AHC: Non-European dominated world

What is the best region to dominate?

  • North Africa and the Middle East

    Votes: 16 21.3%
  • East Asia

    Votes: 49 65.3%
  • India

    Votes: 7 9.3%
  • Indochina and the Indies

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • The New World

    Votes: 2 2.7%
  • Other

    Votes: 1 1.3%

  • Total voters
    75
The Islamic world suffered just as much from the Mongols as China, and the Islamic world didn't just "preserve past knowledge and gain other technology through trade," they innovated. In any case, even before the Mongols, the Islamic world was more ahead in its scientific knowledge (especially in its integration of discoveries from different fields, i.e. there wasn't a situation like in China where a large part of the educated class still believed that the Earth was flat).
Most of Islam innovations related to optics which they used mostly for religious reasons. Being able to locate Mecca was more important then most other innovations. Other then that the preservation of Aristotle and other classical philosophy is a big thing they did knowledge wise but that isn't a innovation. Islam golden age is more of a testament to the backwardness of Christian Europe(before 1500s) and its neighbors at the time then their own civilization doing amazing things. Islam rose and became strong at a time other empires were decaying or stagnating.
 
Personally I think the best candidate for industrialisation is Japan. They could then drag up the rest of the region in East Asia l.

I think China is often (though not always) overlooked as a potential alternate center for industrialization. The population and the resources are there; it's true that economic structures would need to change, but that's just as true for Japan.
 
I think China is often (though not always) overlooked as a potential alternate center for industrialization. The population and the resources are there; it's true that economic structures would need to change, but that's just as true for Japan.

The challenge is that China has such a dominant imperial position that any economic surplus becomes extracted by the state, preventing the beneficial cycle of investment that drove the industrial revolution. You need to recreate the British example of distributed power, which is best created by a power struggle resulting in a constitutional compromise. Japan never got that compromise in OTL but the struggle between the Emperor and the daimyos could do that. Plus, if a maritime tradition took off, Japan's island nature means the merchant class could be relatively pretty powerful, adding a third group into the mix.
 
Yeah, most PODs focusing on industrialisation is always on Song China.
I feel like in a timeline about industrialization starting in the Far East Japan should be the one to kick start it. I see them becoming a mix of Britain and Germany while China is more like Russia and adopts industrialization later at a slower rate.
 
Yeah, I'm going to propose Song industrialisation, too. China's definitely a contender to become a superpower with an earlier industrialisation programme. This can spread to Japan, Khmer, and other places around its periphery
 
Whatifalthis has done no less than three scenarios with at least the possibility of this outcome

I find his videos very general and ignoring many factors. I just personally don't agree with many of them. I see China expanding north and west more then expanding overseas. China has less reason to expand overseas compared to north and west. I could see China expanding north and west for similar reasons as Russia expanded east. They can also eliminate many threats to their empire by doing this and easily become the majority in those areas. China could also more easily control its gains in those places.
 
Most of Islam innovations related to optics which they used mostly for religious reasons.
No, the Islamic world innovated significantly in astronomy (Ibn al-Shatir's work is equivalent to the Copernican model, just using a geocentric framework like Tycho Brahe did; Ulugh Beg's observatory had the world's most accurate catalog of stars before telescopes), physics (Avempace's description of motion was probably the most developed before Galileo), medicine (Rhazes and Avicenna of course, but Ibn al-Nafis's description of the circulatory system is again the most developed prior to Vesalius), and chemistry.

Also, where are you getting the idea that Alhazen, etc., did research "mostly for religious reasons"?


The challenge is that China has such a dominant imperial position that any economic surplus becomes extracted by the state
This claim is objectively wrong. Late imperial China had the world's lowest tax regime and probably the lowest official : population ratio of any major state. Confucian ideology also militated against extracting economic surplus from the people, since the prevailing economic ideology of late imperial China held that wealth best increased when it was allowed to accumulate in the hands of the people.
 
