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Greetings everyone! Thought I'd just give a quick update as I realise things have been a little bit quiet here lately. I have been in Bahrain for a few weeks, but some real life business may well be keeping me busy for a few weeks more unfortunately. Rest assured that this timeline definitely...

Outside Kashan, 1850 Homayun had never been a stranger to luck. He was lucky enough for his parents, peasants though they were, to afford a modicum of an education, enough for him to read and write. He was lucky enough for this basic education to allow him to eventually enter the officer corps...

Perhaps from an Austrian standpoint, although maybe not totally necessary, Russian intervention under the guise of the Holy Alliance was preferable to a collapse of influence in much of Italy, which was rather quite central to the Congress system. I'm not too knowledgeable on the whole era...

In A Destiny Realized: A Timeline of Afsharid Iran and Beyond, the last great Asiatic Conqueror Nader Shah does not develop malaria and subsequent insanity in the 1740s but is instead able to lay the foundations for a lasting, centralised Persian dynasty that avoids the internal tumult of the...

The Violent Opening of Japan By the 1830s, British traders operating in East Asia were chafing at the restrictions on trade imposed both by China and Japan. Previously exploiting a growing demand for opium in Southern China, this trade had been shut down by Chinese officials in the 1820s, and...

Russians versus Japanese? Either way, you know that's going to be decisive. One can't say what will happen in the future, but for the time being it looks like both major Muslim powers have their hands full, what with those encroaching Europeans and all. I mean at the end of the day, they did...

The Second Great Turkish War The actual causes of the Second Great Turkish War were numerous. Primarily it was the rivalry between the Ottomans and the Russians that had intensified conflict, and the Ottoman victory in the previous war between the two had only whetted the Russian appetite for...

Not so well, though some of the ingredients are there. Iran had easily accessible coal reserves, though exploitation was sporadic and minimal even when it took place in OTL. Production of coal ITTL is nearly all for domestic purposes, and can be estimated in the thousands of tonnes a year, a far...

A Society Transformed? - Iranian Society under the Afsharids The first decades of Afsharid rule in Iran had seen great changes in some areas of Iran’s social structure, if not in others. Most dramatically, the growing power of the Shi’a Ulema was curbed and robbed of state support, and the army...

Well part of it is a lack of access to the third-world manpower that they had in OTL, particularly in Britain's case. Otherwise one could imagine something happening in Europe before the 19th century is out. On one hand the sting of defeat its likely to give some impetus to reform, though...

The Limits of Empire? - Siam's Reversal in Malaya When the Siamese king Bawonratchao ascended the throne in 1828, he had a great example to emulate. His father had been the legendary king who had humbled the Burmese once and for all, establishing Siam’s position as the greatest of all the...

In order to have a fighting chance of coming out on top, Bengal needs to move beyond the system of Zamindars, something which has already been done in states such as the Punjab and Mysore, but which has yet to be done in the Gangetic Valley as well as other parts of India. If the Sultans of...

Empire of the Gurus - The Rise of the Sikhs as a Great Power The 1830s and 1840s were to see two main trends in the Indian Subcontinent’s political situation. The first of these was the increasing “divergence” between the younger, more dynamic states and the declining post-Mughal states. States...

Centralisation is doing fine for now, but eventually as various peoples of the empire develop nationalist consciousness, which is almost an inevitability as literacy spreads, nationalist agitation is more likely to become a problem for the Ottoman Government. A federalist movement could...

There are a number of incorrect premises with this challenge. 1. That minority folk such as the Kalash are "Nordic" in appearance. While definitely distinct from the general population in India and Pakistan, they are nevertheless very different looking people from Scandinavia and such. 2...

An Empire Transformed - The Ottoman Empire before the Second Great Turkish War The near-century between the final defeat of the Ottomans at the hands of Nader Shah in 1746 and the Great Turkish War of 1845-1849 was a time of revolutionary change for the Empire. What had previously been a...

I guess you could call him an OTL cousin. Highly implausible, but partially put in for rule of cool, as are some OTL characters who will still show their faces. The word "president" was used in pre-Revolutionary France, albeit only as the head of a Parlement. While the name was chosen somewhat...

Toward Moderation? The Third Revolutionary War and its Aftermath Until the summer of 1832, the spate of revolutionary activity in Europe seemed nigh-unstoppable. Spain, a key conservative power, had succumbed to its own revolution, now casting itself as a neutral party within Europe’s great...

Constitutionalism is the aim of these chaps, but as any paranoid monarchical dictator knows, constitutionalism is the first step toward republicanism. In the long run, either option remains for Iran and it isn't actually something I have decided yet, though absolutism (in a sense limited by...

Challenges to Stability in Early 19th Century Iran Whether or not Nader Shah’s religious reforms were ever meant to seriously bridge the divide between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in his empire has largely been dismissed as an irrelevancy. By the reign of his sons Reza and Nasrollah, Shi’ism had...