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Beyond this, I am not sure that the French would necessarily care about non-French subjects, so long as they were loyal and/or were Catholic.

I think that the odds are that a larger and more secure French Sainte-Domingue will butterfly things long before the Revolutionary period. Ignoring the possibility of Franco-Spanish complications—might Spanish resentment over lost Hispaniola lead to the Bourbon candidate not getting the Spanish...

Assuming a POD in the modern era, Japan is relatively most likely, as a maritime power of some wealth and sophistication that was engaged with wider East Asia. I wonder if you could manage to awaken some sort of active Spanish-Japanese rivalries that would see Japan looking outwards. I do not...

French Hispaniola was Sainte-Domingue, so I think that a wholly French Hispaniola would go by the same names. If you do maintain this colony and do avoid the successful slave rebellion of the 1790s and if we assume that the butterflies will not flap their wings very loudly (loudly enough, say...

Which eastern European countries? The established orders in most countries were fine with being non-liberal. Hungary strikes me as the only exception, and Hungary could get away with it; Hungary is relatively marginal to Warsaw Pact plans.

The problem with the idea of 1990s Russia following the Chinese trajectory is that it was already a highly developed middle-income economy with an urbanized population. There was simply not an opportunity for Russia to make the same sorts of quick easy gains from modernizing and urbanizing that...

I suppose that you could annex some or all of Oregon to Canada, but how could you do that? There were good reasons for these two British dominions to be separated.

Or perhaps the Comte de Chambord, the miracle child, is not born, leaving the way clear for the Comte de Paris and the Orleans branch of the family in 1871.

I think it quite possible to have a black-majority South if you limit black migration. If the Confederacy ends up poorer than a Union that becomes a major destination for immigrants, if you have a situation where whites are free to leave but blacks are bound to a territory you could see a major...

The thing about the Spanish empire is that, by being the first to arrive in the Caribbean, they were in a position to shut out rivals. The only other ways to reach Mexico and Peru would have required unprecedented circumnavigations of South America

The Flemish and the Walloons are relatively endogenous groups because they live in discrete territories with relatively little geographic overlap, and because they have different languages and cultures and webs of associations. This could only change if some catastrophe broke down these...

Agreed strongly. Their situation here is not wildly different from that of the ethnic Germans fleeing to West Germany, or the pieds noirs leaving Algeria for France. For that matter, the Netherlands might be attractive. Afrikaans is close enough to Dutch that there are call centres serving the...

It is difficult for me to imagine how South Africa circa the 1960s could fall to a black Communist revolution. There was a black supermajority, sure, but the whites of South Africa were firmly in control of an effective state. What happened?

Quite frankly, I can imagine this proposal encouraging him to make the break with Rome. If the Pope is encouraging Henry to marry his children to each other, what won't he do? A break from Rome might be defensible seen from that light.

The idea that the Pope would be so desperate as to authorize such a high profile marriage of galf-siblijgs is startling. Was there any possibility that Henry VIII would go for it?

My big concern is that, even if you get the USSR to mostly hold together into the 1990s, there is no clear way forward for the economy. How would you have an economic transition? By keeping most of the Soviet Union united politically despite economic dysfunction, you could simply replicate the...

I am looking at it from the here and now. If you are not going to have immigrants to do the jobs that native workers cannot or will not do, what can you have? Automation has some potential in some sectors, but not for others. We consistently see that native populations, invested in their lives...

What would likely happen, as @David T noted in his post, is that some of the Ukrainians would get deported to Soviet Ukraine and others would be sent west to join in the repopulation of the Western Territories.

That mobilization can only go so far. Quite apart from its being an emergency situation where many make workers were recruited to serve in the military and where many women had no choice but to enter the formal labour market, the WW2 mobilization is not obviously relevant to lots of other...

Perhaps the different Romance-soeaking peoples remain not just politically United but consider themselves members of a single ethnic group?