Down the Parallel Road: An Afsharid Persia Timeline

[Nassirisimo]

Achille MacNamare; European Warfare in the 19th Century

The German War of 1828
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The Battle of Wallau demonstrated the effectiveness of the French army. Due in part to the conflict in Java, as well as the attention given to improvement by the general staff, the French army had maintained its edge, and had seen off an attempt by the Germans to hold them. For the German 1st army, which was now significantly under strength, the French victory seemed to make their position holding Frankfurt as untenable. Von Weber’s pleas to the Frankfurt Parliament was now seriously listened to, and on the day following the Battle of Wallau, it was decided to temporarily relocate the government to Brunswick. This would put the parliament out of reach of the French, and would give Germany time to reinforce its armies and work out a system of government that integrated the existing states efficiently.


Von Weber fought a holding action against the French on the first day of the Battle of Frankfurt, but retreated his exhausted forces by night. Here, the French field Marshal Devaux was faced with a quandary. Intelligence had indicated that Frankfurt itself was held by a corps-strength force of German regulars, and any pursuit of the 1st German Army would likely leave his forces exposed. If he left a corps behind to cover the city whilst chasing after the 1st German Army, there was a chance that both forces would be insufficient for the task. Ultimately, the matter was decided by King Henri, who had now joined his forces in France. He was willing to wager that the capture of Frankfurt would deal a death-blow to the new German state, and force a rethink on the parts of the traditional monarchies. So it was that Von Weber and the 1st Army were allowed to pull back to Giessen, where they would be much closer to the gathering 2nd army.


The second and third days of the Battle of Frankfurt were marked by bloody street fighting, with French soldiers having to go door to door to clear out the German defenders. Contrary to previous intelligence, rather than a corps of German regulars, the city was defended only by “Landsturm” irregulars and a handful of Landwehr. Untrained as they were, the urban environment allowed them to mount an impressive defence, and it wasn’t until the second day of the assault on the city itself that the French had extinguished most major opposition. They had taken Frankfurt at the loss of 4,000 dead and wounded, not a huge amount but a startling number considering the relative weakness of their enemies. As the French Flag was hoisted over Frankfurt’s main square, the conflict held in the balance.


The German Parliament, now on their way to Brunswick, refused to surrender, and vowed to raise more troops and push the French out. The Austrian forces crossed into Bavaria, vowing to push the French back to their own borders, and now even the British requested that the French pulled back to their borders and allow British mediation in the conflict. For Henri, this was an outrage. French opinion had been fearful of Britain’s advance in North Africa, fearing that Algeria would be used as a base to harass the south of France. Now she feared that Britain too was joining a conspiracy to build a threat on France’s Eastern Front. Henri ordered a letter to be written to the British King, stating that France would undertake action east of the Rhine until such time that she could be assured that there would be no threat to her own safety. When presented with this reply, the British government now took a strongly pro-war stance, and the new British Prime Minister pressed the king for a declaration of war against France, which was issued on the 2nd of November, 1828. It was now likely that in the new year, a British Expeditionary force would make its way to Hannover.


Following the British Declaration of War, time was of the essence for the French. Von Weber’s surviving force of 45,000 had now been augmented to around 63,000. There were another 86,000 troops under the control of the German parliament in Kassel now. The German Kings had assembled another army of 71,000 in Dresden, which was now marching to Hesse, and this would be added to an Austrian force of 170,000. If the British were able to land in the North and combine with the Hanoverian force, it could number some 54,000. Overall, this would give the anti-French coalition some 444,000 men. This would be enough to crush any number of men that the French would be able to raise, and could be more easily reinforced than the French army. To Devaux, it was his worst nightmare, and he moved quickly to strike at the divided armies to give France a better chance in the coming year. Devaux now ordered the 2nd French army to move into Hannover to oppose the British and prevent them from joining the German armies near Kassel. He ordered a 3rd French army to be created from forces covering the Italian and Spanish borders and sent to Germany. Combined, his forces would be some 319,000 strong, impressive, but not enough to withstand the coalition.


So Devaux decided to strike first, despite the onset of winter. In just four days, he marched from Frankfurt to Butzbach, where he inflicted a severe defeat on the forward defence force of the German 1st Army. Surprised and alarmed by the French advance so late in the year, Von Weber made preparations to pull back to Kassel and join the 2nd German army, but just two days after the Battle of Butzbach, the French 1st Army encountered Von Weber’s force at the Battle of Giessen. Although Von Weber’s force’s held the field until Noon, the increasing ferocity of the French attacks eventually told, and Devaux broke his centre at 12:25. Von Weber attempted to buy some time for a retreat with the Hessian Lifeguards, but these too were broken shortly after 13:30, and much of the 1st German Army was captured in an attempted retreat. With virtually the whole army killed, wounded and captured, Devaux had improved France’s odds by quite some margin. By February 1829, France’s 312,000 men faced 382,000 Germans. These were odds with which France could win with.

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Frederick Cregan; A History of Modern Europe

Italy's Reaction to the German War​

Asti’s position had been much shaken by the events of the Venetian Revolution. Whereas prior to the Revolution, he had been seen as a progressive and anti-Austrian figure by many in Italy, he was now seen as a coward in the face of fierce Austrian resistance. The Piedmontese middle classes, who had sang his praises in 1827, now considered him to be a bulwark against progress in 1828. As the Austrians now turned to face the French in Germany, the calls in Piedmont to lead a national effort against the Austrians and establish a unified Italian Kingdom now grew stronger and stronger. On the 23rd of October, the crisis was exacerbated by the death of the Piedmontese king and the accession of Charles Emmanuel to the throne. Charles Emmanuel was suspicious of Asti and his influence over Piedmontese state and society. In light of the chaos in Europe, Charles Emmanuel also believed that to some extent, caution could be thrown into the wind, and a unified Italian state could be established.


One of Charles Emmanuel’s first acts after his coronation was the mobilization of the Piedmontese army. The Piedmontese stated that they were doing this as a defensive action in light of the war in Germany, though in reality the Piedmontese planned to push the Austrians out of Venetia, and annex the Northern Italian states. Asti quickly found himself outmanoeuvred, with the crown using popular sentiment to outflank Asti. Reluctantly, Asti threw his lot in with the Italian Nationalists, and agreed to serve as Prime Minister in the new government. By the end of December, Piedmont had around 50,000 regulars mobilized, as well as thousands of volunteer soldiers. Facing 30,000 Austrians in Venetia, there was a good chance that the Sardinian forces could make some headway. The hope of the Sardinians was that by the time the war in Germany ended, the Austrians would be exhausted, and would be forced to accept the facts on the ground.


Thus, when Charles Emmanuel joined the “Army of Liberation” in Mantua, hopes were high. The Sardinian forces, as well as volunteers from further afield, marched off towards Venetia singing Italian Nationalist anthems and confident of their ability to win in the struggle ahead. This optimism seemed to be justified at the victorious battles of Verona, Montagnana and Martellago. The remaining Austrian forces pulled back at the strength of the Sardinian onslaught. Declaring victory, Charles Emmanuel left most of his forces in Venetia, and took a detachment of two divisions to force the annexations of Parma, Tuscany and Modena, all of whom were facing enormous pro-Sardinian uprisings. On the 1st of May, Charles Emmanuel officially proclaimed the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy. The army was enlarged and a liberal constitution promulgated. With events in Germany taking a turn for the worst for the Austrians, it appeared as though Italy’s day had finally arrived.

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Author's Notes - Back from my travels, just about getting into the swing of things and recovering form Jet Lag...

The odds are beginning to improve for France as her unity of command may prove to be her greatest advantage in the conflict. If she can prevent her opponents from uniting against her, she may win a great triumph after all in the conflict.

Piedmont in its characteristic manner has decided to try and profit from the distraction of Austria, and if France prevails in the conflict, may put Italy on the earlier road to unification. Picking a fight with a much larger state, no matter how distracted, may prove to be an enormous risk though.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Achille MacNamare; European Warfare in the 19th Century

The war in 1829 and the Battle of Regensburg​

With the French Victories in the winter of 1828, Devaux and the French had bought themselves some breathing room. The French now planned their next moves, despite their inferior forces. Devaux and King Henri both argued that it were the large foreign powers that needed to be taken out of the picture rather than the German Parliament. Henri believed that without the British and the Austrians, the German kings could be persuaded to turn against the revolutionaries in exchange for a French retreat across the Rhine. This would not only allow the French to cut the increasingly costly war short, but would convert the German kings and princes into allies against the rising force of German nationalism. Devaux thus planned the campaign of 1829 with political considerations as paramount. As Giuseppe Savona would later note approvingly, the French remembered the lesson that “War is only to be fought only with clear political objectives in mind”.


The First French army was to thrust into Hannover, defeating the British and cutting Germany off by sea from the rest of the world. From there, it could offer support to the Danes who were dealing with a low-level German insurgency of their own in the Duchies of Holstein and Schleswig. Meanwhile, the Second and Third armies would have the task of dispatching the Austrian army, now camped near Munich. In doing this, they would also have to prevent the Germans and the Austrians from joining forces. It would be a difficult juggling act, and some more cautious French commanders dismissed Devaux’s plan as foolhardy. Yet Devaux knew that another year of war would be hugely costly to the French treasury, and would drive France’s national debt dangerously high. Finance dictated the risky strategy.


In the North, the British under the Earl of Warwick had landed with an expeditionary force of 57,000 men. They had found themselves augmented by a force of around 40,000 Germans, some Hanoverian Landsturm and others regulars of the German Army who had escaped the desperate Battles in Hesse. Warwick, a talented defensive commander, managed to fight the French First Army to a draw at the Battle of Göttingen, inflicting 12,000 casualties on the French for around 8,000 of his own. He retreated in good order to Hanover, allowing the French to lick their wounds before pursuing him. Meanwhile, the remaining forces of the Germans and the Austrians agreed to meet at the town of Bayreuth, combining forces and pushing the French back. French military intelligence caught wind of this, and were determined to prevent the two from meeting.


The French reached Bayreuth before the Austrians, forcing the Germans to retreat. Rather than split his forces to chase the Germans, Devaux left a corps in Bayreuth to head off any attempt by the Germans to aid the Austrians, and took the other two armies to confront the Austrians. The Austrian Commander, the Archduke Franz Karl, was still a relatively inexperienced general. Nevertheless, he was aware of the French plan. Both the French and Austrian armies were comprised of slightly under 180,000 men, though Franz Karl was aware that his forces were inexperienced, and nervous at the prospect of facing the supposedly invincible French army. He knew that his only hope of victory would be to strike at each French army separately, allowing his superior numbers to tell against the two French armies individually.


The Austrians decided to stop marching at Regensburg. Here, the Austrian army decided to entrench themselves, build barricades and ramparts. They were determined to stop any French attack dead in its tracks. In the space of two weeks, the Austrians built defences in and around the town of Regensburg whilst resting, and the French force marched their way from Bayreuth to the vicinity of the Austrian army. The French armies were divided, the Second Army positioned near the village of Lappersdorf, two and a half kilometres from Regensburg, and the Third Army having crossed the Danube at Donaustauf and making its way towards Barbing. However, Devaux was not aware of how far away the Third army was from its objective, and launched his attack at around 5:00 on the 30th of June.


The first objective of the French Second army was a hill to the North West of Regensburg, which was heavily defended by Austrians. French Chasseurs cleared isolated bands of Austrian Grenzer from the hamlet of Kareth, before launching an assault on the main hill. The initial skirmishes seemed promising, and the Austrian positions on the hill seemed weak. However, Franz Karl sent reinforcements to the hill, assured that the French Third army was far away and seeing the opportunity to give the French a bruising. By 7:00, the Austrians had two hold army corps on the hill, ready to absorb an attack by the French. Devaux sent MacNeil to prove the left of the Austrian position, but found that the defences there were strong. MacNeil was beaten back by an Austrian “wall of lead”, which lead Devaux to conclude that the right was denuded of forces. However, a probing attack was held, and the Austrians launched a counter-attack that savaged the French. By 10:00, the French had made little progress, and the confidence of the Austrian forces was now buoyed.


