AHC: More Gunpowder Empires

We already have the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Your goal is to find out a plausible way for various other gunpowder empires to come to existence and flourish. Bonus points if they still survive to this day and even more points if you find out a plausible way for all gunpowder empires, both from OTL and ATL, to survive and prosper to this day.
 
@Wendell

How about a North African Gunpowder Empire emerging which is powerful enough to stop European colonization of North Africa and utilize it's experience with piracy to build a formidable navy which would compete with the Ottomans?
 
A gunpowder empire isn't any Early Modern empire that uses gunpowder, which would make almost all Eurasian empires between 1500 and 1800 gunpowder ones.

Rather, Marshall Hodgson (who came up with the term in his Venture of Islam series) refers to a specific type of Early Modern Islamic empire ruled by a land-centered military patronage elite, profoundly influenced by the political heritage of the Mongols and Persianate high culture, and united under an increasingly bureaucratic and unprecedentedly strong imperial center. The actual use of firearms itself is somewhat irrelevant, especially since the seventeenth-century Mughal army remained very much cavalry-focused.

Other "gunpowder empires" as Hodgson defined them could plausibly form only in Central Asia (under a more successful Shaybanid dynasty), the former Golden Horde (in an ATL where the Tatars prevail over Muscovy), and perhaps in the Arab world (a centralizing post-Mamluk regime in Egypt, a stable Maghrebi dynasty).

Many other ATL empires might be gunpowder-using empires, but they wouldn't count among the gunpowder empires.
 
Maybe one of the Koyunlu confederations could cultivate closer connections with Constantinople (the Ottomans). Dumb alliteration aside, if they allied with the Ottomans like the Crimeans they might be able to form a little gunpowder empire in the Caucasus.
 
@Intransigent Southerner

You also forgot proto-industrialization. The Mughal's and Ottoman's economy was so advanced during the 16th to 17th centuries that many historians considered them to have proto-industrialized having similar conditions to Britain before it industrialized. The same can, presumably, be said of the Safavids.

Would the Songhai and Mali Empires potentially fit under this category? How about a surviving Cossack Hetmanate or maybe Al-Andalus as I have mentioned before?
 
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