21.)Norse-Islamic – in this world Western Europe fell to Islam and the bulk of the world is divided between the Nordic states (Scandinavia, British Isles, Russia, and much of N. America), which follow a syncretic religion mixing Christianity and traditional Viking beliefs, (and in the north American states, blending some native American elements into the mix) and the Muslims, which have taken all of Africa, and much of Latin America and Europe as well as what they hold OTL.
Christianity holds out in a number of small, backward states in Central Europe, the Balkans, and Ethiopia and some parts of the Caucuses, but is regarded as of little importance by the Norse and the Muslims. Christian Europe is considered a part of the Norse sphere of influence, although the Christian states north of the “marcher Emirates” in OTL northern France are somewhat a matter of disputation.
Outside the duality and of some importance are the Buddhist Japanese, rulers of the north pacific, the west coast of N. America, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, coastal China and the Philippines, and their SE Asian allies, as well as the sun-worshipping Incas who hold the western half of S. America. Japan is dominated by its noble classes, but due to extension of that category over time, nearly 10% of the population belongs to that class. China outside of Japanese controlled areas is divided into a number of little Confucian dictatorships and Buddhist theocracies (Tibet is rather more influential than OTL, and extends some way into OTL Sichuan and Quinghai), and a sizeable Islamic state with a Turkish dynasty in the north: intercine squabbles have prevented a Chinese reunification.
The Nordic realm forms a loose alliance, divided into a number of kingdoms which in turn are divided into autonomous districts and city-states. Most of North America is divided into three major Nordic more-or-less nations (with large Native American minorities) and a number of loosely associated, purely Amerindian states. It’s a fairly democratic society, and one of the few on this world where women are held as equal to men. There are also some small Maya-associated native states along the gulf coast and in the SW, and a few Japanese puppet kings in the inhospitable areas of the Rockies. The Caribbean is closely tied to Al-Andalus, where many of its settlers came from.
Important Muslim states are the Shiite, Arabized Maya, a trading, mercantile people with a network of city-colonies all over the American coasts and into the Pacific; the Sunni Empire of Zimbabwe occupying the southern third of Africa and Madagascar (diverse, including a number of autonomous kinglets in the interior, autonomous Arab and Swahili city-states, and a great many immigrants invited in to settle and Islamicize the under-populated Cape area), which elects it’s kings for life; the populous and traditional Sunni monarchy of Mali in west Africa, which has developed a truly extensive mix of tree-cultivation and irrigation to combat the harsh conditions of the Sahel (gunpowder armies and much massacring of nomadic Tauregs and Berbers helped with the stability thing); the extensive (Malaysia to Australia) but very loosely controlled Javanese Empire, another great trading state along with the Maya and the Vikings; al-Andalus, ruling Iberia, Morocco, southern Italy, and southern France, Sunni but more than a third Christian and Jewish, with an elected kinda-parliament that rivals the Sultan for power; and the mighty Shiite Empire of Iran ruling Central Asia, NW India and Afghanistan, whose ruler in Baghdad claims to be the Caliph of all Islam, although his power is being eroded by a rising middle class and the religious establishment.
Eastern South America is smaller Islamic states vaguely under the protection of Al-Andalus and Mali, India is divided between warring Islamic and Hindu states, the rest of Africa is many small to middling Muslim states, and the Levant and Arabia are under backward and conservative Muslim regimes the great powers tend to sniff at.
Technologically, this world is only at an early 19th century level of development – steam machinery, paddle boats, the beginnings of railways. The Norse are beginning a scientific revolution, but haven’t really realized it yet: the Muslim world is very powerful on scholarship, but there are so many complex philosophical arguments and analyses of the world carried out in (printed, nowadays) books and letters between scholars sometimes half a world apart that the scientific method tends to get lost in the noise. (Someone has already generalized from planetary motion to Newtonian math – telescopes and heliocentrism have been accepted for a while, outside of Arabia - but as a pure intellectual effort without scaring the religious authorities as yet).
22.) Egyptian/Cleopatra Earth – Caesar settled down with Cleopatra and eventually a joint Roman-Egyptian empire briefly emerged, although later breaking apart with much mutual Rome-Ceasaropolis name-calling. Nowadays, after a fresh stage of expansion in the early modern era, Egypt rules N. Africa, the Sudan, the Levant, Anatolia and a chunk of the Balkans, Babylonia, western Iran and Arabia north of Ethiopian Yemen, Italy below the Great Wall, as well as Australia and big chunks of S. America. Most of the modern European states emerge after the period of the Germanic invasions, the remnants of the Gothic empire and the more modern Saxonians, and rather more of Europe speaks Germanic languages than OTL, although Latin speech still predominates in Iberia. The library of Alexandria is indeed still around, and is a major research center, but, alas, over 2,300 years fires will happen, and there are few extant documents from the era of Socrates and Plato.
