Ok, a few more...
74.) Ellsworth – in which the survival of a pro-Union fanatic in the Civil war and an election with an electoral college – popular vote split led to a showdown between the abolitionist, more radical elements of the Republican Party and the Democrats and the more conservative Republicans in the “uprising of ‘76”. After a bloody three-year struggle between various factions nation-wide, (in which George Custer became the hero which he never quite managed to be OTL)this led to the early establishment of income tax, national healthcare, and civil rights laws – and the expulsion of over a million “rebellious” Irish-Americans and all Chinese-Americans, a crushing of the native American tribes even more thorough than OTL, and laws strictly restricting emigration and naturalization that did not end until the 1960s.
Today the League of Nations, backed by the military force of the US, Soviet Union, and other major powers, maintains order abroad. It’s a more “lefty”, pink-tinted world than OTL, and the US is far more like OTLs western European countries in terms of healthcare, social safety nets, etc. than our version of the US. Thanks to a lot less immigration, it also has perhaps a bit over 2/3 the population of OTL, has rather less people of Polish or Italian descent, less than ½ as many Jews, and is culturally rather blander. It is also an overwhelmingly middle class country with a low level of inequality, relatively low crime rates, and fully integrated Hispanic and black populations only slightly below the average in income. (Native Americans have also been “fully integrated”, or, in their terms, been victims of cultural genocide). The major political parties are Monopolist and Anti-Monopolist, and the economy is more government-controlled than OTL (the state-run railway is doing quite well, thank you – perhaps due to rather less of a superhighway-building effort). The official stance on language has shifted from a previous “majority rules” stance (Spanish-speaking south California, Puerto Rico and W. Texas and New Mexico, English elsewhere) to a broader bilingualism: economic and political ties with Latin America are close.
The USSR is still around, a nation of 335 millions, with the borders of OTL 1938 plus Mongolia, admitted as an SSR in 1948 by a “democratic” vote. Butterflies mean that Stalin never came to power, and the country has slowly evolved into a mixed economy, although it is still a one-party state with rather radical notions re the relationship of the post-colonial world to the more bourgeois countries (it heads a bit of a league/debating society of poorer, more leftist nations, from India to Mexico). The Nervous 60s, with their atom-bomb fears and talk of “preemptive warfare” are long gone, and the USSR is generally tolerated by the US, Europe and China the way most families tolerate the opinionated uncle with Decided Views on the Secret Government. China is capitalist, powerful and more-or-less democratic (if richly corrupt), Korea a Soviet dependency (liberated from Japan in the war of ’53-’54).
The Middle East, in spite of the absence of the state of Israel, is still a mess, as a result of several efforts to forcibly unify the Arabs into one nation - foiled about 50% by the League, and about 50% by Arabs who didn’t want to be incorporated in President X’s Greater Arabia. The League, of course, gets all the blame, although the Egyptians did eventually manage to get Libya, the Sudan, and Tunisia into their “United Arab States.” Then of course there was the Communist revolution in Iran, which almost led to a world war, the Syrian civil war… elsewhere in Asia, Japan, which still rules Taiwan, various Pacific isles, and all of Sakhalin, is a middle-sized power, and is nowadays a strong supporter of a “unified world” – after all, if it had not been for the increasing globalization of the world economy, they never would have been able to recover economically after being kicked off the mainland. India and Pakistan are still united, but the Muslims have been able to extract so many concessions on autonomy that foreign diplomats tend to refer to the place as “Pak-India.”
Europe is not too different from OTL, with generally 1937-ish borders, although Germany has absorbed Austria and Danzig (Germany ended up under a dictatorship in the 30s as OTL, but a more leftist one, and one far less interested in conquering all of Europe). Poland has been forced to cede autonomy to large Ukrainian and Belorussian-inhabited areas, while the Czechoslovakian Republic has simply fallen apart (Yugoslavia, oddly, has held together). There is a European Common Market, but there is no overarching political organization as strong as OTLs European Community, international politics and mutual defense arrangements mostly taking place through the League of Nations, which successfully arranged for international resistance to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, and warned off Japan from further adventurism in China although it took Red Army to get them out of Manchuria).