At 10:45, Devaux rallied his forces and now attempted to blast the Austrians off the hill with his powerful artillery. The Austrians attempted to respond with counter-battery fire, but after half an hour of an artillery duel the Austrians were forced to give way. However, the initial French assault on the hill was beaten off by the retreating Austrians. Despite this, by 11:35 the French had captured the hill, giving them a clear view of the city of Regensburg. Devaux was now determined to hold the Austrians in Regensburg, allowing the Third Army to cut off any retreat and press the Austrians from the South. He sent in Bernadotte to assault the town, with his die-hard veterans of the Java campaign. These men, having survived the rigours of guerrilla warfare in the jungle, were held to be some of France’s best soldiers. However, their attack was bogged down, and attempts to reinforce them were blown back by fierce Austrian artillery fire.


This stalemate continued until 15:00, when the first skirmishers of the Third French Army appeared to the East of the Austrians. Franz Karl’s Grenzers held them off initially, but sooner the army was looming, and Franz Karl was faced with an enormous dilemma. Retreating from Regensburg would be an enormous blow to the morale of his army, and it was not an entirely safe move, considering the tactical mobility of the French armies. However, staying in Regensburg would mean being surrounded by the French, and very possibly defeat. At 16:10, the decision was made to retreat. However, this appeared to be too late, and the “Java Soldiers” of Bernadotte broke into the main part of the town. The Austrian forces in the city were now in disarray, attempting to put up resistance wherever possible, and streaming out of the town.


Franz Karl attempted to rally the men, but was now troubled by the Third Army pressing on his flank. It appeared as if it would smash into the Austrian army, which was now in disarray. Franz Karl decided to launch one of the most famed manoeuvres of the war to save his army, the “Great Charge” of Regensburg. His largely untouched cavalry reserves were gathered, and thrown at the unsuspecting French Third Army. In a war where cavalry forces had hitherto been relegated to a secondary role, the initial success of the charge, and the decisive role that it played in allowing much of the Austrian Army to retreat was noted by all military observers in Europe at the time. In particular, the Hungarian Hussars acquitted themselves well, gaining a reputation as some of Europe’s most excellent cavalry. Although only half of the Austrian cavalry force managed to escape the battle, they had ensured that Austria had lost only 34,000 casualties dead, wounded and captured at Regensburg. The French had suffered a similar number, and were in no condition to chase after the Austrians.


The Battle of Regensburg had been France’s best chance to destroy the Austrians as a fighting force, and she had failed. The Archduke Franz Karl had made his reputation as the man who fought France’s best and survived to tell the tale. However, the French war effort seemed to take a turn for the better once again when the main British army had been forced to surrender at Celle. Henri now saw an opening to end the war before it became a quagmire. He invited emissaries from Britain, Austria, Saxony, Prussia and Bavaria (though notably not Hesse) to Paris for a conference intended to settle the issues which had provoked the war in the first place. By the end of August, the Paris Conference was ready to proceed.

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Frederick Cregan; A History of Modern Europe

Piedmont's Last Hurrah?​

In the October of 1829, Italy was a sullen place. The revolutions of the previous year which looked set to deliver a unified Italian nation state in the north had given way to a foreboding amongst many of the peoples of North Italy. The Piedmontese had unified the North following revolutions in the previous year, though this new enlarged kingdom was riven by regional tensions, as well as a brewing conflict between the Conservatives, now led by Asti, and the National Liberals. Following the peace treaty between France and Austria, which omitted any reference to the situation in Italy, the Conservatives had become increasingly worried about the prospects of an Austrian intervention to restore the Ancien Regime governments in North Italy. They were well aware that Piedmont lacked the military might to take on the Austrians, though some of the National Liberals saw hope with a policy of “National Mobilization”.


However, the idea of “National Mobilization” had less traction amongst the peasants who made up the vast majority of Italian society. Most were resentful at the higher taxes that had come alongside the imposition of Piedmontese rule, and saw little beneficial impact in other areas of their lives. It wasn’t to say that they would love positively on the re-imposition of the old order, but there were few on the lower rung of society who were willing to sacrifice themselves for nationalistic ideals. Without the support of the peasantry, it seemed that there was little chance for the Piedmontese to hold their newly-won territories against the Austrian counter-revolution. Even the enlarged Piedmontese army of 89,000 would struggle against an Austrian army that would likely be twice its size. Asti, aware of the incoming Austrian counter-revolution, put out secret peace feelers to Vienna, promising a withdrawal from all territories beyond Sardinia’s 1827 borders. However, when these secret communications were discovered, Asti was disgraced, and exiled by the King.


With Asti out of the picture, the more liberal Charles Emmanuel now prepared for a showdown with the Austrians. A call for volunteers went out, attracting around 10,000 more men to the army. He attempted in vain to secure French help, and he even supported other budding nationalist movements within Austria itself such as the Hungarians and the Czechs. However, these movements were of a very limited scale at these points, and the vast majority remained loyal as the Austrian army began massing at Gorizia. With no help coming from outside, the course of the campaign seemed to be a foregone conclusion. The capable Austrians under Franz Karl were able to hammer the numerically inferior Sardinians out of Venetia. Efforts at securing a ceasefire floundered, and the Austrians pushed ahead, forcing the Sardinians to make a last stand at Milan. In a catastrophic battle that lasted for two days, the Sardinian army was smashed to pieces and the new king Charles Emmanuel was killed in the fighting.


With its army smashed and its homeland now open to Austrian forces, the Sardinian government surrendered to the Austrians after merely two months of fighting. The life’s work of Asti had seemingly been ruined, as Sardinia barely preserved her independence and territorial integrity following the war. Eventually, it was French pressure more than anything that preserved some semblance of Sardinian power, but it seemed as though she had been smashed and would struggle to play an independent role on the Italian peninsula. In Italy, not only had the forces of National Liberalism been defeated, but the victory of Conservatism was so comprehensive that it seemed Nationalism was a dead letter in the country.

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Author's Notes - The war has been won and France's continental hegemony has been defended. However, the question for France is how long she can keep nationalism down in Germany. Were German nationalists to unleash themselves again when France was tied up elsewhere, it is possible that they could establish a German state before France could crush it in the cradle. For now, the German question is closed by the potential lies ready to rise again.

In Italy, Italian Nationalism appears like a spent force, but a martyr can always be a powerful rallying symbol. Again, the question is how long Austria can expend her energies suppressing the national ambitions of Italians. Another book which seems closed but could burst open in the future.

This is the last update of the current cycle! Next update comes with an overview and that pretty world map I've been promising you all.

 

[Nassirisimo]

The Age of Revolutions​

Had 1829 been a false start in Europe? Devaux and King Henri had managed to wring a great victory against the scattered forces of a coalition assembled to thwart French hegemony in Western Europe. However, the French forces had hammered those of the Germans, the Austrians and the British, dissolving the Frankfurt Parliament and leaving Germany as a “no man’s land”, an enormous buffer that would protect France’s eastern flank and leave her free to concentrate on overseas expansion. However, though armies had been easy for France to dispatch, this was not true of the ideas that had led to the convening of the German Parliament in the first place. The sense of powerlessness and resentment in Germany began to grow ever stronger, as educated Germans asked themselves why their country should be the battleground of Europe, always involved in war but never as a serious player. At least among the educated, the regional identities that had dominated for centuries began to weaken as the inevitable answer to “The German Question” became, at least for the Germans, National Union.


The Great King Henri, who had expanded France’s borders, vanquished her enemies and given her unparalleled prosperity had seemingly provided her the key to permanent security. This was the consolation which eased his worsening condition as cancer began to eat away at his body at an early age. His heir Louis was known as an uninspired wastrel, though it was felt by many that the French “ship of state” as it were was such a sturdy one that it could survive even the worst captain at the helm. This contrasted with the perilous position of Austria. Chased out of Germany and overshadowed by the two great continental colossi, France and Russia, Austria seemed to have her purpose ripped away from her. The ruling class of Austria now had to find a new role for her, but also had to contend with the growth of nationalism among the different peoples of the Empire as Hungarians, Czechs and others all questioned why they must be ruled by Germans.


While Europe reeled from the impact of new national ideas, much of the rest of the world was beginning to feel the first small waves of modernity. India and much of the East Indies had both come under the dominion of the English and French respectively, though vast swathes of Asia still saw little to no European influence. Japan still maintained its policy of Sakoku, determined to keep “Barbarians” out, while the Chinese only opened the southern port of Canton to the Europeans, wary of giving them too much influence. Nevertheless, as European interest in these nations grew alongside their power in the region, it seemed only a matter of time that the nations of East Asia would be forced to adjust themselves to meet the challenges that Europe and Modernity presented. How East Asia would meet the challenge however, was yet to be seen.


In South East Asia, the chaos that had marked the end of the 18th century had given rise to a new, seemingly stable order based around three major kingdoms, Burma, Siam and Vietnam. As these nations consolidated themselves and refined their administrations, the smaller kingdoms that surrounded them such as Kedah, Cambodia and Vientiane feared for their own independence. Vietnamese and Siamese agents jockeyed for influence at the Cambodian court, and the Sultan of Kedah attempted to make the most of his marginal resources to maintain his independence, though as Siam consolidated, would Kedah’s great strides be enough to stave off its far more powerful neighbour forever? And what of European influence in the region, previously confined only to the islands of the East Indies but now making itself felt through merchants and adventurers. What effects would the growth of European power in the region have?


And what of the Muslim world? First the superior of the West, then its rival, now seemed if anything its inferior cousin. Once the terror of Europe, the Ottoman Empire had been battered by its neighbours for a century, and was reduced from a continent-spanning Empire to the Balkans and Anatolia, threatened by its neighbours to every side. And yet, the seeds for renewal had been sown, and the Ottoman Empire frantically modernised to meet the challenges it faced. The same could not be said for Persia, once hopeful to be the leader of the Muslim world but now wracked by growing internal troubles and the aggressiveness of the Russians to the north. Islamic India had become nothing more than buffer kingdoms, fought over by the British and their Hindu and Sikh neighbours. Could the growing Sahelian Kingdom of the Fulani peoples be a source of renewal for the Islamic world however? Only time could tell.


The New World was in the process of separating itself from the Old at least politically, though many of the same ideological and economic currents could be found in both. The Anglophone colonies of North America had separated, divided by the question of slavery which seemed to be at the route of the social and political differences between Allegheny and Columbia, the Northern and Southern Nations. The French colonies still remained linked to the home country, though especially in Quebec, the opinion that they should go the way of England and Spain’s colonies was an increasingly popular one. And in Latin America, the newly independent nations remained wracked by internal divisions as Centralists clashed with Unionists, Conservatives with Liberals and Mestizos with Natives.


On top of these other changes, those of the Industrial Revolution seemed poised to make the greatest difference in the long run, as technologies such as the railroad and the steamship shortened distances, while all a manner of machines threatened to make hand-powered industries obsolete. It would be this revolution that would power the economic growth that would make some parts of the world dominant. The 19th century was well and truly underway, and promised to transform the world like no other century before it.

The world in 1829​

 

[Nassirisimo]

In the Shadows of the Shahs: Persia in the Islamic Period to the Modern Day

The Early Reign of Tahmasp​

Tahmasp had almost had the throne hoisted upon him at the tender age of 16 following the assassination of his older brother Hassan, who had died without any male children despite possessing an enormous harem. In contrast to his brash, but unintelligent and weak brother, Tahmasp was noted for being a rather quiet, even subdued young boy. He showed great promise in his studies, but had trouble asserting himself even as a royal prince. Not expecting to rule, he spent his adolescent years in further study, learning how to speak French as well as Persian, Arabic, Turkish and Urdu. When officers involved in Abbas’ assassination came to him and announced his succession to the throne, he was said to have been speechless for a whole day afterward. This was a Shah who was certainly not born to rule.