To the south of Egypt, a powerful Ethiopian empire – much intermarried with the Egyptian royal house – rules OTL Ethiopia, the Yemen and Somalia, and has colonies in OTL Indonesia. Egyptian science and learning has spread south through Ethiopia into the more insalubrious climes of East Africa, and has led to the emergence in the last few centuries of a massive (and somewhat shaky) East African empire extending to the Cape. Chinese Xin, a power rivaling Egypt in global influence, extends into central Asia and almost touches Egyptian territory, (a strip of Bactrian territory seperates the two) while across the Atlantic Saxon England-Norway has colonized North America, its various settlements having united in the 19th century to become a great power covering most of N. America. The Xin, the Iberians and the largely Germanized "French" also have contibuted to the American mix.
The Holy Pair (the male and female Pharaoh-Emperors possess equal dignity and authority – sexual equality is the norm) rule from what would be Byzantium in our world. (Alexandria still remains the cultural center of the empire and the seat of this world’s version of the UN, but political power and industrial muscle have moved elsewhere). A version of Christianity exists in this world, although people from OTL are disquieted by the fact that the person nailed to the cross was female. Technology is roughly OTL 1960s, and Pharaoh helps keep the peace with the Power of Ra AKA fusion bombs.
23.) Napoleonic – Napoleonic Earth is dominated by the heirs of Napoleon. The French Empire includes half of Italy, the Rhinelands, Belgium, Piedmont-Savoy, Geneva and England south of the Thames, lots of islands, Guyana (OTL Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana, and a chunk of Brazil) and a chunk of OTL South and SW Africa (alas, ethnically cleansed); more loosely ruled are the self-governing colonies of Canada, Louisiana, and Australia. Africa has been (slowly) decolonized over the last three decades, although French influence remains formidable.
Lesser, but also important states are the Japanese (ruling over Alaska, Korea and Manchuria), the Romanovs (OTL USSR with 1938 western borders plus Sianking/Mongolia, roughly: Poland is a close French ally), the triple monarchy of Brazil-Portugal-Angola, and the Habsburgs, nowadays also a French ally. Other French allies include the Irish, the Napoleonic branch families in Spain, south Italy and Hanover-Westphalia, Greater Bavaria, and the backward but rapidly modernizing Chinese. The US, OTL US east of the Mississippi, is a rich but fairly weak federation, and New England is often making secession-type noises.
Constitutional monarchy is the norm, and the world is fairly liberal and humanistic. The biggest current headache for the House of Napoleon is Palestine – when the Ottoman empire was finally put to sleep, the Holy land seemed too precious a pearl to avoid snatching – but it has now become a terrorism-wracked pain in the neck. Technology is a little ahead of OTL – the French were always big on supporting public education and scientific research – and there are currently international efforts ongoing to colonize Mars and the Moon.
24.) League of Nations – a president Wilson which was a bit smarter in his choice of allies and who had his stroke later managed to get the US into the League of Nations. Hitler narrowly failed to come into power electorally due to the US pressuring other League powers into giving the Germans a break on economics (no hyperinflation), and when he tried to take over by violence was defeated and tried in an international League forum for trying to overthrow a League member. The more muscular LON managed through economic pressures and a certain amount of Showing Off The Fleets to cut short Italian expansion, but in the end it still took a war to get Japan to get out of China. (The naval blockade and resultant famine ended up doing more damage than the nukes ever did, and after the suppression of the left-wing revolution Japan remained a bitterly politically divided nation for decades, slowing its economic growth and return to major power status).
Failure to open the USSR to League arms inspectors led to a total blockade of the USSR after 1943. The largely self-sufficient USSR remained isolated through Stalin’s lifetime (and kept them busy chasing after Red Revolutionaries in China) but after his death the USSR opened up and went rather further in de-Stalinization than it did OTL. (Fortunately, atomic weapons were not developed in this world until the late 50’s, or things could have got a lot uglier). Probably the worst crisis the league has gone through was the “negro crisis” in America, when the bloody repression of violent black protest after the third failure of a Civil Rights bill to pass (in 1972) led to the US being drawn into a confrontation with a League already moving towards broad-scale decolonization. The US made noises about national sovereignty and pulling out of the League, and a sweeping embargo of the US was only avoided by a few votes in 1974: fortunately, President Humphrey managed to split the difference by ramming through a Rights bill in 1975, shortly after (with Soviet and Chinese and Indian support) pushing through a League resolution condemning Portugal and Italy for their sluggishness in moving towards decolonization, and France for indirect “neocolonialism.”
