Alex Richards
Donor
Beihai wasn't a very large city at the time though- it's growing massively atm. In any case, as they were consulates rather actual concessions it's not really accurate to show them in the same was a Weihaiwei or Tianjin.
Map Thread XV
- Thread starter rvbomally
- Start date
- Status
Beihai wasn't a very large city at the time though- it's growing massively atm. In any case, as they were consulates rather actual concessions it's not really accurate to show them in the same was a Weihaiwei or Tianjin.
I would save having it there is helpful, though I imagine some making maps with it might put in mention of some international cooperation like with Shanghai or during the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing to explain it away. But in the OTL Map Thread itself? It should definetly be kept. After all, they still keep around the Portuguse port in Benin that your local elementary school could fit inside itself several times. Besides, it would mean updating all the maps. They still haven't fixed that grey pixel seperating Tyrol in Austria-Hungary (I think that the original maker had a map of the modern Austrian provinces, and added South Tyrol and Trentino/AltoAdigo to North Tyrol without realizing to connect them to East Tyrol as well). But yah, if there would be any change to the treaty ports then it would need to be done wholesale, so all the concessions are treated according to the terms set out by their treaties and their geographic size, independence, etc.
Damn, I already have that one, and I have the link as well. I'm looking for the 1903 map, not the 1937 map.
Thanks for the effort though, and I'm still lookging for good versions of the other two maps.
It say on the site that those maps are available on request. The ones that are available publicly are samples like this one.
CannedTech
Banned
Those little images of terraforming and colonization happening are just solid gold man.
Also see the capital of Chryse.
L-R: Water pouring through Dam #3 between the Boreal Ocean and the Valles Grandes, the Constant Mass Launcher (OTL: space fountain) atop Richard Nixon Peak (OTL: Mount Sharp), the USCGC Okemah observes a breaking iceberg north of Port Baker, a greenhouse farm complex in Syrtis Major.
Isaac Beach
Banned
Sure, I don't want to clog it up given I've posted a couple of maps there but if you like I will.
OK, here's something. (Based on this: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/map-thread-xv.407934/page-15#post-14077468 )
A more focused and less destructive *Timur managed to create a lasting Sunni Iran-Central Asia state which later expanded into the old Mongol heartland and spread Islam to the borders of Manchuria.
An even messier *100 years war fragmented France, with Burgundy consolidating an empire from Frisia to Provence, and Britain hanging onto much of northern and western France for another half century. The Wars of Religion would eventually fragment both mega-Empires, with the emergence of the states of Francienne, Aquitaine, the Kingdom of South Burgundy, and the-for-a-short-time-North-Burgundy-Kingdom-of-the-Netherlands.
With Francienne resolutely Catholic and Aquitaine adopting one of the exciting new varieties of *Protestantism, the French north-South split became permanent.
Switzerland never really got off the ground, and the Habsburgs were less fortunate in their marriages.
Attempts to reunify the Burgundian Empire did not go well, and led to the wealthy townsfolk and nobility of Flanders, Holland, Luxembourg, etc. putting some sharp checks on the monarchy, leading to the emergence of the first true constitutional monarchy in Europe and the emergence of a powerful “middling class.”
The Lithuanians Russified and challenged Moscow’s role as “unifiers of the Russian lands” directly.
The Karamanids beat out the Ottomans in the “unify Anatolia” stakes, and although not expanding into Europe as far, being distracted by ventures in the crumbling western fringes of Mongol Persia, expanded rather formidably into the Indian Ocean and East Africa, a Sultan very fond of African exotic animals having decided that the conquest of Africa would be just the ticket with borders stagnating in Europe and Iran. The Portuguese (who as in OTL were the first ‘round the Cape) were kicked out earlier than OTL and by a power far more powerful than Oman. The Swahili coast boomed as never before, and the serious penetration of the interior for ivory, slaves, etc. began a century and a half before OTL.
The British were the first to the Americas (here known as the Hesperides)and managed to grab the good bits in Mexico and Peru, but lacking the OTL Spaniard’s Europe-wide power, were unable to persuade the Popes to gift them most of the continents, and a bit of a scramble ensued. Gold and silver from the west allowed the British monarchs to do away with a Parliament they no longer needed to vote them money, and the Kingdom of Britain and Ireland sank increasingly into absolutism until the revolution of 1803 began the turbulent early republican era.
