DBWI: Ottoman and Qing collapse

Dolan

Banned
It seems like the Germans are even better at laicite than the French are at times. Of course, the Germans adopted this secularism because they wanted to ensure unity between the Catholic South and the Protestant North.
And also the Orthodox Christians in their Balkan possession that they got when they absorbed the falling Austrian Empire and Hungarians trying to reassert their dominance over them. And let's also consider that Poland tried (and failed) to invade Germany twice.
 
"The Exoria" is still a very sensitive topic even today. US-and-British Empire still maintaining that there were systematic forced conversions, expulsions, and mass murder of Greek Orthodox communities through Balkans and Asia Minor. All while Ottomans, Qing, and Germans maintain that those ghastly accusations never actually happened in the first place, and while there were riots in Hellas during early 20th century, they were just the usual riots with casualties in the twenties, not thousands.

Trouble in Hellas remains a very common cause of Apocalyptic Nuclear War in many fictions.

Hellas riots of 1910-1930s were largely socialist with Albanian and Armenians every now and then supporting the Greeks of Morea and Thessaly. Not sure if you can count that as ethnic... Sultan Murad VI did try to show more sympathy for Greek culture which made him the most popular Ottoman Sultan... since... first time I guess? And his popularity among the Greeks was 43%... not high but better than Abdulhamid II 17%...
 
Well, that's obviously in response to the Turco-German Alliance, with China after drifting away cozying up to the Alliance for Western Europe instead. Not unlike the Franco-Ottoman alliance centuries ago where differences in things like religion and ideology are set aside in favor of geopolitics.

Not known much but the Ottomans and Qing Dynasties uses their Turkic/Tungusic identity to support their alliance. It seems weird to me but the Altaic friendship they use got some support... even though the Ottoman Dynasty is largely ethnic Circassian and the Qings are Sinicized.
 

Dolan

Banned
Hellas riots of 1910-1930s were largely socialist with Albanian and Armenians every now and then supporting the Greeks of Morea and Thessaly. Not sure if you can count that as ethnic... Sultan Murad VI did try to show more sympathy for Greek culture which made him the most popular Ottoman Sultan... since... first time I guess? And his popularity among the Greeks was 43%... not high but better than Abdulhamid II 17%...
Which almost cost him the Arabs since they deem the Sultan have veered too much into decadence, requiring his son Ibrahim II to publicly denounce his father's 'Hellenistic decadence' to maintain the title of Caliph.

Because face it, Ottoman could actually survive without the Hellas territory (although this will made Konstantiniyye very vulnerable), but they can't keep going on without appeasing the Arabs, which has oil in their territory.

Ottoman Politics is indeed a very hard job of maintaining balance between Secular-Militarist Turks, Religious Arabs, Cosmopolitan Egyptians, and all other minorities, which the Greeks being the most infamous.
 
Japan? Absolutely ridiculous. The island's one of the most resource poor in the world; to even fuel industrial development sooner or later they'd have to fight Britain, France, the Netherlands, or Russia- they wouldn't be stupid enough to pick a fight with powers that great. The Qing did, of course, but China actually had the industry to drive the West from Asia; it's the biggest economy today for a reason. But really, I can't see how Japan ends up anything more than a tributary of Peking- certainly after the Second Sengoku following the Shogun's murder of Emperor Meiji going public I can't see a way. I don't know, it's hard to see a nation where the Shogun has to call the Qing army in at least once a year to save his ass from the Restorationists ever being a great power.

It may seem that way today, but remember that the Edo was a period of remarkable stability that say a Little Divergence in Asia that Edo Japan quite a bit ahead of Qing in the general sophistication of its economy, and the Meji period was, in its infancy, the beginnings of a major period of modernisation.

The trouble in our world was that Japan eventually got caught as a buffer state between the power politics of Qing and the Americans, ultimately precipitating the internal coup by Beijing's preferred man, the Shogun, when the Meji restorationists played their hand too close to the US.

Then the perennial instability that we associate with Japan today became inevitable (which the Qing are unable to resolve, despite repeated interventions that have turned Japan into the longest running quagmire and arguably, black spot, in Chinese foreign policy), and Japan's constant economic trap of boom-and-bust, as gains growth made under normal times are turned apart by conflict.

In another world, Japan may have got the sweet spot between having a well developed early modern economy (arguably the most in Eastern Asia), a lack of any of the internal ethnic conflicts that have cause problems in modernizing elsewhere, and just enough pressures from outside to focus the state on modernisation, but not too much to risk foreign invasion, and its early promise may not have gone to waste.
 
Top