Following his coronation, he took up residence in the city of Isfahan, and set to work on the “Firman Isfahan” or the Edict of Isfahan. While not resembling the constitutions of France and Sardinia-Piedmont in Europe, this document may well have been inspired by some of the ideas articulated in them. It promised that Persia would be ruled in accordance with the best interests of the Persian people, and that the Persian government would be reformed to eliminate corruption and work in the best interests of the people. These were lofty ideas, but were not backed by any kind of representative body. The Shah was confirmed as the ultimate interpreters of the people’s will. Perhaps more startlingly, although the document confirmed the Shah as the Amir-ul-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful), there was no reference made to the powerful ulema, who saw themselves as snubbed by the new direction that Tahmasp seemed to be heading towards.


Tahmasp had been brought to power by the support of the army, who viewed his natural tendency to avoid conflict as a way to ensure their own positions in Persian society. Indeed, Tahmasp in the first years of his reign avoided any kind of attempt to impede on the status quo within the army, confirming his brother’s murderers in their positions. His first attempt at reform came with a rationalisation of Persia’s tax system, ensuring that all land in Persia had a registered owner who would be liable to pay tax assessed by the bureaucracy, and paid directly to the Persian government rather than to regional governors. Making governors dependent on their incomes on the Shah reinforced the centralisation of the country already guaranteed by the military, and gave the Shah more power to spend the government’s income as he pleased. This would aid him greatly in the rest of his reform efforts.


However, the reforms generated much in the way of resentment among sections of the Persian population. The Ulema went as far as to condemn the Firman Isfahan, with both Sunni and Shia scholars joining forces to condemn what they saw as the overreach of the Shah. Although he had not gone as far as the Ottoman Sultan in imposing a Civil Law Code on the country and abrogating the Sharia, there were fears that he would eventually do so. The Firman also left the Waqf alone, though Shia Waqf were now liable to pay a levy, as were holdings by the Armenian Church. For now, those affiliated with the state-supported Jafari’ Madhab of Sunni Islam were exempt from any kind of payment to the government, though suspicions were raised. While not too similar to the contemporary secular reforms of the Ottomans, the spirit of the Firman Isfahan began to split the religious establishment to a much greater degree than before, whilst winding down some state support for some religious foundations.


Also alienated were groups such as the nomads, and non-Persians. Despite the Turkic Afshar origins of Tahmasp, he renewed efforts both to reduce the size and influence of the tribes in Persian society, as well as to reinforce efforts in the Civil Service to make Persian the sole language in use. By the 1840s, the Lur language, which had been spoken by hundreds of thousands of Lur tribesmen in the Zagros Mountains only a hundred years previously, was by the 1850s reduced to a few thousand speakers, the language and culture of whom were documented by the Italian Orientalist, Francesco Rossi. Similarly, Turkomen tribes in Persia such as the Qajar and Afshar groups found themselves integrated either with their Persian-speaking or Azeri-speaking neighbours. Many of the tribal peoples remaining maintained a strong resentment against the Shah for turning his back on the people who had brought his family to power (the Afsharid Dynasty took its name from its Afshar Tribe). However, with the ascendency of the musket in Persian warfare, there was little that tribal powers could do to challenge the Shah.


A more serious challenge to the Shah’s power came from the Persian Military. Unlike the civilian arm of the Persian government, minorities such as the Afghans, Uzbeks and Kurds were well represented in the army. Sher Ali Khan, who famously lost the Battle of Malatya against the Ottomans in 1848 was an Afghan, and his replacement who fought a holding action a few days was an Uzbek. While some resentment was created in Tahmasp’s attempts to “Persianise” the bureaucracy, more was created in his seemingly neglectful conduct towards the Persian military. Following the defeat at the hands of the Russians in the 1820s, but picking up momentum following the unsuccessful war against the Ottomans, there was a growing movement within the Persian court to pay more attention toward the enlargement and modernization of the military. The military itself had not grown much since the days of Reza Shah, despite the fact that Persia’s population had doubled. Tahmasp had dedicated some funds toward the military, but this was only enough to modernize its equipment, not to increase it to the size needed to protect Persia.


By the 1850s, the Shah’s negligence in military matters was now being criticised outside of the court too. The reformist advisor adviser turned rabble-rouser Mohsin Ali al-Hamdani wrote a tract warning of the danger posed by European powers, who were flexing their muscles in India, and who Hamdani felt would soon turn their attention to the Middle East. The Shah was still powerful enough to ward off criticism from these elements, but the fact that the emerging Persian civil society seemed to be aligning against him was a worrying auger for the future.


In the end, it would not be events in Persia that avoided the seemingly impending coup-de-tat, but events in India. As a great crisis brewed in the subcontinent, Persia’s eyes once again turned to the East…

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A True Civil Society? Social Change in Persia in the Early 19th Century​

It has often been argued that one of the factors that contributed to the success of certain Western countries in the 18th and 19th centuries was their possession of what would come to be known as “Civil Society”, people and institutions which form opinion independently of government. A contentious point of Persianists and Historians was whether or not the changes which affected Persian society in the early 19th century constituted the emergence of a civil society. Certainly, the nature of Persian society had been changing greatly at this point, as the population had been increasing since the establishment of the Afsharid Dynasty. As in other areas of the world such as Europe and China, the adoption of New World Crops as well as more refined agricultural techniques enabled Persia’s population to explode, reaching a high point of 36 million in 1850.


Persia had long had a record of urbanization and great cities, though the rate of urbanization in Afsharid Persia exceeded that even of Safavid Persia. Isfahan possessed 750,000 inhabitants in 1850, with numerous other cities growing to large seizes as well. Persia had around 7 cities with a population higher than 100,000, a rate which compared favourably to many parts of the world, including a number of European countries. However, Persia’s cities were not as prosperous, and for those unable to find work in manufacturing, life was precarious, and many depended on the charity of richer inhabitants as well as the ulema. Especially as Central Asia became settled with Persians, the cities filled up with the former inhabitants of the countryside, unable to find land and now unable to find work in the cities.


These people, who the reformed al-Hamdani referred to as the “Great Unfortunates”, found seasonal work and attempted to live as best they could with the proceeds. However, living conditions were appalling, as the French visitor Richard Lefergey noted.

I found houses of mud-brick, scarsely sufficient for a family of eight, housing as many as five or six families of eight or more. Any kind of privacy was impossible in these conditions, as families often shared rooms, making the caged life for women found in the Persian upper classes impossible for these wretched people. The situation for their health is beyond belief, as the only facility for sanitation is a latrine shared with many other houses, which flows into an open sewer. I had never experienced before this kind of deprivation, even in the worst slums of Manchester and Liverpool.

Although Persia as a whole was fairly prosperous and secure, the living conditions for those at the bottom were arguably worse than any seen in Persian history. Beyond the efforts of private charity, there were some tracts published which suggested that something needed to be done for these unfortunates.


Issues such as these led to a growing consciousness in society that was marked by the publication of the first non-government newspaper in Isfahan in 1844. The paper, named Ettela'at or “Information”, proved to be something of a success, so much so that by the time of its closing in 1848, it had an estimated circulation of around 5000. It reported on an array of international events as well as happenings in Persia. It’s criticism of the government, especially in the wake of the Perso-Ottoman War however earned it the ire of Tahmasp, and the newspaper was closed down in 1848. The editor, Abbas Ali Sabouri, was exiled to Syria, where he founded a periodical with a more philosophical bent, al-Nadha (the Renaissance). However, the Persian government could not keep a lid on the spread of the press, and it is estimated that by 1851, underground newspapers and journals had a circulation of around 30,000 throughout Persia, a not-too-insignificant number.


Do these developments mark the development of a civil society? Certainly it seems as though a kind of common consciousness had been established by the 1850s. Among literate Iranian society, criticism of the government, as well as concern for others in society beyond religious obligations were all present. Although political parties were still in the future, there appeared to be a split of government loyalists and those who wanted deeper and more meaningful reform. The conflict Loyalists and Reformists would certainly make its mark following the Indian War.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - The first waves of the modern world are lapping Persia's shores. Life for many Persians is if anything getting worse, and the successive losses are starting to erode the prestige of the Afsharid Dynasty. Change is taking place within Persia, but it is not fast enough to keep pace with the change of the world around it, though it remains to be seen whether Persian efforts abroad may enable it to gain the resources needed to modernize.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Mark Huntington; Studies in Indian History - An Anthology

The Indian Wars​

In the 1840s, India seemed to move ever closer toward a great explosion of violence. The British, through their successful war against Bengal, had established themselves as the most powerful player in India, though she was by no means the hegemon yet. The Sikh Empire was perhaps the greatest challenge the British faced on the subcontinent, and the threat that it posed became more pronounced following a treaty which allowed for closer ties with France. In a bid to prevent total British domination, the French supplied the Khalsa with its weapons, and sent officers to train the army. However, internally the Sikh Empire was entering a period of greater tensions as the Maharaja Balveer Singh shut off many government offices to Hindus and Muslims, attempting to make the Empire a fully Sikh-run polity. This produced enormous resentment among the Hindus and Muslims (who together made up the overwhelming majority of the population), but also among court factions who argued that a more inclusive Empire would be in a better position to resist the British.


However, the spark for the Indian War came not from inside one of the strongest powers of India, but from perhaps one of the weakest. The Mughal Empire had once dominated the subcontinent, but by 1851 had been reduced to Delhi and some of its surrounding environs. The new Mughal Emperor, who still retained a great amount of prestige among the subcontinents Muslims, assumed that his time was limited as either the Sikh Empire or the British would seize the prize of Delhi for themselves. The route to internal development and self-strengthening was blocked by over-mighty nobles who dominated much of what remained of the Empire, the Emperor embarked on a dangerous scheme which seemed to offer the only escape route. In 1850, he sent a handful of envoys to Isfahan to secure a promise of protection from the Persian Shah. Tahmasp, a figure who had an almost pathological fear of conflict due to the traumas of the Russian and Ottoman Wars, attempted to resist the envoy’s references to Nader Shah’s treaty with the Mughal Emperor. In the end however, the decision was not made by Tahmasp.


It was made instead by Humayun Abdali. Humayun was widely regarded as perhaps Persia’s greatest general since Nader Shah. He had prevented the destruction of the Persian army in the Ottoman War, and had handily defeated a rebellion on the part of his fellow Afghans subsequent to the war. The Shah had appointed him as the leader of Persia’s eastern army, but his fame had grown across Persia. By 1851, it was suspected on the part of the Shah that Humayun had given some encouragement to critics of the Shah, and there was worry in the court over whether he was in a position to launch a coup-de-tat. Evidence that he was planning a coup has not been found, though any plans that he could have had were shelved when he was approached by the rejected envoys. They offered him a prize too tempting to reject, that of carving out his own empire in India. They promised sanction from the Mughal Emperor to rule his own corner of the Empire as Vizier.


Humayun went over Tahmasp’s head, assembled much of the rest of the Persian army and in the summer of 1851, marched from Jalalabad to Mardan to prepare an invasion of the Sikh Empire, planning to fight his way toward Delhi. When the invasion came, it was swift and decisive, overcoming the resistance of the divided Sikhs. The Khalsa put up a valiant fight, though ultimately Humayun was able to outmanoeuvre Balveer Singh’s army, defeating it at Safdarabad and ultimately killing Balveer at the siege of Lahore. Within four months, the Sikh Empire, one of the great powers of India, had seemingly been crushed. This was a great shock to almost all the powers involved in India. France sent a strongly worded letter of condemnation to the Persian Shah, who was unable to do anything more and shrug his shoulders and attempt to explain the complex situation. The invasion had been launched without Tahmasp’s permission, though he could not openly condemn Humayun for fear that he would turn his army on Isfahan.


The British were understandably nervous that the Persian army could work its way to Bengal, wresting it from Britain’s grasp. This would remove Britain’s hegemonic power in the subcontinent, and it was resolved by London that Bengal must be secured at all costs. Britain sent a whole army corps, much of its standing army, to Bengal to assist in the annexation of the rest of Bengal. While some brave resistance was mounted on the part of the remains of the once great Bengali army, the British overcame this ill-coordinated resistance with relative ease and formally annexed the territory. Having secured total control of Bengal, the British now began steeling themselves against the Persians. Armed with modern Howard-Richmond rifled muskets which outranged the outdated Persian muskets twice over, and keeping relatively up to date with the latest doctrines in Europe, the British were cautiously confident about their chances in any conflict with the smoothbore armed Persians. They would not initiate any conflict, but they would stand ready to meet any challenge.


