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The British government subsidized and underwrote passenger ships travelling to Canada and Australia (and in the case of convicts to the latter, payed their way entirely). This made it much easier for people from the British isles to move to north america than other people in Europe prior to the...

I think he meant that whilst Chicago is a very crucial transhippment point, there are plenty of other such hinge locations in the region, and Chicagos ancillary industries (like food processing) and population could have gone to them instead. Also the transshipment point of 'chicago' could be...

Well massive and utter ignoring of butterflies and America-Wanking aside, you need to a) Decide which infrastructure projects are set up, if the St Lawrence seaway goes before the Erie canal then Montreal will be much bigger and New York much smaller for example, where the transpacific termini...

Except the ones who were opposed to the fleet wanted to spend the money on the army instead (and since the Ming fell to northern invaders, and Zheng, they were probably right to want such). Unified China's security problems were always land based, maritime interests will always take a back...

The smaller European countries have been more effective because they have very strong senses of cohesion on an ethnic and cultural scale that creates a high level of trust and government responsibility. They also tend to have higher resource:population ratios than the more populous countries to...

These borders and names make no sense, and are badly drawn to boot. Since you seem to indicate this is part of a political process, why the fuck would they try to divide up Europe into 10 million person blocks when pretty much every European country is perfectly happy with diverse sizes of...

I'll get on it. Well a trick with GIMP is a) make sure all your text has been rotated at least some extent to ensure it all has the blur effect (believe me, the blur is much less obvious when there isn't non-blur text to contrast it too) and b) Do the working at much higher res than the...

Its AH.com, people know shit about actual conditions in places. Based on the similar climatic example of Norway and the current food exports, Alaska's coastal strips food production could easily support 2-3 million+ people with a monotonous diet. If they pulled their finger out and actually...

That's dumb, Brazil's strength is not related at all to the barely populated expanse of the Amazon, an expanse of jungle will not help a grand power grow. Despite the usual AH idiocy of looking at a space filling area on the map and conflating it with potential power, the vast majority of the...

Sounds good, I could knock that out really easily if you want since all the work is already done ;). I know I say it a lot, but this is one of the things a good program and spending time on the map allows - when each name is a separate object (or in GIMPs case, a raster layer) you can move...

If you're optimizing it for download I'd say its arguably more important to avoid raster maps in favour of vector ones - resizing the cross hatching of a raster map can make it look horrible. Secondly when your limited on colour palette and resolution doing a hierarchy of maps is better than...

Rainforest is your answer.

There is variation within the Amerindian population, however they are quite a recent population movement, probably 11 thousand years old at most. Plus that lack of genetic diversity slows the rate of adaption due to a limited allele pool to work on. Secondly they have similar skin tones to...

And you don't understand the meaning of 'profitable' - in terms of revenue rendered to the metropol, Jamaica was far more important. The Eastern Seaboard had greater gross product, but the difficult of rendering that dispersed wealth to taxation and commercial interests was what the american...

Meh, lots of societies have had that sort of commercial and organisational dynamism in their heydays; the italian republics, the low countries, various chinese and indian urban cultures, even urban islamic spain (or rather the lower Guadalquivir cities in particular). Britain had the good luck...

Oh yeah certainly, a particularly well set up south eastern Chinese state or a Bengali state which pacifies and develops sufficient infrastructure in Gondwana could do it, or north eastern north america if it has a pre-industrial urban culture unconnected from Europe there. The former two will...

These maps merely show extent, utterly failing on accessibility, quantity, and quality of the ore beds in question. On each of those three factors the Iberian resources are an order of magnitude or more worse than those in northern europe. In addition the position Iron isn't that relevant...

Whilst Novogorod was representative within the city itself, much like the Italian merchant republics it was pretty autocratic over its hinterlands. I don't see why'd it be any different with a larger hinterland, especially as communication problems will increase.

Having settlement on the steppes in this era is just silly (and for those who don't know, the south of Ukraine is also short grass plains). There was very good reason why Kiev and the forest line rather than the coast was at the southern limit of the Rus' polity and why despite over a thousand...

Yeah its dead easy with gimp, just save it as a gif and there is an option to make each layer a frame.