With less formidable opposition, the Low Countries managed to plant colonies all over the place, founding what would be a global territorial empire and an even larger economic empire.
The Kingdom of Francienne, late to the colonization game, only managed to gain permanently a few bits of the Caribbean and the area of Central America between British Mechico and the narrow isthmus which was the route to the riches of Tawantine (a shortened and mangled version of the Inca name of their empire). Attempting to make the best of a bad thing, from the start Paris pursued a policy of “scientific” (by 17th century standards) development and heavy investment in large scale forest clearance and tropical agriculture and encouraging settlement by Catholics from all over Europe.
The Grand Khanate of Mongolstan temporarily conquered parts of a fragmented China (inadvertently preempting a Manchu takeover of the whole deal, the Jurchen Khanate being a Mongol vassal by this point), leading to a new era of intellectual exchange and the development of a more centralized, efficiently bureaucratic empire and a move towards what some traditionalists still call “the great betrayal”, as the Khans turned to a policy of encouraged settled living and agricultural lifestyles and pushing nomadic clans off land more profitably put to the plough. In an era of gunpowder empires, horse archers were not as decisive as they used to be: bloody wars barely stalemated with the Karamanids and the Muscovites proved that.
An earlier adoption of improved agricultural technique and immigration from a troubled China expanded rapidly the population of Vietnam, whose emperors at one point ended up ruling much of southern China: they put the extra resources and manpower to good use, expanding south and west, absorbing the last remnants of the Khmer and dividing Thailand with the Burmese Empire.
The ruling classes of French-speaking central America felt that only through rational, scientific means could their relatively resource-poor and disease-plagued country be made into a real power: after the breakdown of Parisian royal authority due to a joint Aquitainian-Dutch invasion, a small coterie of people who considered themselves the epitome of Latin rationalism took their chance. The Rationalist Republic would eventually become the Technocratic Federation, without losing its tradition of elitism, authoritarianism, and a society fiercely regulated and policed to achieve “scientifically” calculated goals, whether pumping up the population through carrot-and-stick promotion of “prodigious breeding”, the acquisition of what inhabitants of Saxony-Brandenburg might call Lebensraum, even if in Africa, to have a place to put all those people, or making sure all members of society are provided with productive work, even if said members might wonder if hacking a highway through the *Darien Gap is really the best use of their time.
A merchant-dominated Zanj eventually broke away from distant Constantinople as the Karamanids declined. A vast swathe of Africa from Ethiopia (briefly independent, only to fall into the Zanji orbit) to OTL Zimbabwe was brutally exploited, but as Islamic religion and the Swahili language spread inland, also assimilated into a larger society with no racial prejudice. A new brand of Islam developed among the mercantile classes, a faith tolerant of a wide variety of Islamic sects and of the People of the Book – even Hindus – but also with an emphasis on personal success and action in the world rather than fatalism and quietism, with a political, radically democratic edge. The Islamic Renewal movement spread widely as Islamic society seemed under siege in much of the Western Islamic world, pushed back in the Balkans, colonized outright in western and North Africa, and in India and SE Asia. The great Mongol Khanate still stood strong, but it was an authoritarian bureaucratic tyranny to which Islam was merely another tool of state power. In time Zanj would become the intellectual leaders of much of the Islamic world and the cutting edge of Islamic liberation under European colonial rule.
Playing off Dutch and Francienne influence, the Empire of Great Viet would shake off its loss of South China in the War of the Seven Commanderies, and successfully do a Meiji in the 19th century, expanding further at Burmese expense, and even snatching the rebellious Joannine Islands from Portugal: wild plans to reconquer south China were eventually abandoned as impractical, but the Vietnamese would still extract their pound of flesh in the form of the islands of Hainan and Taiwan when the Chinese foolishly tried some “border adjustments” while the Viet Empire was busy in the Second Burma war.
With a still formidable resource and manpower base, the Grand Khanate managed another revival in the 20th century, beginning with a 1905 victory over Russia alongside an allied Lithuania in what is called either the Siberian War or the War of Misha’s Mustache, depending on who you ask. Over the course of the century, the Kahanate would become the protector of the more conservative, less democratic Islamic nations (with some notable exceptions due to geography) and compete fiercely with Zanj for leadership of the Islamic world as a whole. Population boomed, to the point where the very ecological sustainability of central Asia came into doubt, and a massive canal had to be constructed to hook the Aral Sea into the river systems of Siberia to prevent it from drying up. Samarkand had become the largest (and most polluted) capital city on Earth.