The Persian army entered Delhi on the 6th of December, 1851. Rather than engage in the looting and violence that Nader Shah’s army had engaged in over a hundred years ago, they were welcomed by the populace. Humayun made a proper show of submission to the Mughal Emperor, who granted him governorship of the Punjab. News of the Persian arrival in Dehli, and the formal re-annexation of the Punjab to the Mughal Empire shook the rest of India. Across India, talk quickly turned to speculation over the next move of the Persians. The Marathas mobilised their army, and the British deployed their forces to receive any Persian attack. India stood on the edge of an enormous conflagration as a wave of rebellions on the part of Muslims swept India from the Bengal to Mysore. The Marathas were barely holding on in the wave of the determined assaults, though the British were able to hold the line.


Buoyed by the news, and hopeful to restore control in other parts of India that were formally Mughal, the Emperor and Humayun now plotted the conquest of the Bengal, which would deliver India’s richest region into their hands, securing the Mughal Empire once again. Humayun’s one time advisor, Mohsin al-Hamdani, alleged that ultimately Humayun plotted to seize the Bengal and the rest of Empire for himself, establishing a powerful new state capable of driving off the Europeans and securing Islam in India. There was certainly precedent in both Iranian and Indian History, with figures such as Nader Shah and Sher Shah Suri overthrowing, or at least attempting to overthrow, the previous dynasties. However, for now, Humayun played the part of the loyal general to the Mughals, and readied an enormous Persian-Mughal army of almost 200,000 against the British in Bengal.


Against this colossal force, the British would barely be able to muster half the amount, a mix of Sepoys and British troops. The British purposely avoided using Muslim troops in Bengal, viewing them as too politically unreliable. Instead, the Sepoys deployed in Bengal under Charles Renton were nearly entirely Hindu and Christian, and were even more afraid of the incoming army as the British were. The invasion began in earnest in the fierce summer heat of 1852, and the combined Muslim army won an early victory at Bhagalpur. A British Sepoy brigade attempted to hold the city against 30,000 Muslim troops. It was not an easy victory for the Muslims despite the fact they outnumbered the Sepoys 10 to 1. The British rifles and rifled artillery wreaked havoc on the unprepared Muslims. Captain Jamshed Masood, a Mughal officer, described it thusly.

The withering fire of the infidel troops began to hit us at ranges we had previously thought impossible. The whizzing of bullets around us built up into a storm, and we ran forward to close the distance with our assailants. However, many of us fell before we were able to scramble for cover. Our formations were broken, and we prevailed in the end only with the application of our crushingly superior force. However, from my company almost a quarter of the men were slain in what should have been a quick and painless action.


Ultimately the Persian and Mughal armies lost 4300 soldiers at Bhagalpur. Most of the Sepoys had escaped the capture of the city, meaning that military gains from the action were limited. However, Humayun ignored this, proudly announcing that he had captured the gate to Bengal. The Persians and Mughals should have attempted to find a way to neutralise the tactics of the British, utilising difficult terrain and cover to get their men in range. Instead, Humayun thought that the proper application of traditional Persian shock tactics which had failed against the Ottomans would carry the day for the Muslim armies. The follow of this line of thinking would be brutally exposed at the Battle of Malda, in which the disciplined riflemen of the British army would destroy the combined Muslim armies in a single day.

* * * * * *

The Second Sikh Empire​

The destruction of the Muslim army and the death of Humayun would only prove to be the beginning of the Indian Wars. The remnants of the army limped back to Delhi to prepare for the British retaliation. After a hard fought war up the Ganges, by 1854 the British had conquered the city and were preparing to march into the Punjab. However, the Sikh Khalsa, once thought to be a destroyed force, had re-established itself in a guerrilla war against the Persians. Their leader, Avtar Singh, now united Punjabis of all faiths against the repressive occupation regime of the Persians. Shortly after the British conquered Delhi, the Sikhs conquered Lahore, and once again re-established the Sikh Empire[1]. This reborn Khalsa used newly acquired rifles to devastating effect, and its officer corps was comprised of Muslims and Hindus as well as Sikhs. Avtar Singh seemed determined to establish an empire in which only competence rather than religious adherence was the path to advancement.


Initial British-Punjabi tensions in the Gangetic Basin later gave way to a peace and general understanding. Initially, British and Punjabi forces had found themselves in a number of stand offs as their forces met. At Kaithal, a skirmish had resulted on casualties on both sides, and reinforced the mutual fear that they felt for each other. Eventually, both British and Sikh leaders resolved to reduce tensions and establish a buffer state in the form of a restored but powerless Mughal Empire. All that was left was to force this understanding on the Persians. The Punjabis now set to work restoring their Empire and indeed, making it a greater force than it once was. Avtar Singh conquered the Sindh by 1858, securing the port of Karachi and enabling the Punjab to trade with much of the rest of the world. Although an agreement had been established with the British so far, there was still a great deal of suspicion toward British intentions, and there was a general desire in the Punjabi court to grow too powerful for the British to absorb easily. By the 1860s, the Punjab was going some way toward this goal, with a growing economy based on the export of agricultural products and a powerful army almost the size of British India’s.


Unlike the rest of India, the Punjab saw little of the communal violence that raged in the 1850s, despite having been the first-hit by the Indian Wars. Avtar Singh and the Sikhs were well aware that they would be vulnerable to the British if communal violence were to break out. Consequently, the revived Sikh Empire continued the policies of tolerance that had marked their governance before the time of Balveer Singh. Economically the Maharajas also went quite some way toward reversing the damage of the Persian invasion, and modernizing areas of the economy. With French support, the first railway line was built in the Punjab in 1860s from Lahore to Amritsar, heralding the spread of the transportation revolution to the country. The growing of cotton as a cash crop was also encouraged by the government, in order to gain the foreign currency needed to buy modern European weaponry. Although there still was little to no industrial growth, there was an improvement overall in the Punjabi economy going into the 1860s.


[1] – The second incarnation of the Sikh Empire is more commonly referred to as the Punjab for a number of reasons that will become evident later on.

* * * * * *​

Although the political map of India remained much the same after the Indian Wars, the subcontinent had undergone a great deal of change in just ten years. The Muslim communities in some areas had almost ceased to exist, following years of communal violence which authorities either struggled to, or wouldn’t put a stop to. In other areas, it had been the Hindus and Christians which had suffered, accused by their Muslim neighbours of plotting to murder the Muslim populations. Ultimately, millions of people had been killed, with millions more displaced in what would be remembered by those who had thought kindly of their neighbours with great sorrow. The Indian Wars was one of the great crucibles of the nineteenth century, making a rich tapestry of peoples, religions and cultures run red with the blood of hatred and recrimination.


* * * * * *

Authors Notes - The Indian Wars, as much as anything else, spell the end to Persia's pretensions at Great Power status. The road to India has been blocked by a state just as strong as Persia's, ruled by a political class far more interested and motivated in modernization. The British are likely only to pick off small parts of Persia and to demand the further opening of the country, which is likely to have huge ramifications. In India itself, the crimes of the Wars will not soon be forgotten, and intercommunal tensions are likely to be even more severe than OTL, unless efforts at reconciliation are made.

This was a bit of a hefty updates, and mistakes may have been made here and there, so corrections are welcome!

 

[Nassirisimo]

In the Shadows of the Shahs: Persia in the Islamic Period to the Modern Day​

The loss of the Persian army in India was nothing short of a catastrophe for the country. While the greatest threat to the Shah had been lost with the army, Persia now found herself at war with Britain and the Punjab with barely more than 40,000 trained men under arms. Tahmasp ordered conscription of a new force, and purchased 50,000 modern rifles from France. However, these would take a long time to be prepared, and Persia was in a desperate strategic situation. The Punjabi army, having reached an agreement with the British, now took the offensive against the Persians. After capturing Mardan and Peshawar, the Punjabis made an attempt on Jalalabad, but found it difficult to sustain offensive operations up the Khyber Pass in the face of resistance from the local Afghans. After numerous failed attempts to storm the city, the remains of the Persian army counter-attacked and pushed the Punjabis back, negotiating a ceasefire in 1856 that returned Peshawar and Mardan to Persian hands.


However, the British would not prove to be easy to face off. Granted some initial respite by the British operations against the Mughals, a British fleet sailed to Hormuz in the winter of 1857, sending the Persian Indian Ocean Fleet to the bottom of the sea with deadly shells that proved all too devastating to the unarmoured and antiquated Persian fleet. The British were then free to launch amphibious raids against important Persian bases in the Persian Gulf, seizing Bahrain, Hormuz and Muscat in 1858. When the city of Bushehr was shelled, it had become obvious to the Persian court that the British could not be defeated by the Persian army. Eventually, Tahmasp had built up the support to request a peace from the British. And while not quite Carthaginian, the peace was harsh. Although the only territory surrendered was Hormuz, Bahrain and Oman, the Persians were forced to give an array of other concessions including a large indemnity, extraterritorial rights for British citizens and barriers toward free trade eliminated.


The Persians accepted the Treaty of Muscat, though it was a tremendous blow to Persian prestige. In every war she had fought with a foreign power in the 19th century so far, she had lost. Decades of Tahmasp’s rule had not been enough to arrest the decline, and discontent was brewing. Conscious that a change of policy was needed, Tahmasp attempted to secure the services of an able Vizier. Two of his choices rejected him, though he found the man he thought he needed in Navid Ali Kermani, a Persian intellectual who had been educated in Paris. Kermani argued that in order to strengthen Persia, as many European ways as possible needed to be adopted. He suggested that Persia attempt to improve relations with France in order to ward off future British and Russian encroachments, while providing the capital and expertise needed to modernise. This approach had been successful for the Ottomans, and Kermani had every reason to be confident that this would have similar results in Persia.


The most conspicuous early dividend that this paid was the French-funded and built railway from Rey to Qazvin. The railway in particular seemed to offer great promise for a country in which transport was a major issue, though to build railways in the rest of Iran would take great investment due to the difficult terrain.

* * * * * *​

Overlooked Philosophers of History - The Strange Tale of Mohsin al-Hamdani​

Mohsin al-Hamdani was born near the city of Hamadan in 1808, the son of a local village mullah. Initially, there was little indication that the boy would do anything other than follow in the footsteps of his father. According the biography written by his later disciple, Ali Sistani, al-Hamdani had become a Hafiz [1] by age 13, and was sent to the city of Hamadan in order to finish his Islamic education. For some years of his adulthood, he stayed in the city as a student of one of Persia’s foremost Jafari’ scholars, Ebrahim Shirazi. Little evidence from this point in his life exists, and if he did produce any writings in this period, they are not known to have survived. By al-Hamdani’s own admission, he kept a low profile, preferring to spend much of his time in the countryside rather than studying. It was a chance event that seen him travel to Syr Darya province in the hope of influence.


However, after some time attempting to help enforce legal reform in the province, he returned back to Hamadan somewhat dispirited. The first surviving writings of al-Hamdani come from this era, mostly comparative religious treatises comparing the writings of previous Jafari’ thinkers, particularly Qasim Khalil, who had played a singularly large role in adapting the thought of Shiism Jafari’ Islam to Sunnism. Although al-Hamdani would later play down his strong support of the Jafari’, possibly in order to appeal to those who followed more mainstream Sunni schools of thought, it is undoubted that at this point he maintained an orthodox religious stance, with an especially strong stance against Shiism which was still popular in some parts of Persia. Even later in life, al-Hamdani characterised the beliefs he held in his youth as those of a “dormant” Muslim, unaware of the deep changes that had happened in the world and convinced that all that was needed for civilization could be found in the revealed religion.