One European oddity is the Danzig corridor: the Poles, although beaten in the Danzig conflict of ’42, refused to give in on the subject, and rather than drag on a fight that could only be advantageous to the USSR, the League intervened to stop the fighting and give the Corridor to a neutral party that would be bound to respect the extraterritoriality and transit rights of both parties, and which would be disliked equally by both sides: a bunch of Jews, looking for somewhere else to go after being kicked out of Palestine by the British. (This was energetically protested by the Polish Jews, to no avail.) Today, 4.535 million Jews (aside from the Palestinian Jews, they’re mostly from Poland, the Balkans, and the rest of the Middle East) squeeze into 3863 square miles of territory, sharing the space with some 438,000 Poles and 135,000 Germans, creating one of the most densely populated areas in the world – and, Jews being Jews and the area being on the Baltic rather than in the Middle East – a very prosperous one.
The British Empire is gone, in the end undermined on the one hand by Red-supported revolution in their colonies, and on the other hand estranged from its dominions by London’s obsessive determination to hold onto Ireland (the lack of US support for the Irish helped keep England on this suicidal path). India departed by the 50’s, Australia (which had a lot of Irishmen) became a republic, and after a new generation of Irish terrorist made the “bloody fifties”, the massive public protest against a government that seemed to be willing to suspend elections indefinitely led to the Emergency, which led to the General Strike of ’61, which led to the Suppression, which led to the failed military Coup of ’63, and the Queen’s flight to France and the collapse of the government in the same year. After a lot of arrests and some suicides, the new government pulled out of Ireland forthwith, and liquidated the rest of the Empire 1967-1980, holding on to only a few islands and places like Brunei and Guyana.
75.) Carthaginian – unlike the Phoenician world, the Carthaginians here adopted the imperial model of their Roman enemies, and built an empire that lasts till today, although nowadays the People and the Senate are more powerful than the Emperor. The Carthaginian Union includes Africa north of Ethiopia and the jungle kingdoms, the Levant and Anatolia west of Armenia, the Black Sea straits and most of OTL Greece, Italy and Iberia and former Gaul (the northern 2/3 of which were taken from the Hunnic Empire in their last major war, in the 1930s), the Caribbean and South Florida and Madagascar and the eastern half of south America.
Carthage is the greatest power on earth, rivaled only by the Chinese Xin Empire, which rules Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines and splits Indonesia with the Malwa of north India, rules much of the Pacific coasts of the Americas and vassalizes many of the states, not to mention the little states of SE Asia and the Koreans. Only Japan, which rules much of Siberia, has managed to maintain effective independence in East Asia.
Other powers include the Maya, who modernized through centuries of trade with the Carthaginians, and either directly or through puppet regimes rules much of Central and North America (the empire is dispersed in three major chunks: commerce and religion bind the empire together, and the Maya control one of the world’s strongest navies to maintain contact between the Yucatan, the Mississippi valley, and the oil country of Venezuela). Then there are the United Persian Republics (the world’s only Social-Democratic nation), a small power which makes up for it with some rather massive chutzpah, the aforementioned Malwa, and their SE Asian, Indonesian, and East African colonies and satellites, and the Celtic Brittys Republic of Ireland and Britain, and their colonies along the eastern shore of North America, and in South Africa.
Then there is the Holy Hunnic Empire, extending from the Low Countries through Eastern Europe and the Balkans to Central Siberia. It is something of a pest-hole, upper end third world corrupt military dictatorship (the last Holy King was strangled after losing the war in the 1930s), an oddball ethnic mix of Slavs, Turks, Finno-Ungrians and who knows what else, which through an ancient policy of resettlement and population shuffling has created a majority “Hunnic” culture, mostly made up out of whole cloth in the last three centuries. There are some exceptions: the Lithuanians hung on in their marshes and nearly took over the Empire when ¾ of it was devastated by the Horse Gods in the 14th century, and survived their failure to break loose during the last war to join the Empire of Gottsland (Scandinavia and the colder northern bits of Canada) as an autonomous province: the world’s only non-Scandinavian Germanics (survived in the Alps) have a similar arrangement with the Carthaginians.
