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Now 18th C India was on par with Europe with regard to military technology, or at least capable of becoming so e.g. the Sikh Empire in the Punjab had foundries and armouries as sophisticated as those in Europe and so did other states. They fielded excellent cavalry and superb artillery. The...

Now I think this was brought up way back but I'd like to address it again. Is there any way, after Rome officially pulled out of Britain, to have the Romano-Britons manage to maintain a coherent Romanised state on their own? By this I mainly mean maintaining sufficient cohesion to raise...

I've just read the Fox on the Rhine books and I find the situation at the end of the war fascinating. For those of you who haven't read the books, Hitler was successfully assassinated, Himmler took over, Rommel defected to the Allies with an entire German army and the Allies used this as a...

The history of the early Church isn't one of my strongest areas but I was just thinking about this- what if Saul of Tarsus, instead of receiving his epiphany on the road to Damascus, dropped dead of an aneurysm? How might Christianity have developed without the Pauline influence.

Keralan seamanship during the 14th century was quite highly developed. They were capable of building oceangoing ships for the trade to Arabia, East Africa and the East Indies. Lets say the Ottomans extend preferential trading to the Muslim states of North India, thus hurting the profits on...

I'm a Michener fan and I can't help but think about how glorious that might have been. A massive, deeply researched tome along the lines of The Source or Covenant :D Michener, like Frank Herbert, wasn't the best of writers but both of them were amazing storytellers.

Sweet Zombie Jebus, what happened here? This was crappy even by Turtledove's standards. Usually, Turtledove stretches his books out into interminably long, badly written sagas, padded by unnecessary repetition. Here he's sort of switched tactics. Now he's given us a relatively compact book, once...

He of the Lions Blood/Zulu Heart books. We've all heard of how the laughability of the AH in those books isn't important because the real point of the books is to make a commentary on racism. I'm not going to comment on that save for the fact I still think it's an intellectually lazy as any...

Warning: This isn't all too plausible. I'm mainly interested in fleshing out a world to use as a basis for a possible story. Basically the POD here is that merchants from Al-Andalus come to England to trade, possibly for tin. By the 9th century there are solid Islamic communities in most of...

I've decided to set down a proper TL for the world in which my Sons of Alexander stories are set. Initial POD: Alexander does not die young but instead lives twenty more years. He conducts a second campaign into India and manages to seize the Indus Valley. He takes an Indian princess as...

This POD arises from a thought I had in this thread. WI the Indus civilisation hadn't suffered the hypothetical ecological catastrophes which may have led to it being overrun by the Aryans. The Aryans are stopped at the Hindu Kush and the Indus civilisation (which, for the sake of conciseness...

Basically this is a development on my Sons of Alexander stories found in the Fiction Forum. The stories aren't completed but I intend for this to serve as a timeline thread to try and continue past the fictionalised time period I've written about in the Writers Forum. The main POD is that...

In the Mutiny of 1857, one of the strongest arms of the East India Company's forces were the Sikh regiments which remained loyal. What if a Sikh demagogue arose who preached in favour of reconstituting the Khalsa and driving the British from the Ganges Valley?

What POD after the independence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands could give us a Europe like this in the mid-18th C?

In OTL, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, ceded all Dutch territory in India, Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula to Britain in exchange for all British posessions in the Indonesian Archipelago. A further clause was that the Dutch were to give up any claims on Singapore. WI the Dutch made the...

How could we make it so that a few of the military monastic orders survive into the 20th Century as military units? I don't mean for there to be a vast number of them- maybe just one or two orders sponsored by the Catholic church and other large, organised churches such as the Church of England.

WI, instead of choosing Byzantium as the site for the new capital of the Empire, Constantine had decided upon Alexandria or Antioch? Might this have focussed the Empire even more firmly on the East, possibly resulting in the increased Christianization of the Arabs?

From the discussion in Faeelin's "Great Divergence" thread I know this is politically incorrect but, as my mum is fond of saying, just look at the difference between South Asians in the US and South Asians in the UK. The ones who went to the US are those from more prosperous, high caste...

In 1840, while pregnant with her first child, Queen Victoria was almost assassinated by one Edward Oxford. Oxford was acquitted by reason of insanity at his trial. What if his attempt had succeeded in killing the Queen and possibly even Prince Albert who was riding with her at the time?

How can we make the dominant culture of the island of Great Britian into an analogue to that of pre-20th Century Japan- a tightly isolationistic, somewhat xenophobic culture with a unique and idiosyncratic set of social and cultural rules. You could argue that English culture is already...