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Zero chance of that. Kamchatka (in Petropavlovsk) had the only good harbour in the entire Pacific seaboard before Vladivostok was acquired. I am assuming this is an actual POD in the early 1800s. if you give that up, you might as well give up the whole seaboard. Zero chance. Also, in the 1800s...

To restate the point; the more likely you as an individual soldier are to end up fighting alone instead of shoulder to shoulder or knee to knee with someone, the more versatility, variety of weapons, and individual skill you need. Which to me could maybe explain why some cultures kept the shield...

Even an all-steel shield isn't terribly heavy. And you could make it pistol-proof quite easily without making it weigh more than 3 lbs, depending on diameter. True! Soldiers ditched gas masks, bulletproof breastplates, and even swords, all the time. They are all decidedly useful items that can...

Yeah, theoretically any anti-Western government could provoke the same reaction. I wasn't entirely totally serious about every nuance of it, I just literally used the Comoros because it's hard to do much worse but it's not that hard to replicate the experience.

Maoism ensures USSR doesn't lift a finger to help. Cultural revolution therefore can only be defended by local forces. This is important in decolonization era.

Have as many countries as possible go down the Comoros route: 1. Decolonize education by more or less abolishing it 2. Have Maoism happen or at least attempt to happen 3. Have foreign mercenaries come and overthrow the Maoists, while allied with local religious conservatives. 4. Never fix 1. or...

A lot more people died at 40 in 900 AD than today, judging by grave finds. A much higher % of grave finds from 900 AD shows permanent damage on otherwise young people than today. Yes, individual people could indeed be hale into the old age, but on average, they really would have lived less long...

If only they hadn't started dressing like effete barbarians and instead proudly displayed their bare manly legs to the world secundo mos maiorum, Rome would have never fallen!

I'm speculating that it was from a desire to avoid local politics around Buddhism in China, since it was often anti-Imperial. Esoteric Buddhism had a lot of presence in China's various mass rebellions too. Yes, there was a direct link to Tibet through conquest or occupation by both the Mongols...

Problems with the concept: 1. Cultures where women wore trousers or pantaloons had men also wear trousers or pantaloons. 2. Cultures where men wear skirts, wraps, or tunics, also have women wear skirts, wraps or tunics. So to summarise: lower outer garments actually tends to be quite...

The Stoudion Monastery was the biggest collection, iirc, but by the high middle ages it was so understaffed and generated so little interest in old and especially laic texts that it never could preserve them all.

But I saw it on the History Channel!

Honestly the sails and ropes are fine if stupidly expensive, but silver anchors is just asking for trouble if you don't want your galley dragged by the tide because your anchor bent. Maybe they have iron ones in addition to the silver.

Aside from the obvious "but why", maybe as some kind of diplomatic event? Like Field of the Cloth of Gold equivalent? Twelve galleys all spectacularly wasteful seems like a one-off for some kind of diplomatic summit, later to be given away as gifts or disassembled for materials. They certainly...

I, for one, am terribly distressed that it doesn't in fact lie along the bold and mighty Elbe as opposed to the timid Oder. Doing that would make it indisputably beautiful.

And instead of the Ephors of the Gerousia, you had the Starostas of the Zemsovets. And instead of the Shofetim, you had the Noyons of the Great Soviet Khan. And don't get me started on the Deacons of the Cinque Ports, that's clearly the same old reactionary Imperialism cloaked in red hypocrisy...

Yeah, no question that it's difficult. Lots of things would have to change and require an almost strategy-player level of focus over generations. But I don't like completely discouraging hypotheticals on principle, because even within the bigger laws of material history there's room for...

File under "supremely unlikely" considering HOW and WHY Russian America was administered. But if something fundamentally changes Russian colonialism in the early 19th c. (an alliance with Britain seems like a must), doing much "better" than OTL is quite possible.

This is kind of a common thing, in my opinion. Franco-Russian Imperial cuisine would be a great example, and Franco-British and Franco-American too: international professional and upper classes adapting local ingredients for their own sensibilities in restaurants and hotels. In earlier years...

Also it's not a given that they neither did art nor wrote. We know of decently literate steppe societies in perfectly historical times because neighbouring literate societies have recorded them as such. But in terms of what they left behind, well, sometimes it's as little as three bits of paper...