Starting in the mid 19th century, the Low Countries began a long term effort to organize their sprawling global empire into a federal union, with a fair degree of success to some extent undermined by their desire to prevent the huge non-European, non-Christian population of their Asian territories from gaining proportional representation: compromise and collaboration didn’t go too badly in India, but some nasty decisions were made in South Africa, while a balance of power was maintained in Indonesia only by a complicated federalism designed largely to weaken the influence of the areas where Islamic nationalism (“Indonesia for the Indonesians”) was strong and strengthen more conservative or Europeanized areas. Developing a north Europe spanning free trade block and mutual alliance was, in the eyes of some, a backup plan in case the overseas territories became estranged from the mother country. As the century drew close to an end, the global “Circle of the Netherlands” was the richest and probably most influential power block in the world, but would it remain so?
Central Hesperidian (American) “scientific” and “efficient” modernization was less scientific and rather less efficient than it made itself out to be, but it was successful enough for it to become, after the transition to “full technocracy”, to become a successful revolutionary export, popular in countries where the path to modernity had not been smooth and modern *Capitalism particularly heavy-handed. As the exporter of this world’s most energetic “modernizing” revolutionary force (there are *socialists in this world, but the Technocrats mock their talk about the dialectic and the inevitable triumph of the working class as teleological nonsense, and have largely preempted any talk about scientific modernization), the Technological Federation of the Central Hesperides punches beyond its individual weight (which is still fairly formidable: it’s more populous than the area OTL, far more developed, and with a high-tech military. It’s also a nasty bureaucratic tyranny with a virtual serf class of “uneducables”.)
The rise of Technocratic Muscovy is looked upon with as much enthusiasm in Centralia (the Scientifically Planned capital) as the rise of Red China was in the USSR.
Zanj has hopes for unifying all of (non-Central Hesperidian) Africa plus Arabia into a single economic union centered in Mombasa: the lack of a cooperative attitude in such countries as Egypt really bugs them. A rising concern is the Return of the Peoples: after centuries of cultural assimilation to a coastal Islamic-Swahili archetype, newly highly educated peoples of the interior, especially in the autonomous provinces, are rediscovering their own languages and cultures, and pushing back hard for cultural revival. As yet the possibility this might lead to the breakup of Zanj is only a tiny cloud on the horizon, but things are not helped by East coast elites grumbling about people mooning over times when they lived bareass in jungle huts, ate eachother, and worshipped chunks of wood with nails in.
The Great Viet Empire is the economic hub of east Asia, but with the increasing heft of a China slowly but steadily catching up with the rest of the world, this may not last. The Viets therefore are embarking on a long term project of creating a “two Oceans” economic league under their leadership, extending west to the Persian Gulf and east to the islands of the Pacific, to include Indonesia when (most Vietnamese pundits don’t use the word “if”) it breaks from the Circle of the Netherlands. They hope to also increase their influence in Latin America and those parts of Africa not under the thumb of Zanj. Interesting times may be ahead…
A century is ending. New powers are rising. The balance of world power may soon be shifting…
A more focused and less destructive *Timur managed to create a lasting Sunni Iran-Central Asia state which later expanded into the old Mongol heartland and spread Islam to the borders of Manchuria.
An even messier *100 years war fragmented France, with Burgundy consolidating an empire from Frisia to Provence, and Britain hanging onto much of northern and western France for another half century. The Wars of Religion would eventually fragment both mega-Empires, with the emergence of the states of Francienne, Aquitaine, the Kingdom of South Burgundy, and the-for-a-short-time-North-Burgundy-Kingdom-of-the-Netherlands.
With Francienne resolutely Catholic and Aquitaine adopting one of the exciting new varieties of *Protestantism, the French north-South split became permanent.
Switzerland never really got off the ground, and the Habsburgs were less fortunate in their marriages.
Attempts to reunify the Burgundian Empire did not go well, and led to the wealthy townsfolk and nobility of Flanders, Holland, Luxembourg, etc. putting some sharp checks on the monarchy, leading to the emergence of the first true constitutional monarchy in Europe and the emergence of a powerful “middling class.”
The Lithuanians Russified and challenged Moscow’s role as “unifiers of the Russian lands” directly.