The first encounter that al-Hamdani had with the reformist school was in the “court” of Humayun Abdali, who attempted to assemble a council of learned men for the purpose of a general revival amongst Muslims. However, much of the discourse produced was that looking back onto the past, with Humayun himself taking an interest in the Ghurids, the first Muslims to drive deep into India. Little of what came from Eastern Persia in the 1840s could properly considered to be modernist thought, despite the recognition for the need of reform. Al-Hamdani parted ways with Humayun following the invasion of India, calling a war with the British folly, despite his growing anti-European attitude. Following the Indian Wars, al-Hamdani established himself in Isfahan, publically criticising the close alliance with the French until Shah Tahmasp exiled him. This would begin al-Hamdani’s long period of exile from his native land…

[1] - A Hafiz is one who has fully memorised the Quran.

* * * * * *

Land of the Shifting Sands - A History of the Arabian Peninsula
​

The former Persian governor of Nizwa, an Omani nobleman named Ali al-Hinai, had neglected to commit his forces against the British when Royal Marines landed at Seeb and subsequently captured the city of Muscat. It is unknown how long he had been in contact with British agents, but his treasonous conduct had only come to light after the capture of Muscat. With the Persians assailed on other fronts, there was nothing they could do to stop Ali, and he subsequently signed a treaty with the British that recognised him as the ruler of the whole of Oman, and allowed the British to maintain a garrison and naval base at Muscat. The official British reason was in order to fight pirates operating out of the Persian Gulf, though in actual fact the garrison is what would ensure the loyalty of the supposedly independent Omanis.


Ali was elected as Imam of Oman in 1855, though despite this show of support from the Omani Elite, Ali believed that the foundation of his rule was British support, and following advice from the British Viceroy in India, appointed British civil servants to some of the highest positions in the Omani government. This expertise was needed in part to fill the gap that had been left by Persian administrators. Muscat was the largest city on the Arabian Peninsula by the mid-19th century, with a population of over 60,000 and trade links stretching across the Indian Ocean, and thus educated men were much in demand to help administer the city and its environs. One of the priorities for the new Anglo-Omani government was to improve the food supply. The existing irrigation systems of Oman had been maintained and improved upon by the Persians, yet Oman was far from food sufficient, and the British began to import rice from India into Muscat.


Also a high priority was the suppression of piracy in areas of the Gulf not ruled by the Persians or dominated by the British. The British began to build an Omani army to fight brigandage within Oman itself, and to bring the piratical chieftains of towns such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai to heel. By the 1860s, the Omanis had set up a string of forts stretching from Doha on the Qatari Peninsula to Ras al-Khaimah. The families which had formerly dominated the area were moved to Muscat, and Ibadi mosques were built in the region. Oman’s expansion in the Gulf was not simply an expedition to cut down on piracy, but to expand Oman’s borders and seize more of the pearl-rich seas to boost export incomes. The new Oman, ruled in part by Britain, was very much a commercially-oriented concern, integrated more than ever into the world market and seeking its share of the growing wealth of the world in the 19th century.

* * * * * *

Isfahan, 1861​

The room spun around Abbas Hassani, as he struggled to stay on his feet. Abbas was drunk once again. The patterns on the carpet seemed to meld into a great blur, further contributing to his disorientation, until he could no longer stay conscious.


He awoke slumped in the corner of the room, confronted by a stern face he immediately recognized as his father. Abbas was unsure which was worse, the shame of being seen in such a state by his father another time, or the pain in his head which was almost certainly God’s punishment for his grave sin.

“You are finally awake my son. At times like these, I wish you would never wake”

“Father, I-“

“I do not want to hear anything. No excuses. No lies. You know that this behaviour of yours is wrong, it shames me and most of all it should shame you. I pray to God that you are ashamed”

“I am ashamed father, and I swear to God that it will not happen again”

His father’s eyebrow rose. “You have lied to me so many times it is a wonder that God has not struck you with some great affliction. He will work as he will. Myself, I cannot tolerate this behaviour any longer. Abbas, you are twenty years old and a man. It is high time that you acted like one”

He reached into his pocket, and procured a folded piece of paper. “You will travel alone, you will go to the island of Bahrain, south of Bushehr. There, you will find a man named Khadim, son of Mayouf, and you will give him this. The writing is in Arabic, so I would not tax your inadequate brain trying to understand it, but I ask you that you deliver the message to him unopened. Do not betray my trust again son”


Abbas’ father stood up, and left the room without another word, leaving Abbas to wash the smell of wine from himself and to throw on some clean clothes.

* * * *​

The road to Bushehr from Isfahan is not an easy one. Though there are caravansaries, wells and even trees to shade the traveller from the hot desert sun, the great length of the journey takes its toll even on a seasoned traveller. For Abbas, who had been as far away only as the city of Rey, he might have been on a voyage to the moon. His horse at times came close to buckling under his body, and the money with which his father had supplied him to undertake the trip had mostly run out before he had even reached the city of Shiraz. And he was yet to undertake the journey through the great Zagros Mountains, Persia’s shield against the Gulf and its legendary heat.

* * * *​

Abbas was lucky in that the many he was looking for resided in Bahrain’s capital, Bilad al-Qadeem. A rather shabby place by the standards of Persia, with few buildings of stone and the al-Khamis Mosque, surrounded by mud houses and a sea of date palms. The people of the town were a strange mix of Persian and Indian Merchants, veiled women and bored looking British soldiers patrolling the streets, for this was Britain’s outpost in the Gulf, an eye focused on Persia to ensure that she would never again make mischief for the British in India or anywhere else in the East.


Abbas was directed to one of the larger mud houses, a close distance to the mosque. While not as shabby as some of the outlying houses, Abbas nevertheless felt some aversion to knocking on the door. Could this really be the residence of the recipient of his father’s message? Nevertheless, he had not come this far to abandon his task. He knocked on the door, to be answered by an enormous African. Once he had told him of the message he carried, he was joined by a podgy Bahraini man, around his father’s age. This had to be Khadim Ibn Mayouf. “My boy, you bring word from your father? Please, come in, it is good to meet the son of Yasser”

The man offered Abbas a cushion on the floor next to him, and began speaking in flawless Persian. “Sit here. By God, it must have been a tremendous journey. Your father rarely speaks a kind word about you, but for you to have made it this far, maybe there is something of your ancestors in you my boy”

Abbas was struck dumb, and with nothing to say, reached unto his pocket and gave Khadim the paper. Khadim, who looked surprised, glanced over the paper for a second, before screwing it up and throwing it to the other side of the room.

Abbas looked aghast at Khadim. “I spend months trying to bring you that!”

“You should not have bothered, it is gibberish. It is certainly not Arabic or Persian, and I strongly doubt it is Turkish. He is not in the habit of writing codes, so I would think the paper was a pretext, and you were what your father actually wanted to send to me”

Abbas could barely look Khadim in the eye. “I don’t understand”

“Your father has told me of your drinking. And your womanising. He expected a lot from you, after all, you are his only son. This means a lot. He had sent word a few months ago, telling me to expect you. To turn you into the man that he cannot. My boy, you will be staying with me from now…”

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - The hiatus is now over, and I'll be able to start posting regularly again!

Persian pretensions at being a great power have been well and truly smashed by the Indian Wars. Although certainly damaging to the Persian psyche, this will at least give greater impetus to the reformers in Persian society, though the race is on and it is questionable as to whether they can catch up to the Europeans, especially with Persia's disadvantages. On the flip side, the British have established a firm presence in the Gulf, and will likely use it to ensure that Persia does not fall fully into the French camp.

Abbas will be the first of several characters I'll introduce, all of whom will come to be rather important later.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Gerhard Schneider; Osman's Children - A History of the Ottoman Empire

Progress and Danger - Abdul-Hamid's "New Order"
​

While the reign of Sultan Osman had been a disappointment for many of the reformists, there had still been a considerable amount of progress made. During Osman’s reign, the literacy rate of the Empire had increased from around 2% of people to 10%, still abysmal by Western European standards but a huge improvement on what had previously been the case. The economy had seen signs of growth, boosted by the growth in demand for raw materials in Europe, and the Ottoman Army had been reorganized along European lines. However, the achievements of Sultan Osman could not disguise the further territorial decline of the Empire, which now saw huge swathes of its European Empire become independent states. Although none of the Balkan States in themselves presented existential threats to the Ottoman Empire, their collusion with a larger power, such as Russia, now presented an enormous threat to the Empire.


Osman died in 1833, having advanced the reform project in the Empire significantly but with little benefit to show. Following the disappointments of Osman’s reform attempts, his successor could have been forgiven to listen to the landed elites and ulema of the Empire, and reduce the pace of change. However, Abdul-Hamid was just as determined as his brother to continue with the project of reform. He assembled a European-style cabinet government made of well-educated individuals, and promulgated a kind of “manifesto” for his rule, stating that he wanted to secure arrest the territorial decline of the Empire, continue the path of economic progress and improve the administration of the Empire. However, while Abdul-Hamid envisioned embarking on this path with only the opposition of the traditional elite of the Empire to contend with as his brother had done, the society of the Empire itself had begun to change. The wider provision of education had created people who were able to fulfil the demands presented by administering a modern state, but it had also created people who were familiar with Western ideas such as Parliamentarianism and Secularism.


In 1833, these were not the largest concerns of the Empire however. The army had still been worn out by the conflicts in the Balkans, and its weaknesses shown. Abdul-Hamid invited French instructors into the Empire to further reform the army, and raised loans in Paris and London to enlarge the Ottoman army and navy. Military reform was perhaps the most important issue for Abdul-Hamid, and expanded the officer training school in Constantinople, increasing salaries for officers to encourage the educated to join the army. However, the Ottoman Army remained relatively bereft of NCOs, and relied on the conscription of largely Anatolian peasant youths to fill its ranks. Rather than the motivated armed forces of France, the Ottoman Army was filled with ranks of gaunt looking youths, living under a system of harsh discipline and paid poorly. The Navy fared somewhat better, with modern ships of the line added to ensure naval supremacy in the Black Sea and Aegean.


The army however, outstripped the fiscal resources of the Empire, and became an increasing drain on the Empire’s resources. By 1840, around a quarter of the money for the maintenance of the armed forces came not from taxes, tariffs or other income raised in the Empire, but by loans raised in the money markets of Western Europe. Much of the intelligentsia were vaguely aware of this, and were furthermore aware that this was not sustainable in the long run. The Ottoman inability to balance its security with its limited economic resources appeared to be the issue that would dog the Empire throughout the 1840s. However, Abdul-Hamid appointed as Chief Vizier a man who had previously been the governor of Monastir, a notoriously difficult region. Ali Talat Pasha was a man who had articulated a plan to certain circles which he argued would not only enable the Ottoman Empire to improve its fiscal situation without compromising on security, but restore the prestige of the Ottoman dynasty abroad. Like King Henri of France, he would use limited wars of expansion to bring productive regions into the Empire, humiliate the Empire’s enemies and secure its future.


Ali Talat found a like-minded friend in the War Minister, Mahmud Emin Pasha, who was increasingly aware of a military gap that had developed between the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim neighbours, to the advantage of the Ottomans. Ali Talat convinced Mahmud Emin that a series of short wars with limited objectives would enable the Ottomans to seize rich regions capable of contributing to the treasury, but would also bind the emerging middle classes of the Empire to the Imperial system of government, avoiding the need for representative government as in Europe. Like those Conservatives who hoped to co-opt the “National Liberal” movement in Europe to further the territorial ambitions of the state, Talat and Emin hoped to direct the energies of the Ottoman Empire into expansion rather than political reform. With this blue-print for political success in mind, they began preparing for the first test of the Ottoman Empire, a war with Egypt.


Ruled by the Mamluks, Egypt had done precious little in the way of reform. The countryside was still dominated by absentee Mamluk landowners who spent the meagre profits of the neglected farms on luxuries in Cairo. In contrast to the Ottoman Empire, where European style manufactories were beginning to make their appearance on the shores of the Bosporus, industrial production in Egypt was entirely artisanal in nature. Although the Mamluk Sultanate had achieved success abroad with various military campaigns, the army was still one that resembled the “Old Order” Ottoman army, a mixed bag of infantry armed with heavy, difficult to reload muskets and others armed with swords. Against the “New Order” Ottoman troops, armed with the latest rifled muskets from Europe and trained in modern warfare, they appeared to hopelessly backwards. The danger for the Egyptians was that while the Mamluk Sultan in Cairo was unaware of just how far behind his armies were technologically, the Ottomans were.


