AH Challenge: Earliest or latest possible WWI

Hm? Somebody else will kick open Japan 'afore long: do you think the triumphs of the Meji restoration were very butterfly-dependent?

Bruce

Few people were as brazen, granted. But chances are the Russians are going to do it that same year (Putyatin's expedition was late to the party by a very short time period), and if rejected, maybe a year or two after that. And the French of course, probably no later than '61 or so.

Japan won't stay closed for long.
 
Churchill argued that the Seven Years War was the first World War. So that's my nomination. It was the first war with big land armies fighting on at least two continents.

Though the Carthaninian-Roman Wars were fought over most of the world they THOUGHT existed....

You can arrange a scenario where Persian satellites in Central Asia are fighting the Chinese while the Persians themselves are at war with Rome. It'd even be fantastic, if you did it right.

What you can't do is have it function even remotely like what we called the World Wars. Those wars were at a scale and intensity that dwarfed anything before or after them. The Seven Years war is a world war only in a geographical sense. Which, while semantically critical, was arguably one of the least significant aspects of the war.
 
Since no one else has commented on this yet, I just wanted to pipe up and say I was amazed at this suggestion.

The Seven-Years war was certainly fought on various continents, but I don't think it involved the kind of military technology characteristic of what we consider a "world war." It's more than just location.

If you wrote a TL on this, I would totally read it. It's certainly an interesting clusterfuck of a war, though I suspect the US and the Anglo French would make peace at the first opportunity, now that the US has succeeded in screwing up the CSA's chances.

Thank you.

Writing chronological timelines is a skill I haven't yet mastered. Most of what I have on the board is what I could write out in a sitting, unfortunately, like the above. Larger things I write like I'm editing a wiki - the end result may be good, but it's not terribly exciting to read the updates!

It is an interesting scenario though, isn't it?

To my mind it comes down to three things: weighing Britain down, getting America in, and keeping Russia in.

Britain's dominance effectively prevented total wars from becoming general wars. If the fight involves Britain you can't win and the longer you go on, the more likely it is that a third party joins in on London's side. If the fight doesn't involve Britain, you have to end it quick or risk British intervention. Pax Britannica is actually a fairly valid descriptor for the period. I'd argue the thing that ultimately protected America (though note, not its neighbors) was public sentiment in Britain created by a war officially about slavery.
 
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