Currently there are seven “major powers” comparable to the OTL Security council dominating the LON: the US, Britain and France and Italy (mostly nowadays due to their ties to other states – colonial rule was phased out in the 70s and 80s), the USSR, (from 1967) Japan (regained first-rank power status 1992) and China (gained status in 2004, after more than three decades of downright alarming economic growth). There is some talk about having Germany join (some also talk about dropping Italy, but it’s not polite to say in public, and inherited tradition is awfully hard to buck).
Africa is a bit of a mess, but less so than OTL: there are several ongoing efforts at political unification and cooperation, perhaps the most successful being the unification of Gabon, OTLs Zaire, and the former French Congo into one state. This was done mostly by coup and military annexation, and the League is starting to get a bit annoyed – it’s only ex-colonials, yes (the European-led League tends to be far more concerned with misbehavior by major and White states rather than what goes on in dinky little African countries), but it’s beginning to set a bad precedent.
25.) Greater Czechoslovakia – in this world the Czechs and the Poles managed to work out a compromise on their border disputes, and did not become enemies: as a result Poland stood by Czechoslovakia in 1938, France was grudgingly forced to join in, and Hitler was toppled. The Second World War was against the USSR in the late 40’s, and the US was never involved.
Unfortunately, Fascism revived. Nowadays an alliance of democracies (Czechs, British Commonwealth, Poles, Ukranians, Indians, and the French) is gingerly feeling its way towards détente with a Fascist block (Italy, China, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Iran, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Argentina, Cuba). Japan and its Asian allies – Thailand, Indonesia, etc. form a neutral, isolationist -if heavily armed - block along with the Low Countries and Scandinavia.
The US is also a bit isolated from world affairs, and rather more leftist than OTL (alas, also rather racist. Segregation is still around, although to be fair the US government spends a fair amount of money on black schools and neighborhoods. But then again, white people had a good deal of time to grow accustomed to the welfare state before it was applied to minorities.) It has no love for the Fascists, but really doesn't think much of the corrupt Imperialism of the "democracies". Government and big business are intertwined in complex ways, and the "giant corporation-jobs for life model" is still the dominant one, although international competitiveness is suffering.
China is suffering from violent rebellion in its western, Muslim territories. Italy rules over a restless Greece, Albania, and Ethiopia. Germany was divided up between the Poles, Czechs, French, British, and an independent Bavarian state: there is some talk now of reassembling the German state, although the Rhinelanders and Greater Hanover are actually fairly content with being respectively part of France and the UK. (Czech Silesia and the Sudeteland, and remain troublesome, as does Poland's Brandenburg Protectorate). Japan rules Korea and Taiwan, as well as a big chunk of Siberia, and has a protectorate over Manchuria. (Manchuria actually largely rules itself: the heir of Pu Yi is a preferable choice to the Chinese Supreme Generalissimo.) Russian managed to grab back lost areas in Central Asia and the South Caucuses while the Third Sino-Japanese War distracted people.
Communism is on the rise again: Russia is plagued by communist movements (Socialism did not fall on its own in this TL, and the younger generation discount stories of the horrors of Stalinism as government propaganda). Burma has broken away from the Commonwealth under a radical leftist new government, Communists lead the struggle against Chinese rule in occupied Indochina, and a very odd Islamicist-Socialist regime rules Afghanistan and spreads wackiness into Tibet and S. Central Asia in the wake of the Russian withdrawal. But the big success story for Communism is Mexican Marxism, which overthrew the pro-fascist Silver Shirts in the late 70’s, and since has gone on to unite all central America in a socialist union. No Stalinists, it is still a fairly repressive one-party state using massive state intervention to modernize the country, but it has made some fairly impressive gains in health, education, etc., and has inspired similar movements from Tibet to the Belgian Congo. It gets along OK with the socialistic US – indeed, the US is the main buyer of Mexican petroleum.
Africa is a mess – communistic revolts, failed attempts by the allied democracies to build true liberal-democratic societies, proxy wars, Fascist puppeteering: about the only bright spot is the fact that South Africa managed to avoid Apartheid and slowly and painfully make its way to a multiracial democracy. Oddly enough, environmentalism is stronger than OTL – Fascism has a certain fascination with nature and the wild, and protection of the wilderness is more valued in Fascist lands than in ever was in the Communist ones OTL. (In spite of mutual hostilities, there is an actual international ban on whale hunting, for instance). Technology is roughly as OTL, although they are ahead in some fields: only recently has the development of a Neutral Sphere super-cavitating submarine able to travel at over 300 knots come to public attention…
26.) Shirazi – a world where Islam was wracked by internal war in the 10th and 11th centuries, the Europeans tried (and failed) to crush Islam in its time of weakness, and the Mongols PWNed all. Nowadays, the most advanced states are in Islamic Iberia and West Africa, the heretical Shirazi Muslims of East Africa and Madagascar, an India rather more Islamicized than it was OTL when the British arrived, and the Chinese. Two Aztec successor states have already come and gone in Mexico, but the now-ancient Inca Empire still holds western South America. Islam (Sunni or Shirazi) is currently undergoing a new intellectual flourishing, similar to OTLs Renaissance, albeit hampered by fewer surviving classical records, but Christian Europe remains politically fragmented, war-torn, and religiously obscurantist and anti-intellectual. Technology is OTL 1700 at best.