The Turco-Egyptian War of 1841 was in some ways watershed in the history of the Middle East. Prior to it, the Ottoman Empire had been a much denuded force, forced back to its Anatolian Heartlands after the disastrous 18th century. It was not taken seriously as a defensive force, though this changed quickly after the initial battles of the war. The Egyptian fortresses at Erzin and Antep were quickly seized by the Ottoman troops, who were able to pick off Egyptian artillerymen with their rifles. The Egyptian general Rashid Bey attempted to mobilize a force at Aleppo, but was forced to retreat to Homs after a disastrous battle at Kafr Naya, which saw a considerable Egyptian army wiped out with comparative easy by a small Ottoman Force. Although Rashid Bey had around 100,000 men available to him compared to the Ottoman force of just half of that figure, his forces were poorly organized. He lost another 5000 with the fall of Ildib, as the Ottomans cut off Rashid at Hamah, before he had the chance to reach Homs. After a failed attempt to break off, the Egyptian army surrendered just three months after the war began.


Operationally, the Ottoman operation had left much to be desired when compared to Western European armies. Ottoman soldiers were poorly provisioned, often going into battle with insufficient ammunition, and reconnaissance still left much to be desired, with the cavalry seeing itself as a shock force waiting for an opportunity that never came to break the enemy. Instead, foreign observers such as the French Guillaume de Beers and the British Joseph Fairfax noted the effectiveness of the Ottoman rifles, which picked apart Egyptian formations from hundreds of meters away, often ensuring the Egyptian armies had few means to respond. However, while Fairfax came to the conclusion that fire-focused tactics were once again taking the fore, Guillaume de Beers noted that the poorly organized and trained Egyptians were not to be compared to European troops, and that a modernized and professional army such as France’s would still be able to carry the offensive on the point of a bayonet. The Ottoman General Staff was more inclined to follow the explanation of Fairfax, who was offered a position to help modernize the Ottoman Army.


The Ottoman Army attempted to digest some of the lessons of the Egyptian war as best it could. However, the army’s attempts to reform itself floundered on the lack of educated men. An attempted reform of the logistical sections of the army seemed to have little effect, though the Ottomans made the wise choice of procuring new bronze rifled artillery from Britain. Emin Pasha felt that this would be needed for an enemy more resolute than the Egyptians, which was an apt description for the Persians. Although they had declined somewhat since the glory days of Nader Shah, the Persian army was still a professional, full-time force which had experience fighting European-style armies. Unlike the Ottoman Army though, the Persians were yet to adopt a modern general staff system, or to procure rifled muskets, preferring to rely on the old-style European muskets that had been adopted with the failure of the Jazayer muskets against the Russians. While large, the Persian army was also ossified and in desperate need of reform.

​

The Turco-Persian War of 1847-1848 was not quite the easy fight that the war against the Egyptians had been. Although the first battles on the border were Ottoman victories, the superior cavalry of the Persians ensured that Persian forces were able to escape with relatively few casualties. However, as the Ottoman army pushed the Persians out of the Badlands of Central Anatolia and onto the plain near Diyarbakir, the superiority of the Ottoman army told. Eventually, both armies faced each other near a dilapidated Persian fortress at Bismil. There, the Ottoman rifled artillery hammered any attempt by the Persians to come to a swords-distance of the Ottoman infantry, who peppered the large but demoralized Persian army with accurate rifle fire. By the end of the day, the Persians had lost almost three times the men that the Ottomans had, and the Persian Commander requested a ceasefire later confirmed by Isfahan. The Ottomans had defeated the Persians and regained some of the honour which had been lost a century before fighting Nader Shah.


The Ottoman victories against Egypt and Persia had restored the lustre of the Ottoman Dynasty in the Muslim World. The land gained by the Ottomans amounted to an additional 1.5 million subjects, all contributing to the Ottoman government rather than to her rivals. The seeming ease with which the Ottomans won the wars not only inspired reformists in other parts of the Muslim world, but generated unease in the small Balkan states bordering the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro had watched the Ottomans win success in Asia with great unease, certain that a revived Ottoman Army would eventually be turned to Europe. All four countries underwent a process of militarization, with the governments in many cases arming brigands and sending them over the border to raid Muslim villages. Protests from the Ottomans to the governments of each country fell on deaf ears, as did attempts to communicate with Russia regarding the raids. Eventually, the Ottomans decided to fight like for like, reforming the Bashibazouks in 1852 and sending them on similar raids against Christian villages over the borders.


This did little to resolve growing tension in the Balkans though, as throughout 1852 and 1853, the raids grew in frequency and intensity. In the last few months of 1853, an estimated 7000 people were killed by both sides in these raids. By 1854, war had broken out in all but name as a low intensity conflict now wracked the Balkans. The Balkan nations did not dare to fully mobilize as they were not confident about their chances of winning an all-out conflict, and the Ottomans were reluctant due to the threat of European intervention. France, the greatest European ally of the Ottomans promised support so long as the Ottomans were not the ones to initiate hostilities. However, following a massive Bulgarian raid on Filibe, the voices in the Ottoman advisory parliament calling for retaliation became too strong to be ignored by the government. The Ottoman government presented a formal request for compensation, as well as the ending of raids to the Bulgarian government, which did not even respond. The Ottomans responded by mobilizing a corps on the Bulgarian border.


Following unsuccessful British attempts to mediate in the conflict, the Ottoman force entered Bulgaria in the July of 1855, capturing a number of towns and strategic mountain passes. Amongst some in Europe the news renewed conflict in the Balkans was not surprising. The Times reported that “Once again, the most backward region of the European continent finds itself embroiled in the blood feud that has persisted since time immemorial”. For the Russians and Austrians however, the threat was more serious. Were the Ottomans to prevail in a conflict, Russian influence in the Balkans would be severely limited, whereas if the Balkan States were to push the Ottomans back, Austria would be surrounded on two fronts by Russia and her allies. Russia now began to put pressure on the Balkan states to create the conditions for a Russian intervention in the conflict, while Austria continued to support British efforts to mediate in the conflict. For now, France kept her cards close to her chest, secretly hoping for the chance to contain Russia but unwilling to push Britain and Russia together.


The diplomatic manoeuvring of the Great Powers achieved little in the end, and the situation was changed when Serbia and Greece launched massive invasions of Ottoman territory. Within weeks, Ottoman garrisons were reeling from the onslaught, and the Sultan called for a general mobilization in the Empire. The Balkan Wars had truly begun in earnest.

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Author's Notes - A bit of a hefty update. The Ottoman Empire's star is rising in the world, but she is still hobbled by her heritage as the "Ghazi State" as increasingly assertive Christians refuse to accept Muslim domination. While only touched upon in the update, Ottoman Civil Society is beginning to come into its own, and amongst the elite of Constantinople, new European ideas are being circulated beyond the narrow interests of the Sultan. In terms of intellectual developments, the Ottomans of the 1850s are decades ahead of those of OTL.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Alois Scheibel; Warfare and Society in 19th Century Europe

The Russian and Ottoman Armies Compared
​

The Ottoman Army had made enormous strides in the years before the Russians became involved in the latest round of the Balkan Wars. Having almost ceased to exist as a force following the Russo-Turkish War of the 1820s the army had re-founded itself with battle-hardened officers. The last remnants of the old Ottoman Army, reliant on the Janissaries and Sipahis among others, were obliterated. Instead, the model of the Ordu-i-Cedid was to prevail despite its limited success holding onto the Balkans. Peasant conscripts, mostly from Anatolia, were to fill the ranks of this new army. Officers were required to be educated to at least an elementary standard, and were tested on the ability to read and write before being commissioned, as were staff officers. With concessions to Ottoman tradition, this new army very much resembled a European army. In respect to its performance it had certainly closed much of the gap with its European neighbours. When unleashed on the neighbours of the Ottoman Empire to the south and east in the 1840s, the reformed army made quick work of the Egyptians and Persians, restoring Ottoman prestige in the region with a number of quick clean victories.


The army’s success brought additional funds. As tensions in the Balkans began to rise in the 1850s, the Ottoman Government was forced to turn to foreign financiers for the first time in the Empire’s history, authorising the first foreign loan. Most of this money went to the Ottoman Army, which was able to increase its number from 137,000 in 1850 to around 215,000 by 1855. This gave her an impressive force by the standards of most European powers, putting her in the company of the great powers rather than the secondary ones. However, it was always questionable as to whether this force could stand up to a Russian army with over 600,000 men at full strength. The Ottomans had rearmed themselves in the 1840s with the French Prevost Rifle, which provided a critical advantage over musket armed opponents, though upon witnessing the success of the rifle against the Persians, the Russians now began producing their own indigenous rifles, a feat which the miniscule industrial capacity of the Ottoman Empire could not hope to accomplish.


However, while the Prevost rifle was a reliable weapon, produced in the great French arms works near Lille, the Russian Kowalski rifle was a problematic weapon. Produced mainly in Moscow and St Petersburg, the rifle differed slightly in each factory. Troops loading rifles produced in Moscow found that bullets designed for the St Petersburg Rifles would not fit, resulting in enormous difficulties for the already creaking Russian logistical system. The French Prevost was also effective to a range of 900 meters, to the 700 meters of the Kowalski rifle. In terms of artillery, both sides used mixed bags of smoothbores and a central core of rifled artillery. In the Russian army, the rifled artillery was mixed in batteries with the smoothbores though the Ottomans kept the rifled artillery in a “grand battery”. The Russian system was somewhat more flexible, though the Ottomans would have the advantage were they able to concentrate their forces.

* * * * * *

The Russo-Turkish War of 1855-56​

“If the Balkan War prior to the intervention of the Russians may be described as a group of ragged bandits fighting the slaves of an Eastern Despot, the war after the Russians joined may best be described as the most poorly-led armies I have seen in my life bludgeoning each other into exhaustion”


This was the verdict of the British General Sir Alfred Smedley on the final Russo-Turkish Wars. Many observers, and subsequently historians, characterised his judgement as excessively harsh. Charles Ney, the leader of the French Expeditionary force noted that both the Russian and Ottoman armies suffered from constraints stemming from their domestic situations as well as the manpower available to them. The Post-War report from the Russian general staff noted that the leadership of the Ottoman Army was much more a mixed bag than is commonly accepted, arguing that “were it not for the excellent leadership displayed by Halil Pasha and his staff at Çatalca, we may well have pushed to the city (Constantinople) and have brought the war to a favourable conclusion”. For their own part, the Ottomans preferred to look at the heroes who had saved their country from total annihilation rather than the commanders who had brought it so close to the brink.


The Turks had initially fought well against the Balkan nations, showing how far their armies had come in the twenty years since the First Balkan Wars had ended. Although suffering a few initial setbacks, the Ottomans won two important victories in a week of each other against the Serbs and Bulgarians. With Sofia occupied and Belgrade threatened however, Russia threatened intervention. Initially believing this to be a bluff, the Ottomans took one of the last major Bulgarian fortresses at Pleven and laid siege to the city of Belgrade. However, the two hundred thousand Russians station in Bessarabia were not a bluff, and promptly swept into the Dobruja, threatening to lunge for Constantinople before the Ottomans had the time to organise a proper defence. However, the Russian General Staff were wary of extending their own supply lines, and instead sent reinforcements to the beleaguered Bulgarians and Serbs. By the August of 1855, the Russians and Bulgarians had retaken Sofia, and Russian forces relieved the siege of Belgrade. On the Northern front, 176,000 Ottomans were arrayed against a combined Russo-Serb-Bulgarian force of roughly 250,000. On the southern front, around 20,000 Ottomans faced a Greek army of similar size.


The decision to make a fighting retreat through the Balkans to set up a defensive perimeter in the vicinity of Adrianople was not one made lightly. It meant giving up lands that the Ottomans had held since the 15th century, an almost unprecedented retreat. However, there were more considerations than merely the psychological. It meant moving masses of troops with insufficient officers hundreds of miles to new positions. The decision was a hard fought one, with army commanders coming to blows with the minister of war, and the Ottoman Grand Vizier coming close to resignation over the decision. However, after months of political bickering, it was decided that in the winter of 1855, the Ottomans would make the unprecedented step of giving up half of their Empire, in the hope of saving the other half.