The Karamanids beat out the Ottomans in the “unify Anatolia” stakes, and although not expanding into Europe as far, being distracted by ventures in the crumbling western fringes of Mongol Persia, expanded rather formidably into the Indian Ocean and East Africa, a Sultan very fond of African exotic animals having decided that the conquest of Africa would be just the ticket with borders stagnating in Europe and Iran. The Portuguese (who as in OTL were the first ‘round the Cape) were kicked out earlier than OTL and by a power far more powerful than Oman. The Swahili coast boomed as never before, and the serious penetration of the interior for ivory, slaves, etc. began a century and a half before OTL.
The British were the first to the Americas (here known as the Hesperides)and managed to grab the good bits in Mexico and Peru, but lacking the OTL Spaniard’s Europe-wide power, were unable to persuade the Popes to gift them most of the continents, and a bit of a scramble ensued. Gold and silver from the west allowed the British monarchs to do away with a Parliament they no longer needed to vote them money, and the Kingdom of Britain and Ireland sank increasingly into absolutism until the revolution of 1803 began the turbulent early republican era.
With less formidable opposition, the Low Countries managed to plant colonies all over the place, founding what would be a global territorial empire and an even larger economic empire.
The Kingdom of Francienne, late to the colonization game, only managed to gain permanently a few bits of the Caribbean and the area of Central America between British Mechico and the narrow isthmus which was the route to the riches of Tawantine (a shortened and mangled version of the Inca name of their empire). Attempting to make the best of a bad thing, from the start Paris pursued a policy of “scientific” (by 17th century standards) development and heavy investment in large scale forest clearance and tropical agriculture and encouraging settlement by Catholics from all over Europe.
The Grand Khanate of Mongolstan temporarily conquered parts of a fragmented China (inadvertently preempting a Manchu takeover of the whole deal, the Jurchen Khanate being a Mongol vassal by this point), leading to a new era of intellectual exchange and the development of a more centralized, efficiently bureaucratic empire and a move towards what some traditionalists still call “the great betrayal”, as the Khans turned to a policy of encouraged settled living and agricultural lifestyles and pushing nomadic clans off land more profitably put to the plough. In an era of gunpowder empires, horse archers were not as decisive as they used to be: bloody wars barely stalemated with the Karamanids and the Muscovites proved that.
An earlier adoption of improved agricultural technique and immigration from a troubled China expanded rapidly the population of Vietnam, whose emperors at one point ended up ruling much of southern China: they put the extra resources and manpower to good use, expanding south and west, absorbing the last remnants of the Khmer and dividing Thailand with the Burmese Empire.
The ruling classes of French-speaking central America felt that only through rational, scientific means could their relatively resource-poor and disease-plagued country be made into a real power: after the breakdown of Parisian royal authority due to a joint Aquitainian-Dutch invasion, a small coterie of people who considered themselves the epitome of Latin rationalism took their chance. The Rationalist Republic would eventually become the Technocratic Federation, without losing its tradition of elitism, authoritarianism, and a society fiercely regulated and policed to achieve “scientifically” calculated goals, whether pumping up the population through carrot-and-stick promotion of “prodigious breeding”, the acquisition of what inhabitants of Saxony-Brandenburg might call Lebensraum, even if in Africa, to have a place to put all those people, or making sure all members of society are provided with productive work, even if said members might wonder if hacking a highway through the *Darien Gap is really the best use of their time.
A merchant-dominated Zanj eventually broke away from distant Constantinople as the Karamanids declined. A vast swathe of Africa from Ethiopia (briefly independent, only to fall into the Zanji orbit) to OTL Zimbabwe was brutally exploited, but as Islamic religion and the Swahili language spread inland, also assimilated into a larger society with no racial prejudice. A new brand of Islam developed among the mercantile classes, a faith tolerant of a wide variety of Islamic sects and of the People of the Book – even Hindus – but also with an emphasis on personal success and action in the world rather than fatalism and quietism, with a political, radically democratic edge. The Islamic Renewal movement spread widely as Islamic society seemed under siege in much of the Western Islamic world, pushed back in the Balkans, colonized outright in western and North Africa, and in India and SE Asia. The great Mongol Khanate still stood strong, but it was an authoritarian bureaucratic tyranny to which Islam was merely another tool of state power. In time Zanj would become the intellectual leaders of much of the Islamic world and the cutting edge of Islamic liberation under European colonial rule.