Lesser states include the Tiahuanaco in the Andes, the large but loose Kongo federation, the Zoroastrian states of central Asia, the Araucanians of Chile and the various dinky states of North Mexico, the Hotinosavvanih Federation inland of the Brittys colonies, the Armenians, the South Indian Kingdoms (allied against Malwa dominance), the Arabs, and the Oyo federation. It is a religiously diverse world, with the Buddha competing with Viracocha and Reformed Kukulhanism in the Americas, Baal is worshipped in Carthage and Ethiopia and west Africa and the Kongo and northern Europe (although very heretically, grumble the high priests), Zoroaster dominates Persia and Arabia and Central Asia and the Malwa lands (there was a _big_ Persian-Indian empire a while back, until it cracked under nomadic invasions) and is a sizeable minority in China, Hinduism hangs on in South India and as a too-large-to-safely-persecute minority in Malwa India, and the Buddha dominates the east. The Huns have their own faith, a particularly bloodthirsty and apocalyptic offshoot of Buddhism: they are also one of the few nations to make a practice of persecuting “heretical” minority faiths, along with the Maya and the Gottslanders.
It is a generally rich and peaceful world, although the Huns are a bit of a worry: they may have fallen too far behind to fight a conventional war against a major power, but they do have nuclear weapons. The Maya, who have long sought to link their northern and southern domains through the conquest of the Mexica-Tarascan alliance, and who see themselves as the natural unifiers of the small, Old Worlder-bullied Native American states, are a more serious problem. They have modernized pretty successfully, and are formidable negotiators and manipulators to boot. There is a UN-equivalent headquartered in Carthage, the name of which can be roughly translated as the “Allegiance of Nations”, but, as usual, the organization has fairly limited powers.
Technology is generally ahead of OTL: there is a tremendous use of solar power, idiot-proof nuclear power, advanced quantum computing, biotech (yes, Mr. Crichton, they _do_ clone prehistoric animals. Not dinosaurs, though) and extensive space exploration (there are manned bases on the Moon, Mars and Europa. There has been a bit of a Chinese/Carthaginian space race since the 1950s, and lately the Maya, the Malwa, and the Japanese have joined in). One side-effect of the more extensive space race is that near-orbital, supersonic passenger transport is an everyday thing. Cars have never really caught on big-time, high-speed rail and trolleys and moving walkways for urban transportation dominating.
Carthage is considerably larger than in Phoenician –world, and does not have any walls. It glitters with innumerable solar collectors, and a vast complex of atomic power plants extends out into the sea, where they desalinate the enormous amounts of water a city of 20 millions needs in a dry climate. The huge statue of Hannibal and elephants is somewhat tacky, but it has an even wider variety of peoples, foods, cultures, etc. than OTL NY, and one shouldn’t miss the world’s largest zoo – now with mammoths and cave bears.
76.) Internationale – in which socialism was rather more successful: after a second and a third world war (no 2. Was socialist nations vs. capitalists, followed in the third round by Luxenburger democratic Reds vs. Trotskyite autocrats – which the democratic side won) some 75% of the world’s population live under legally socialist or communist regimes, varying from a US about as lefty as OTL Sweden, to the rump Soviet Union (well, the one corresponding to ours…there are several states which call themselves “Soviet Union”) which is as autocratic as it was OTL under Brezhnev and has used imported computer tech to create a society planned to the point of Kafkaesque nightmare. Still capitalist powers run from the downright reactionary powers of White Siberia and the Ethiopian Empire to the exceedingly bourgeoisie French Sixth Republic. It is a pretty secular world, with probably a majority of the world’s population describing themselves as agnostic or atheist (admittedly, a lot of “atheists” adhere to some mighty odd superstitions): one of the areas of the world where religion is still strong is the Islamic world (about ½ of which live under Capitalist governments). The Catholic Church has liberalized substantially, and now allows married priests (no women yet, though).
The Fourth Internationale is something of a Marxist UN, and indeed competes with and in some ways is more important than the actual UN-equivalent, the Concord of Nations. The Internationale meets in New Zealand (stodgy old-fashioned Marxists, and remarkably industrially self-sufficient) and given the overblown drama that often accompanies sessions, makes for good television ratings. Germany is divided, with the Soviet Republic of Greater Bavaria having remained separate even after the rest of Germany went socialist. (Doctrinal disputes, alas). Italy is also a first-generation Red state, Benito having stayed true to his Socialist principles, and Mexico is a bit of a mess, the Socialist half having tried to reunite the divided nation by force: nowadays an international peacekeeping force keeps order, while politicians argue to find a formula for reunification that will not squick either side too badly. (Political fragmentation is not rare: most socialist regimes in this world recognize the right of self-determination, and Alaska is an independence capitalist regime).