The retreat was a hard one. The Ottomans faced treacherous conditions in the Balkan Mountains, faced with the harsh winter weather and Bulgarian and Serb guerrilla fighters. At one point, pursuing Russians almost overtook the Ottomans at the Dyulino Pass, but were fought off by Halil Pasha. Tens of thousands of Ottomans fell in what was one of the most audacious retreats in history, though by April 1856 the Ottomans had managed to salvage an army of 163,000 around Adrianople, with around 20,000 conscripts and foreign volunteers on their way. The beginning of the campaign season seemed to go well for the Ottomans, with attempted Russian and Bulgarian attacks fought off at Habibçeova and Alexandroupoli. However, when news arrived that the Serbs had captured Sarajevo, and that they were heading for the Adriatic Coast, morale amongst the Bosniak and Albanians in the army sagged. A Bulgarian force smashed the Ottoman position near Kofçaz, leaving allowing the allied armies to march on Adrianople.


By this point, worry about the advance of the Russians in Paris had turned to panic. French newspapers were filled with indignation and accusations that the Russians were seeking nothing less than hegemony in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Demands for action had gone so far that the Parisian Newspaper -Moniteur Universel- went as far as to advocate co-operation with France’s arch-rivals in Austria to reduce the Russian threat. As the Russians advanced on Adrianople, the French foreign minister sent an ultimatum to Russia that France herself would defend Constantinople were the Russians to advance upon the city. This ultimatum was backed by the deployment of the French Mediterranean fleet to the Sea of Marmara. Attempts on the part of the Russians to bring in the British to counter the French fell on deaf ears, as the British Government had their own fears regarding Russian expansion into the Mediterranean. However, by this point, Russian propaganda predicting the imminent recapture of “The Second Rome” had whipped up the Russian middle classes, and nothing less than the capture of Constantinople would appease domestic opinion.


The first major clash in the “Constantinople Campaign” was the Battle of Adrianople. In the biggest European battle since the Great Eastern War, 153,000 Ottomans clashed with around 217,000 Russians and Bulgarians. On the first day, the Ottoman General Orhan Ali Pasha parried each attempt by Russian forces to outflank his position, using the Ottoman Artillery to counter determined Russian infantry attacks on his own exhausted forces. However, on the second day it was Bulgarian forces once again that showed their worth, breaking through Ottoman defences at the Avaruz redoubt. The majority of the Ottoman army began a headlong retreat eastwards toward Constantinople, while Orhan Ali was trapped in Adrianople with 40,000 troops. Casualties on both sides were upward of 20,000 men, and these were losses which hampered each side. For the allies, this meant irreplaceable manpower losses hundreds of miles away from their supply bases, and for the Ottomans this meant that the very bottom of the barrel was being scraped.


Halil Pasha took control of the remains of the army, and managed to stop the retreat at the Çatalca defensive works. By now, the Russians were within two day’s march of Constantinople, a prospect which greatly excited the Russian troops. As they prepared what appeared to be the last assault on the Ottomans at Çatalca, Russian General Feodor Drubetskoy wrote to the Tsar.

“We are almost on the cusp of liberating the great queen of cities from the grip of the Moslem. In all our previous wars against the Turk, there has never been such a pivotal moment as this. Morale is high among the men, and all appreciate the significance of what they will undertake. This week will be a tremendous triumph for your troops, for your crown, and indeed for Orthodoxy, and I am honoured to be leading your armies in this noble task”.


The telegraph kept both the Tsar and the literate subjects he had up to date with the conduct of the war. However, unfortunately for the Russians, it also kept the French well informed of the progress of the Russians. French General Jean Tissot was sent to Çatalca to liaise with Halil Pasha, and a hasty plan of defence was formed. The 81,000 Ottoman Troops who had escaped Adrianople would be reinforced with 20,000 additional troops, as well as 4000 French Marines. Among these additional troops were volunteers who had responded to the Sultan’s call for Jihad, and had come from as far away as the East Indies. Even other Muslim leaders such as the Sultans from lands such as the Maghreb and Malaya had sent token forces, partly to acquaint their forces with modern warfare but partly to assure Muslim opinion in their own countries. Arrayed against this force were 160,000 Russians, with a few token Bulgarian contributions. The forces were both buoyed by the symbolic significance of the battle, but the Ottomans and French had naval support and the advantage of terrain and defensive works.

* * * * * *

Gerhard Schneider; Osman's Children - A History of the Ottoman Empire

The Aftermath of the Balkan Disaster​

“Of all the great battles in Europe during the 19th century, it was perhaps Çatalca which proved to be the most decisive, not only for Europe but far beyond its borders. The preservation of the Turkish Nation within the European Continent not only had enormous consequences for the states involved, but preserved the embers of enlightenment in Turkey, while providing a check on the feudalists of Europe”

So did the renowned Czech historian Jaroslav Sýkora assess the Battle of Çatalca in his tome of European history in 1908. In his mind, as well as the minds of many others, the battle was an almost mystical battle of good versus evil, of the Russian attempts to build a great religious Empire in the East broken. However, history is never so simple, and this is true especially in the case of Çatalca. Militarily, the Ottomans enjoyed an almost miraculous victory, with the subsequent rout at Çatalca enabling the Ottomans to push the Russians back over a hundred kilometres from Constantinople, leaving Turkey with the borders she holds today.


However, the legacy of the battle, and the subsequent peace brokered by the Austrians at Vienna, were complicated. In Russia, the Tsar was able to temper anger over the failure to capture Constantinople with the enormous gains made by Russia’s allies in the Balkans. Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece had all been greatly enlarged in the conflict, and were indebted to Russia for their territorial growth. The Ottomans on the other hand, although having saved their core territory, had lost enormous swathes of the Balkans, delivering millions of Muslims into the hands of Christian masters and relegating the Ottomans to the ranks of the secondary powers of Europe. While the army for its part managed to redeem its reputation among the Turkish population with its heroic victory at Çatalca, there was little sympathy for the Sultan. The Nationalists felt that the Sultan had risked too much by provoking the Russians, and the Conservatives were furious at the stories of persecution coming from the Balkans. The Sultan was left without much in the way of support, precariously perched between two factions who harboured little affection for him.


As the situation of the Muslim population left behind in the Balkans worsened, the first refugees began pouring into the rest of the Empire as the 1850s drew to a close. Soon the trickle had become a flood, and hundreds of thousands of refugees had entered the Empire, all needing housing, work and food. The population of Constantinople swelled with these migrants, depressing wages and creating something of an economic crisis for the government, which now embarked on the enormous task of resettling the refugees elsewhere in the Empire. With social tensions rising, economic crisis engulfing the Empire and the Sultan increasingly unpopular, it appeared that Çatalca was not enough to unify the Ottoman Empire, and that the clock was ticking for the existing order.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - And so ends the hopes of the Ottoman Empire once again becoming a great power. The Ottomans hold slightly more territory in Europe than they did in 1913 in our own timeline, but still remains smaller than the Empire of our time. Although the Russians have been staved off, the internal divisions in the Ottoman Empire appear to be getting even more severe in the wake of the war. And of course, what of the newly freed Balkans? I will be going into more detail in a later update, but the ethnic and religious conflicts will not cease with the departure of the Ottomans, and much of the bloodshed and recrimination that occurred after the Balkan Wars of our world are likely to happen in this one.

As always, comments/criticisms are very welcome.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Khulood al-Shuwaikh; The Story of the Arab People

Reform and Tension in Egypt​

Egypt’s disastrous war with the Ottomans showed that the world had very much left the Mamluk state behind. Her antiquated armies had been cut to pieces with ease by the Ottomans, who fought largely in the European style. The Egyptian Sultan Adel Ali, now very much fearful of his position, started an ambitious reform programme almost immediately after peace was signed. European experts in all areas of government and society were imported, as Adel Ali recognised that it was the adoption of European ways that had renewed Ottoman strength. Economically, Egypt began changing. The Nile Valley had been famed since the dawn of civilization of a place of great fertility, and French merchants suggested a new use for this agricultural potential. The cash crops which had made unimaginable amounts of wealth in the Americas in the 18th century were already grown in the Middle East, though as Egypt began to open up in the 1840s, it was cotton that quickly became the dominant crop in Egypt. It was a valuable source of foreign currency earnings, which was now necessary to pay for the import of Western arms, machines and expertise.


European culture however proved no less seductive than its technology and institutions. At first, an appreciation for European music, theatre and literature only touched the highest levels of Egyptian society. Egyptian society was still a conservative one, rooted deeply in Islamic tradition but for those with the means, European culture was now increasingly seen not only as desirable, but superior in some aspects. In 1853, the Sultan scandalised traditional society in Cairo by arranging for the famous Danish Opera singer Charlotte Eriksen to give a performance at the new European-style palace built on Gezira Island, which had usurped the Cairo Citadel’s position as the affluent home of the Sultan and noblemen. On the island, a new Cairo emerged, funded by the growing proceeds of the cotton trade and built in a European style, with wide boulevards and magnificent palatial houses forming a stark contrast to old Cairo, with its narrow streets and unassuming exteriors. Such a visible sign of cultural divergence did not go unnoticed by the Ulema of al-Azhar University, who began to warn against mindless imitation of Europeans.


By the beginning of the 1850s, the growing proceeds of the cotton trade were no longer enough to fuel Egypt’s development. Although export income had more than doubled in the 1840s, this was no longer enough to finance Egypt’s development. The coming of the railroad promised to open up the whole of the country economically as well as physically, and construction began on the Suez Canal in 1850. In order to pay for these new developments, capital had to come from elsewhere. Much of the money spent to construct the Suez Canal was raised on the money markets of London and Paris, where bonds for the Canal Company were also sold. The Egyptian government offered investors extraterritorial rights as well as generous tax and tariff structures, and a small community of Europeans began to settle in the cities of Cairo, Alexandria and Rashid. As much as the westernisation of the Mamluk nobility, the European community was considered a danger by the traditionalists of Egypt.


The reaction of the Coptic Christians of Egypt was somewhat more mixed. Many Coptic merchants welcomed the trade opportunities that the Europeans brought with them, and acted as intermediaries between the Muslim Landowners and the European Merchants who came to Alexandria and Rashid to purchase cotton. A number of Copts became extremely wealthy, and many of the great warehouses that dominated to coastlines of the Delta trading ports were owned by Copts. However, while the opportunities for wealth and status that the Europeans brought were welcome, missionary activities on the part of Europeans were seen as a threat by the Coptic Church. During the 1840s, conversions were still few and far between, but with the Evangelical Revival of Non-Conformist Churches of the 1850s, many missionaries went to Egypt as a source of converts. Although prevented from preaching to the Muslim population (in the open, at any rate) they found a number of converts among the Coptic communities. By the end of the 1850s, an estimated 30,000 Copts had converted to a Protestant or Reformed church, out of a Coptic population of around 600,000 overall. Some Coptic popes went as far as to petition the Sultan for a ban on missionary activities.


As the 1860s dawned, Egypt appeared to be entering a brave new world. The Suez Canal was completed in 1861, turning Egypt into a hub for international trade and making her a key strategic point. This brought the overtures of both Britain and France, who maintained colonial Empires in Asia, with both wanting to secure Egypt as an ally. However, one of the tools with which they used to curry favour with the Egyptian Government, loans, proved to be troublesome. Although the Egyptian economy was growing strongly, the growth never matched up to the increasing interest Egypt was paying to service her loans. As well as criticism from the traditionalists, the Egyptian government now began to attract criticism from modernist opposition as well, who argued that Egypt’s development was being mismanaged by the government. There were even voices which argued for a constitutional government, anathema to both the Egyptian Government and the traditionalists, but the idea began to gather momentum in the 1860s in the coffee houses of Cairo.

