So, here's my scenario inspired by it...
This TL started diverging from ours in the second half of the 1400s: the Chinese remained more open to outside contacts (although they still discontinued that whole treasure ship setup. Man, was that a financial black hole). There was no great Habsburg marriage lottery victory, and Castile united with Portugal rather than Aragon. Columbus never sailed, and the Americas were discovered by the English looking for fish. To the south, the Brits soon found much more gold-like things than fish, and aside from Fish Central in Newfoundland, North America was largely abandoned to the Luso-Castilians, the French, and the Scandinavians.
A *reformation took place which ended with the Irish and the Brits on the same side of the religious fence but not the Scots, and more than 2/3 of OTL Switzerland was united under a Protestant centralizing government centered in Zurich, which later became an important Hungarian ally. The Habsburgs crashed and burned by the 1700s, Hungary was reunited under the rule of Transylvanian Protestants rather than Catholic Austrians and managed to slip the Ottoman leash, and the Aragonese empire ended up being divided up between France and Portugal-Castile.
In East Asia, a stronger late Ming managed to beat the Qing to a standstill, although a Chinese general ended kicking over the decadent last Ming emperor and found the Sheng. There was considerable intellectual exchange through Central Asia with the Mughals, which underwent a bit of a Renaissance: between them, the Chinese and the Mughals managed to complete 4/5 of an industrial and ¾ of a scientific revolution, the Mughals later picking up through trade and literary commerce from the Europeans enough to carry themselves the rest of the way to modernity, while the Chinese at least managed to keep up enough to avoid humiliations on the OTL level and hold onto their overseas possessions.
The Ottomans fell behind for a while, but managed to get their shit back together in the 19th century and greatly expanded in Africa: by the present day of 1926 AD they have grown strong enough to shake off a former degree of dependence on the Mughals to challenge them for the role of “leader of Islam”.
The Ottomans and the Mughals are considered two of the “great powers” of this world (the word “superpower” has yet to be invented). There are generally considered to be five: the Conference of Espanish Nations has recently returned to the Top Powers rank by the formidable growth in population and industry of its American (Hudsonian) members. It is generally however considered the least influential of the five, in part due to its isolationist and business-centered approach to international relations. The other two are the Chinese, aiming for the Top Nation spot the Mughals took from them a couple centuries back, and the Russo-German Union. (Due to a tangle of dynastic marriages, the houses of Romanov and Hohenzollern-Wettin ended being united in one heir, and after defeating the strongly objecting British and French in a war, the two empires have been ruled by one family – although religious objections to a closer union have kept Germany and Russia largely self-governing on an internal level).
At present, new alliances are in the process of forming. The Ottomans, in their quest to displace the Mughals as Top Muslim, aside from harping all the time on how disgustingly tolerant of pagans the Mughals are, have moved closer to China, which has some serious beefs with the Mughals re their hogging of central Asia and mucking about in Indonesia and other parts of SE Asia. The Mughals, in response, have opened closer contacts with France and the Russo-Germans (there have been some squabbles re Russia and Mughal vassals in central Asia, but Russo-Ottoman hostilities go waaay back). People wonder where the Espanish Conference will stand if full-blown modern, industrial warfare were to break out between the other four great powers (and France. Man, the French are pissed that nobody counts them as a first-ranker since their defeat, civil war and loss of much of their colonial empire). And then there are the other second-rank powers, the Anglo-Irish, the Karnatic League, and the Nihonese, which the Chinese will tell you are positively inscrutable. The Hungarians have moved back into the Ottoman sphere with the alarming rise of the Russo-Germans to the north, and the Danes are friendly with the Germans…
Technology is in many ways comparable to OTL in the 1940s, with some things (tropical medicine) rather ahead, and a number of things rather behind – most notably the practice of industrial warfare, no major conflicts having taken place since the mid-1800s, when the Ottomans stopped cold the Luso-Castilian effort to expand its colonial possessions in N Africa (and even got some colonial pelf in the peace treaty). Nobody knows what a reaaaly big war in this era of internal combustion vehicles, diesel locomotives, airplanes, and chemical weapons (for pesky colonial subjects) will look like. And some people are messing around with atoms…
Bruce