Colonization ended earlier than OTL, with much of the colonized countries gaining their independence by the early 40s. A current major issue is trying to push and gently or otherwise bully the poorer ex-colonies to make some major necessary adjustment to their economies: socialism has been far more successful at finding a balance between state power, equality, and economic growth than OTL, but that does not mean that finding the right formula for poor, pre-capitalist-in-the-first-place nations is easy to find or apply.
Arguments on how to create a True Socialism continue, but with any war likely to have at least 5 different sides armed with nuclear weapons, things remain fairly cordial. There are strong international regulations on nuclear weapons, and there is much close economic coordination between the majority of Socialist states, in most of which things like housing, education, healthcare, public transportation, etc. have been taken out of the cash economy and made basic rights, and in a majority of which utilities and vital mineral resources are controlled by para-statals: there is even a convertible “socialist currency”, the International Labor Certificate (the use of which is leading to some friction with the Capitalist countries, who often raise arguments about proper conversion rates). Technology is slightly ahead of OTL, with a World Wide Web even more widespread than OTL (only a handful of hard-line Red and extreme conservative states ban internet communications), advanced sustainable agriculture, and some of the best solar-power tech around.
77.) New Empire – diverging initially in a later, rather different, and Napoleon-free round of French Revolutionary wars, it is now a world in which the New British Empire and its Russian, NE Asian, Mexican-central American and Dutch allies hold the line against the Theocratic quadruple threat of the New Caliphate, the Spanish Empire, and a very Christian US. (Fortunately, the Brazilian and Spanish Catholics don’t like the US Protestants, and neither likes the Islamic caliphate: they have a common hatred for the “godless” Empire, but cooperate rather erratically). “The Empire”, as it is now called, moved its capital from London to Bombay in 1964 as economic development and manpower increasingly made India the natural core of the Empire. It includes Canada, the UK, Australia (which includes New Zealand), Fiji, India, N. Borneo/Brunei, Singapore, Hong Kong, various Caribbean isles, the Cape Province, and the Falklands. The kingdom of Hawaii, the republic of South China, and Malaysia are associated states, while Nigeria, Kenya, the Zulu kingdom, and Ethiopia are protectorates. It is a federal state governed by a Parliament with limited powers and much local sovereignty. India is less populous than OTL, having gone through the demographic transition a while back as a result of earlier economic modernization. It also has large (tens of millions) minorities of European, African, Malaysian and Chinese origin. Thanks to the less appealing nature of the increasingly theocratic US as a destination from migration, Canada and Australia got rather more immigrants than OTL and are rather more populous. It doesn’t have too much African territory: what would be the Cameroons and Gambia OTL were traded away for Imperial possession of Portuguese holdings in Asia, and most of Africa south of the Caliphate is part of the French Union. The Empire trades with everyone, no matter how unpleasant they may be.
Its allies include the Netherlands (which includes Belgium) and its descendant states in interior South Africa and colonies in the Caribbean (including Trinidad and Tobago) and Indonesia, which nowadays is increasingly the tail that wags the Dutch dog (there is some talk of moving the capital of the Dutch Empire to Jakarta in the way the British Empire’s capital was moved to Bombay).
Japan, another ally, due to butterflies from a different forced opening, took longer to resolve its traditionalist-modernizer conflict, and never found the right timing to become a big territory-grabber (its colonial annexations were confined to Taiwan) and eventually chose to become a British protectorate as the lesser evil. Later, after Korea and NE China moved towards independence from their Russian “protectorate” in the 1960s, Japan moved to form an economic and military alliance with the new powers, although it retained close ties to the Empire. Today the Northeast Asian Federation of Japan, Greater Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan is an important power in its own right (although the rump Qing state is still a bit backwards), and is perhaps even more closely tied to the Empire than the Dutch: it is certain that selling stuff to the Empire is vital for the NAF’s prosperity. Korea, which has a large Christian fundamentalist movement of its own, is a bit worrisome, although they show no signs of planning to desert the Federation and ally themselves with the Americans.
Russia, which did not make the very sharp turn to reaction it did OTL after the Napoleonic invasion, has managed to painfully and slowly make its way to parliamentary democracy and a largely symbolic Czar, although Russian society remains rather conservative and religiously very Orthodox. (The Jews are no longer confined to a Pale, but there is a definite glass ceiling to the advancement of Jews in the Russian Empire). It includes more of Poland than OTL 1914 (Prussia was squished in the Great War of 1910-1915), Xinjiang and Mongolia are part of the Empire, and European Constantinople is a joint Greek-Russian possession. (Finland, however, is still dynastically tied to Sweden). It is a British ally, mainly out of mutual hostility to the Caliphate, but doesn’t really like the British.
