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Don't forget that, by quirk of historical accident, there already is a line pretty much defining the boundary of the Confederate culture with the non-Confederate culture. The Mason-Dixon line happened to be pretty close to the boundary of the range of malarial mosquitos (the area where more...

It used to be that the way of fighting practiced by the steppe nomads (bow, horse, and incidentally lance) was the most effective style of warfare bar none, not only in terms of numerical efficiency but also full stop - a steppe horde was tactically and strategically mobile, had a very small...

That's, frankly, unlikely to say the least. The most recent Indian revolt had been put down without too much trouble and the issues causing it dealt with, and Egypt was actually functionally at the time under Muhammad Sa'id Pasha. (Later Isma'il Pasha). With the Indian army being reforged into...

Without California, it's quite plausible the Union would go bankrupt - or at least be unable to buy small arms overseas in anything like the same profusion. OTL the specie income from Californian gold was a majority of US convertible currency income, while the CS had cotton to make their money...

Ah, I see. Yes, the demographics militate against it. According to the 1788 Census, Haiti's population consisted of nearly 25,000 whites, 22,000 free coloureds and 700,000 slaves, so the whole non-slave "controlling" population is outnumbered 14-15 times over by the slaves. In the CSA, some...

Not just that, they claimed to be the legitimate Confederate government in exile...

It would if it became economically unprofitable, though admittedly that's not likely.

What's just as baffling, of course, is to base the economic performance of a future CSA on the economic performance of the OTL CSA. But that makes no sense at all, because the OTL CSA's entire existence was spent in a war and under blockade. A war, it must be added, which was hard enough for...

Possibly, though that also assumes the South would ride down into economic oblivion rather than just reverting to an 1840s-era conception of slavery (in which there were a lot more manumissions). Slavery was affected by economics just like everything else, and it was increasing in the immediate...

It's become something of a fashion in recent decades to declare the CSA was inevitably doomed, for whatever reason. I think that's shortsighted. Certainly it lost, but that doesn't mean it would be inevitably doomed - indeed, as we've seen the CSA would have a considerably healthier export...

It was actually the first result when I did a Google. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/FRB/pages/1920-1924/26396_1920-1924.pdf OTL the cotton from India and Egypt was lower quality, to the point a new word entered the language - "Surat" meaning "substandard", as in "Surat...

Though, of course, cotton will still be a fairly major market sector because it's enormously profitable. Even in OTL the cotton production of the US (overwhelmingly concentrated in the south) was sufficient to totally meet the domestic needs of a country producing large quantities of textiles...

Statistics would suggest at least 50,000 did. The question is how one identifies an out gay man during the 1860s...

Slaves can do things other than pick cotton, and indeed many did. (Sample case: Tregedar Iron Works.) It's a matter of economics - if cotton is the most profitable thing for slaves to be doing, that's what they'll be doing. If the cotton price goes down, the slave price will but not as much...

Trent is the usual fallback for getting an independent South because it essentially accomplishes the "British Intervention" thing very early on before the Union's got their war economy properly going - though I think there's an even earlier possible victory in there, if you can swing British or...

Um... Hadrian's Wall is only one of a number of fortifications of that date in the Roman Empire, iirc. Others were longer.

Actually, on the battleship front, something it's worth thinking about is that the list of nations able to build battleships entirely off their own bat is quite small in the 1880s. In fact, there's three powers who can - the British, the French and the Russians. Everyone else imports some major...

I understand that this was actually what the British were hoping would happen in France - their implacable opposition to France came from the Terror and then from Napoleon, and they were cautiously willing to consider peace unless lots of people were being killed and/or someone was violating...

Yes, at least three even without removing McClellan or changing Confederate plans. (1) McClellan gets all the troops he wanted from the beginning (so McDowell's corps, Wool's division and possibly Blenker's division). He can turn Gloucester Point with an amphibious landing, thus breaking...

For the problems with this I refer the learned gentleman to Clarkson, May et al.