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Interesting sidenote, this was actually one of the few wars during the era where the European side actually got fought to a standstill.

I'd take a lot of exception with this. LKY was also subject to believing in his own genius over others. For example his policy on Chinese language education destroyed the heritage of many Singaporean Chinese and resulted in a system which has consistently produced students who, on average, are...

Despite the flaws of American democracy, there is infinitely more accountability to the citizenry in the US, then somewhere in Singapore where the underlying assumption of politicians and senior government officials is "we know what's best for you because we were selected on the basis of passing...

Yes, this too. Also, invasion distance aside Portugal is much more in the same weight class as the Netherlands.

Your timing is problematic. French Indochina was only really established in the late 19th C. It's a totally different political setup from the 1600s- the Dutch capture of Portuguese colonies was part of the wider wars of religion and it was much more free for all. By the time the French enter...

Singapore is probably the closest thing real life has got to a technocracy. What happens is that all the technocrats get invested in promoting their kids and it essentially turns into an aristocracy.

I can talk more about India because that's what I'm more familiar with. China is a different situation with a different progression of events. It was cumulative but right up til the 19th C it wasn't really about military technology. First the need to venture further afield to trade, and then...

It took the Dutch until the 1920s to fully secure the territory of modern Indonesia which speaks volumes about the effort kt took. @OP As others have pointed out Britain did not conquer India but rather managed to pull off, over the course of a century, a process of hegemonisation in the wake...

Wasn't Alexandria still strongly culturally mixed Greek/Arab until the Egyptian Revolution? Maybe some sort of dust up in the late 19th C which gets Alexandria awarded to Greece as a mandate?

Interestingly if they retain contact with the Malay world you could get a vast transpacific Hindu-Buddhist culture

IIRC the southern brahmic scripts don't have as many problems with letter complexity as devanagari. The dominant form of cooking oil in the Tamil country was coconut oil which presumably would have been pressed. Paper is still an issue.

Ok, the point about the luxury trade is the first clear and logical incentive I've seen. I get how that might incentivise Japanese merchant-adventurers to pursue bluewater navigation in the China seas, and, like the Portuguese and Dutch carve out and defend trading enclaves. This is probably...

Few things are entirely impossible. But the issue is that every step along the way from Toyotomi's Japan to Japan conquering Persia requires ridiculous amounts of implausibility and it's clear that the people arguing for jt have a very tenuous grasp of, or possibly a wilful misunderstanding of...

See the problem here is that the scenario you posit isn't possible with the original POD. Toyotomi wasn't even able to conquer Korea let along China. So basically it's handwaving all the way down.

There's a difference between dismissing legitimate changes of fate and with dismissing ideas which have zero understanding of historical economics logistical and geographic realities.

What's the incentive? What's the return on investment? It's not a computer game. The Europeans had the incentive to engage in expensive and dangerous campaigns to try to dominate the Indian ocean trade routes because the return on investment made that a worthwhile proposition. No Asian power had...

And it's important to realise that the British didn't exactly conquer India in a single sweeping campaign. It was a century long process combining political deals, support of one local ruler against another, domination of trade routes and so forth, all against the backdrop of the chaos caused by...

No return on investment. They were quite happy to burn ships full of Haj pilgrims bjt only as an ancillary activity to securing the spice island routes

Precisely and as I said earlier it's not about our perceptions but what motivates the people on the ground.

The difference was that the French really weren't adopting an ethnic based rhetoric on their own part. The Japanese specifically were, and in their treatment of occupied populations did vary their treatment based on ethnicity with the Chinese consistently getting the short(est) end of the stick.