The Caliphate originated with the annexation of much of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab lands by the Egyptian Empire after the Great War, but did not become a Caliphate since the previous Supreme MuckaMuck (think the unholy love child of Joe Stalin and Osama Bin Laden) declared himself so in the 90s, and who would disagree? It currently extends from Morocco to Iran and includes the Asian parts of the old Ottoman Empire and much of the Sahel. It is an isolationist state which does not allow any non-Muslim visitors from abroad, and as for getting out again, visiting can be as hazardous as visiting the aformentioned Stalin’s USSR in the 1930s, so not too much is known abroad about its internal affairs. It sponsors Islamic “unificationist” movements in Pakistan, Africa, Afghanistan and Russian Central Asia (with varying degrees of success: most Pakistanis are too Empire loyal, and most Russian Muslims too secular, to have much regard for this, but turmoil in Afghanistan and West Africa keeps a lot of Imperial troops all too busy. Largely unknown to the outside world, the Caliphate has some serious internal problems: the Iranians, of course (Shiites under a Sunni Caliph), but also Maghreb Arabs unhappy with being ruled from Egypt and with different understandings of the Koran, Turks who think Arabs are a bunch of desert rats, and certain radical groups in the Arab peninsula who think the Caliphate is far too “western” and “radical” in all the wrong ways. A regime of positively Stalinist severity keeps on the lid – so far.
The Emperor of Brazil successfully pushed his claim to the Portuguese succession with the aid of his Spanish allies, and therefore rules over not only Lisbon but also the Portuguese territories in Africa. The Emperor has the loyalty of his black subjects, having created an army of slaves to crush his republican enemies at home and giving them freedom in exchange: nowadays black Africans born in Angola and Mozambique have (almost) the same opportunity to rise to the top in the Imperial government as any white native of Brazil or Portugal proper. The Spanish Empire rules over OTL Spanish-speaking South America, southern Italy, Cuba and San Salvador and the Philippines, plus some chunks of Africa and a large slice of China.
The US is not a genuine theocracy like Revival Earth’s USA, but all political candidates need to be vetted by the powerful Ecumenical Councils, so nobody who is not properly Christian and conservative gets to run for office. Prohibition is still in effect, censorship is fierce, non-Christians are not allowed to become citizens (although there is a grandfather provision for those who have been here since those laws went into effect) and the teaching of evolution is illegal. The one partial exception to the dominance of Christianity is the Mormons, which were accepted into the “system” in the 1990s: they were simply too numerous and influential to shut out. On the positive side, this US lacks the racial attitudes of Revival, and racial segregation ended earlier than OTL, with the Black churches nowadays included in the “oversight” process.
The Great War, in which the North Italian-Ottoman-Prussian-Austrian (Austria in this TL the senior partner) alliance was trounced by the Russian-French-British-Egyptian one, led to the disintegration of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, the loss of 20% of Prussia’s territory, and a Collectivist revolution in Italy, the brutal putting down of which leaving fissures in Italian political society that last until today. The French Union, plagued with Caliphate-sponsored Islamic terrorism, is struggling to convert its empire into a federal union on the model of the Empire, and is pursuing a policy of heavily armed neutrality. The South German federation, Prussia, Austria-Bohemia, and Saxony have rejoined into a loose economic/mutual defense alliance, but the Russians and the French aren’t standing for anything closer.
China, divided into British-protected greater Canton in the south, a Qing remnant allied to Korea and Japan in the north, French, Spanish and Brazilian colonial possessions in the middle, and a couple of semi-independent warlords in the deep interior, dreams of reunification. (The latest unification talks between those arrogant, stick-up-their-ass-conservative, Mandarin-speaking, ruled-by-Mongols/pushy, un-Chinese, Cantonese-babbling, British-ass-kissing Imperials/Republicans have, strangely, broken down again).
Technology is roughly OTL, and all the major powers have ICBMs and nuclear weapons. People worry quite a bit about what the Caliphate might do some day. (And the Caliph worries about what those Christians might get up to).
Bruce