The Rus briefly managed to conquer most of Central Europe, but their empire fell messily apart a century ago. Currently, the Iberian and West African Muslims are tentatively starting to explore the New World, stumbled across a few decades ago by Iberian navigators sailing south to trade with the states of the coast of Guinea. As yet they haven’t contacted the higher civilizations of Mesoamerica or the Andes, but expect explosions when they do. Although prosperous, the Muslims of India and the Middle East proper are more intellectually rigid than the African ones, and are less taken with the new intellectual currents. As for the Chinese, they are currently engaged in another effort to push into SE Asia vs. the Vietnamese (and the other nations) again: the new scholarship is rather insistent on the importance of increasing agricultural production, and there is far too much fertile land in SE Asia going unused while N. China is full of half-starved peasants.
27.) Lopez – a world in which Paraguay managed to expand early on at the expense of a more fragmented Brazil and a weak Argentina, and just kept on growing. Today the Paraguayans dominate the entire hemisphere save for neutral Canada, except it’s not really “Paraguay” any more than the Roman Empire was a small Italian city-state. All of Latin America has been incorporated, and the battered remains of the US – defeated in a nuclear conflict in the 1960s, in which 60 million Americans and 14 million Paraguayans perished – are under military occupation, but save for the Mexican “stolen territories” have not been directly incorporated into the Empire – the First Consul is a bit uneasy about the prospects for assimilating the North Americans, who remain convinced of their superiority to the multi-racial Catholic inhabitants of the Imperial Republic of Paraguay. Anglos are encouraged to emigrate from their war-and-rebellion battered land to Canada, the USP (see below), the more densely populated parts of Paraguay (where hopefully they will assimilate), or the European Empire of Kaiser Frederick V.
“Freddie’s” empire is one of the other two big powers of Lopez’s world, along with the Empire of Japan, which controls most of East Asia. None of the three is a particularly lovely place, but German Europe is probably the least God-awful of the three: (biological) racism is passé, the beer is good, and the rule of law – oppressive as the law may be – is usually followed. The Germans are even starting to – slowly, cautiously - to give self-government to their African possessions. (For Germany’s Arab subjects – those sitting on top of large pools of oil, that is – things are…less pleasant).
The Paraguayan Republic is ruled by the First Consul, which somehow always turns out to be a member of the Line of Lopez (currently Antonio VIII, although he’s starting to look a bit shaky). On the positive side, there is virtually no racism, crime is low, the economy prosperous, and there is plenty of opportunity for an ambitious young man. On the negative side, it _is_ a dictatorship, despite the “republican” trappings, the secret police are omnipresent, and the constant propaganda is positively High Stalinist in its fatuity and excess. The 12 million inhabitants of Asuncion are always in the shadow of the 800-foot statue to the first Antonio Lopez, and one can hardly walk a block without tripping over a monument to the glory of the dynasty. It is also a sexist, macho, and xenophobic society (no, not racist – but all foreigners who don’t make the obvious choice of migrating to Paraguay or who say bad things about the Empire on the news are clearly Not Right in the Head).
The less said about the Japanese Empire’s methods for keeping its empire orderly and profitable, the better. It’s not a nice place for anyone, not even its Japanese citizens (The average Japanese woman would commit seppuku out of shame if they produce less than four children for the Empire before menopause, and Japanese men, after their universal four years in the armed forces, are expected to be gainfully employed, married, and fathering sons tout suite, and never failing a opportunity for patriotic enthusiasm).
Although most people in this timeline talk about the three-part division of the world, there are several lesser but not unimportant powers that retain a fair bit of autonomy: the Russian Holy Empire, a fairly brutal (and densely populated) theocracy, the socialist dictatorship of India, the United States of Pacifica (OTL Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and New Guinea: lots of émigrés and a disproportionate nuclear arsenal), and Greater South Africa, the oddball Japanese ally which is actually an ally rather than a puppet state. The atomic arms race has eased a bit in the last couple decades, after the Near Miss of ’89 concentrated minds wonderfully, although the slowed growth of nuclear arsenals just means more secret bio-weapons research.
Bruce
