlement to show up.

The main problem is that the population, while comparable to Africa's, was really concentrated to about 80% between Mesoamerica and the Andes.

With relatively little change to OTL until the 18th century, you could probably manage native majority and native-language dominated states out of the Viceroyalty of Peru (post Bourbon reforms), Paraguay is that IOTL, and out of the core regions of the viceroyalty of New Spain plus the Capitania...

Slavery took two revolutions and slave revolts to end in France. It took slave revolts to end in Britain. It took slave revolts to end in the Netherlands. It took slave revolts to end in Denmark. Haiti is a basket case because France and the United States spent the whole 19th century wiping...

The black death came through Alexandria.

Kurland, which was a lithuanian dependency, did have colonial ambitions; I suspect it's the implication that the Balts were more navally inclined than the Poles, which I guess is partially true but they have the same handicap as Sweden, which is that they're confined by the Baltic sea (even more...

Actually on Austria, not on Britain. Britain jumped in out of misplaced "monarchist solidarity".