Playing off Dutch and Francienne influence, the Empire of Great Viet would shake off its loss of South China in the War of the Seven Commanderies, and successfully do a Meiji in the 19th century, expanding further at Burmese expense, and even snatching the rebellious Joannine Islands from Portugal: wild plans to reconquer south China were eventually abandoned as impractical, but the Vietnamese would still extract their pound of flesh in the form of the islands of Hainan and Taiwan when the Chinese foolishly tried some “border adjustments” while the Viet Empire was busy in the Second Burma war.
With a still formidable resource and manpower base, the Grand Khanate managed another revival in the 20th century, beginning with a 1905 victory over Russia alongside an allied Lithuania in what is called either the Siberian War or the War of Misha’s Mustache, depending on who you ask. Over the course of the century, the Kahanate would become the protector of the more conservative, less democratic Islamic nations (with some notable exceptions due to geography) and compete fiercely with Zanj for leadership of the Islamic world as a whole. Population boomed, to the point where the very ecological sustainability of central Asia came into doubt, and a massive canal had to be constructed to hook the Aral Sea into the river systems of Siberia to prevent it from drying up. Samarkand had become the largest (and most polluted) capital city on Earth.
Starting in the mid 19th century, the Low Countries began a long term effort to organize their sprawling global empire into a federal union, with a fair degree of success to some extent undermined by their desire to prevent the huge non-European, non-Christian population of their Asian territories from gaining proportional representation: compromise and collaboration didn’t go too badly in India, but some nasty decisions were made in South Africa, while a balance of power was maintained in Indonesia only by a complicated federalism designed largely to weaken the influence of the areas where Islamic nationalism (“Indonesia for the Indonesians”) was strong and strengthen more conservative or Europeanized areas. Developing a north Europe spanning free trade block and mutual alliance was, in the eyes of some, a backup plan in case the overseas territories became estranged from the mother country. As the century drew close to an end, the global “Circle of the Netherlands” was the richest and probably most influential power block in the world, but would it remain so?
Central Hesperidian (American) “scientific” and “efficient” modernization was less scientific and rather less efficient than it made itself out to be, but it was successful enough for it to become, after the transition to “full technocracy”, to become a successful revolutionary export, popular in countries where the path to modernity had not been smooth and modern *Capitalism particularly heavy-handed. As the exporter of this world’s most energetic “modernizing” revolutionary force (there are *socialists in this world, but the Technocrats mock their talk about the dialectic and the inevitable triumph of the working class as teleological nonsense, and have largely preempted any talk about scientific modernization), the Technological Federation of the Central Hesperides punches beyond its individual weight (which is still fairly formidable: it’s more populous than the area OTL, far more developed, and with a high-tech military. It’s also a nasty bureaucratic tyranny with a virtual serf class of “uneducables”.)
The rise of Technocratic Muscovy is looked upon with as much enthusiasm in Centralia (the Scientifically Planned capital) as the rise of Red China was in the USSR.
Zanj has hopes for unifying all of (non-Central Hesperidian) Africa plus Arabia into a single economic union centered in Mombasa: the lack of a cooperative attitude in such countries as Egypt really bugs them. A rising concern is the Return of the Peoples: after centuries of cultural assimilation to a coastal Islamic-Swahili archetype, newly highly educated peoples of the interior, especially in the autonomous provinces, are rediscovering their own languages and cultures, and pushing back hard for cultural revival. As yet the possibility this might lead to the breakup of Zanj is only a tiny cloud on the horizon, but things are not helped by East coast elites grumbling about people mooning over times when they lived bareass in jungle huts, ate eachother, and worshipped chunks of wood with nails in.
The Great Viet Empire is the economic hub of east Asia, but with the increasing heft of a China slowly but steadily catching up with the rest of the world, this may not last. The Viets therefore are embarking on a long term project of creating a “two Oceans” economic league under their leadership, extending west to the Persian Gulf and east to the islands of the Pacific, to include Indonesia when (most Vietnamese pundits don’t use the word “if”) it breaks from the Circle of the Netherlands. They hope to also increase their influence in Latin America and those parts of Africa not under the thumb of Zanj. Interesting times may be ahead…
A century is ending. New powers are rising. The balance of world power may soon be shifting…
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A more natural and Russian-sounding name for a city named after Gagarin would be Gagarinsk or Gagarinov, not Gagaringrad. Too many syllables.
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