Nah, a Surviving Song would mean that Islam would spread East and North Earlier, since Sumatra the source of Islam had trade links with the Philippines, they had no time to spread since Majapahit reinvigorated Hinduism and Majapahit was just propped up by the Yuan and Champa would have been Muslim earlier preventing a Vietnamese takeover.
 
No, the Islamic world innovated significantly in astronomy (Ibn al-Shatir's work is equivalent to the Copernican model, just using a geocentric framework like Tycho Brahe did; Ulugh Beg's observatory had the world's most accurate catalog of stars before telescopes), physics (Avempace's description of motion was probably the most developed before Galileo), medicine (Rhazes and Avicenna of course, but Ibn al-Nafis's description of the circulatory system is again the most developed prior to Vesalius), and chemistry.

Also, where are you getting the idea that Alhazen, etc., did research "mostly for religious reasons.
To quote Al Razi,

"If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed." How Muslim does this man truly sound.
Much of the science in the Islamic world came from or influenced by the people they took over or traded with. This includes the Greeks, Persians, and the Indians thinkers. The people in these societies thrived in science because leaders of this era followed a very secular school of Islam(Mu'tazilites) that is now extinct and because they built on the knowledge of past civilizations in the area. Neo-Platonism was big during the time. This is like Christianity taking credit for the enlightenment or Renaissance instead of the rediscovery and expansion on of classical knowledge being given credit. We don't call the renaissance the Christian golden age. The ironic part the concept of a Islamic golden age is more of a modern and western concept. Many Sunni and Shia Muslims of the time didn't consider these thinkers as "true Muslims" and Muslims scholars in the eras following until recently would say the same thing. They considered many things of the era as "unholy". This era ended once orthodox fractions of Islam won out. Islam literally had groups saying the scientific advancements being made was anti-Islamic. They were saying this about mathematics and cried about Persian mysticism. The Muslim world will be passed by the Far East and Europe as long as it falls to orthodox beliefs and considers itself the Muslim world. Anyone else notice the west started to advance more when it considered themselves the western world or related to the Greco-Roman world instead of christiandom.
 
This claim is objectively wrong. Late imperial China had the world's lowest tax regime and probably the lowest official : population ratio of any major state. Confucian ideology also militated against extracting economic surplus from the people, since the prevailing economic ideology of late imperial China held that wealth best increased when it was allowed to accumulate in the hands of the people.

Purely factors of the size of China's territory and population. Give me a time in Chinese history where the Emperor was restricted in power other than by a rival Emperor claimant.

As for your Confuciam claim, can you provide a readable online source?
 
Chiming in on your conversation, Found this academic article which seems like a nice coverage of the broad tax history of China - https://www.researchgate.net/public..._and_Its_Political-Legal_Development/download.

Does seem to make it clear that the imperial government viewed taxation as an instrument to shape society according to Confucian ideology, and a role to play in shaping society, beyond simply taking a laissez-faire view of social development. Ideological preference for low tax is specifically a preference for low agrarian tax (land tax), to favour an economy rooted in agricultural production, tax on trade seems less clear, though trade certainly controlled and heavily regulated, if not taxed. This is not as a such laissez-trade, low tax and regulation on trade and business to grow trade and business economic type ideology. As the economy has an agrarian base in employment (as all Malthusian economies with relatively low agriculture surplus must be) this is functionally relatively low tax.

From what I've read on this though, it seems really difficult to tell how much of a leading role ideology actually had in tax rates and mdoels though. There are limits of tax levels imposed by the inequality possibility frontier (states can't sustain high tax or inequality if the result would push large amounts of population below subsistence - https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/med...Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/2013/WPS6449.pdf, and China was a relatively low income society according to what we know of historical economics), limited incentives to tax from on military costs due to China's relative size to local competitors, and limits to tax bargaining imposed by China's model of government (bureaucracy in a limited position to credibly negotiate limits on powers for higher tax rates, in a system built to make bureaucracy accountable only to the centre). Would they have come up with a different justification under Confucian ideology if they'd faced different conditions (a richer, less agricultural population, much competition with peer states, an absence of a strong early bureaucracy)? And thus Confucian ideology not really necessarily causal.
 
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