* * * * * *

North Africa in the Mid 19th Century​

The British occupation of Algeria was the biggest shock to the Muslims of the Maghreb since the fall of al-Andalus many centuries before. Once initial fears of mass conversion and immediate expansion fell away, the rulers of the remaining countries of North Africa now considered how best to avoid the fate of the Bey of Algiers. Although piracy had greatly declined toward the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, some pirates operating from the North African coast had continued to harass the coastal peoples of Europe. Indeed, this had been one of Britain’s justifications for her adventure in Algeria. First the Sultan of Morocco, than the Bey of Tunisia and finally the Bey of Tripoli all banned piracy as well as the slave trade, though not the institution of slavery itself. There was little stomach amongst most for these measures, yet in the face of growing European power there was recognition for its necessity.


As well as reducing sources of friction with European powers, some of the North African rulers attempted to reform their states. A previous attempt at centralization in Morocco around the turn of the 17th century had resulted in some temporary success in strengthening the Sultan, the domination of the tribal peoples of Morocco became marked once Sultan Ismail bin Sharif died. Now with external pressures stronger than ever, the Moroccan Government saw it necessary to bring the tribal peoples to heel and bring a modern administrative system to the country. However, this would be an incredibly difficult task. Without the resource base of Persia and the Ottoman Empire, or the favourable geography of Egypt, the task of the Moroccan government to bring the highlands and valleys of the country under central control would be a costly struggle. Although efforts were made to improve roads and irrigation networks, as well as to foster internal trade, the majority of the efforts of the Sultan were focused on combating unrest and bringing tribal chiefs and village heads to heel.


Morocco and the rest of North Africa began to open itself up to free trade. State Monopolies were gradually abolished during the mid-19th century, opening the door for European manufactures and for the export of grain and minerals such as phosphates to Europe. The growing cities of Europe proved eager for cheap wheat from the Maghreb, though efforts by protectionists to raise prohibitive tariffs on exports hurt the exports of North African countries somewhat. Following the end of the “Grain Tariff War” in 1836 in Britain, the swiftly growing population of the British Isles grew hungry not only for Algerian grain but for foodstuffs from elsewhere in the world. Tunisia in particular made the most of the rise in demand, and its wheat exports grew threefold in the 1840s and 50s, buoyed by the increasing efficiency of agriculture in Tunisia as well as demand without. However, the export success of mineral and agricultural products in North Africa were offset by the destruction of traditional cottage industries in the region, largely due to the success of European manufactures in North Africa, which was much closer than much of the rest of the world to Europe. Cotton goods from Manchester could be produced and shipped at far less cost than those produced in Tunis or Fez. The decline of artisanal producers began to produce an urban class of underemployed who blamed the government and the Europeans for their own misfortune.

* * * * * *

The Decline of Egypt in Arabia​

As Egypt’s grip on its outlying territories began to weaken following the defeat in Syria, once dormant forces in Arabia began to rear their heads again. Although still too weak to challenge the Egyptian garrison at Diriyah, the Saudi family and their Wahhabi allies made their presence felt in some of the outlying oases in Arabia. The one famous exception was their defeat at the hands of the al-Alawis of Ha’il, though by the 1860s this and the Egyptian garrison in Diriyah were the only areas of Central Arabia out of the hands of the al-Saud clan. Less successful were its attempts to subjugate the Banu Khalids in al-Hasa and to stop the expansion of Oman on the rest of the coast of the Gulf. The landlocked status of the Saudi State did not seem to promise great wealth in the future, and it seemed vulnerable to the possibility renewed Egyptian strength in the region which would once again push the Saudis into exile.


In Yemen, the centrifugal forces affecting Egyptian rule were somewhat less disruptive, and there were attempts by the Egyptian administration in the region to accommodate the desires of the Yemenis. The Zayidi Imam of Yemen had been unseated by Egyptian forces, but now his grandson was invited to return and rule under Egyptian supervision, as a concession to the Zayidi population of North Yemen. The Egyptians concentrated on concentrating direct rule on the key ports in Yemen, Aden and Mocha. These were important ports in funnelling many of the luxuries of Asia into the Red Sea and into Egypt, making them valuable sources of income for the Egyptians. Although their importance to the Egyptian economy began to decline as the export of cotton to Europe became ever more important, they maintained a strategic importance as the Suez Canal was built, serving as bases to fight piracy on the Horn of Africa and refuelling stations for ships coming from the Indian Ocean and beyond into Europe. This growth in traffic in the 1860s was fast making Aden a surprisingly cosmopolitan place.


The impact of modern technology was also beginning to make itself felt even in the Hedjaz, the home of the Prophet. The Hashemite Dhawu-'Awn clan ruled the area as they had done for centuries, though with their de jure Egyptian masters increasingly distant and weak. However, the Hashemites remained loyal to the Egyptian Sultan, instead making the first steps toward imposing some kind of modern authority in the region. The steam ship now began to bring pilgrims from further afield to Jeddah, increasing the numbers in the annual Hajj pilgrimage and providing the Hashemites with a slight increase in revenue. Much of the increase went into the creation of militarised police force to protect pilgrims and other inhabitants of the region from the Bedouin, who were loath to recognise any authority and who saw brigandage as their birthright. The 1850s were marked by the increasing efforts of the Hashemites to protect pilgrims against the bandits who had so often targeted those making the sacred journey to Mecca and Medina.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - With the defeat of Egypt at the hands of the Ottomans, and the growth of European influence in the Arab World, change is coming at an ever faster rate. Tensions between the modernisers and the traditionalists in much of the Arab world are likely to play an ever more important role in the politics of the region, though it remains to be seen how Europeans will react to any challenges that they face in the region.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Enver Mehmetoglu; Perfumed Land: South East Asian History Reconsidered

The Development of the Kedahan State​

In the first years of Sabri Naqiyuddin’s rule, Kedah was experiencing a golden age. The depredations of Siamese rule in the Kedah Plain were gradually being forgotten, and a mixture of immigration and natural population growth led to a swift repopulation of the country. In the period of 1828 to 1864, the Kedahan population increased from around 350,000 to 500,000, an increase enabled largely by the opening up of new agricultural land. This gave Kedah an enormous population in comparison to the rest of the Malay States, who had a population of perhaps 700,000 combined. Not only did the population increase, but it became a more urbanised population than had ever been seen on the Peninsula. The number of market towns in Kedah increased to around 57, including towns outside of the Kedah Plain such as Baling, Taiping and Gerik. The growth in Kedahan wealth and power did not go unnoticed by other Malay rulers, and throughout this period to pre-eminence of the Sultan of Johor was gradually supplanted by Kedah. The ability of Kedah to fight off the Siamese and the Bugis was admired by other Malays, though the example of aggressive expansion into Perak was feared by many. The other Sultans of the Malay Peninsula began to send gifts similar to those of the Bunga Mas to the Sultan of Kedah, partly as a show of submission but partly in the hopes that he would extend protection to them.


With an increase in population and influence throughout the Malay Peninsula, came a corresponding increase in trade. The export of traditional cash crops was joined increasingly by tin. Although it was the Kinta river valley in Perak which was to become the great tin mine of the Malay Peninsula, a good number of tin mines were to be found in Kedah as well, particularly around Taiping. Although a number of Malays settled in these mining villages, it was to be the refugees from Java who were to be the main settlers of the mining towns. By 1860, around two thirds of tin miners in Kedah were said to be Javanese or Sundanese, with much of the rest being Chinese. Kedah, relatively unthreatened by Europeans and seemingly capable of defending itself against the encroachment of the Siamese, became an increasingly popular destination for emigrants in the Malay world, as well as a community of Chinese traders keen to gain wealth from the growing economy. It was this as much as anything else which had contributed to the swift growth of Kedah’s population in the preceding century. With the increase of trade within Kedah, the Malay Peninsula and internationally, came an increasing monetisation of the economy. The labour obligation of Malay peasants was now replaced increasingly with cash taxes, pointing toward an increasing sophistication within the Kedahan economy and administration.


This enlarged administration also had the fortunate side effect of producing a number of jobs for the other men of the royal family. Whereas traditionally younger brothers had been a constant source of bother, or even a threat for Malay Sultans, Naqiyuddin made use of his brothers as provincial administrators, usually supervised closely by one of his own men. The growing sophistication of the Kedahan state not only raised the resources available to the Sultan, but also the esteem to which Kedah was held internationally. The Sardinian adventurer and colonial governor Luigi Capra gave the following description of Kedah to the government in Turin.

Kedah is one of the more advanced states of the East Indies not yet under European rule. At its heart is a plain extending some 50 miles lengthwise, extending around 13 miles inland. This is very much the agricultural heart of the Sultanate, though in recent decades I am told that the traditional agricultural basis of the economy has been replaced by tin, which is found in greater quantities than anywhere else in the world in Malaya. The Sultanate is almost completely free of banditry and privateering that seems to pervade in areas such as Perak and Selangor, and while small in stature and affected somewhat by malaria, there does not appear to be a great deal of malnourishment amongst the population as can be seen in other areas.


However, as the 1850s drew to a close, the golden age of Kedah seemed to be increasingly threatened. With the ascension of the ambitious Tribejrutama to the throne of Siam, Kedah’s position appeared ever more precarious. Kedah had not played any part in the great Siamese-Vietnamese War that had resulted in enormous gains for Siam, and Burma was in no condition to check Siamese ambitions. Following the conquest of the Mekong Valley, the Siamese signed a treaty of cooperation with France, bringing a French military mission to Thonburi. With the Siamese army numbering over a hundred thousand men, it was unclear as to how the tiny Kedahan army of 10,000 would be able to fend off Siamese aggression without outside help.

* * * * * *

Malayan Reactions to European Influence​

The growing influence of European powers as the 19th century went on was now increasingly evident. In those states with flourishing plantation economies such as Johor and Aceh, merchants from Europe were now as common as those from China and Oman. The increasing demand for goods such as pepper and tropical woods further stimulated the economies of the regions, and as in Mainland South East Asia, most rulers in the region took some measures to encourage immigration from areas such as China and Java. In the first half of the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese emigrated from their home districts near Guangzhou and made new homes in the Sultanates of the islands. Most of these new arrivals worked on plantations, but others set up merchant networks, and cottage industries. While there had always been Chinese communities in these areas, the Chinese population began to increase by a large margin. In Johor, the Chinese population had reached some 35% of the total by 1860 and was quickly increasing with continued immigration in the wake of political turmoil at home.


As well as a growing commercialisation, the changing world around them presented challenges for the Sultanates of the region. The British had taken Malacca from the Dutch following the Franco-Dutch War to act as an observation post on a crucial shipping lane, and this enterprise soon began to grow with the annexation of Palembang and Jambi. Many of the remaining Sultans began to seek closer ties with European powers to preserve themselves from the depredations of others. Johor concluded a treaty with the Piedmontese in 1834, leasing the island of Singapura as a base for Italian merchants in exchange for military aid and a yearly payment for the island. Unlike many of the other Sultanates, Aceh began to revitalise its traditional links with the Ottoman Empire, especially following the Empire’s victories in the 1840s against her Middle Eastern opponents. The Ottomans were able to use their allies in Aceh to maintain a presence in the Indian Ocean, something which they had not been able to do since the loss of the port of Basrah to Nader Shah.


The social, economic and political fabric of the independent South East Asian Sultanates were all being greatly affected by the forces unleashed in the industrial revolution, even if the smoke stacks were absent from the still-small cities and towns of these Sultanates. The growing economies brought ethnic heterogenization to the Sultanates, while simultaneously boosting the power held by the Sultans as their increased revenues allowed them to undertake more effective action against pirates, recalcitrant chieftains and other bandits. Despite the fears that came with increased Western influence in the region, most states, and a good portion of the people in region actually benefitted from the changes which were wrought in the period.

* * * * * *

Java under the French Yolk​

The French victory in the Javanese War not only secured French rule on the island, but fundamentally changed the nature of the rule. The war had been a costly one for France, leaving her with around 200 million livres in debt, an enormous figure for a colonial war. France was determined to make the Javanese pay for the costs of the war, and instituted a “Régime d'exploitation” in Java. The French instituted heavy taxes an almost all goods with the exception of rice, and developed a bureaucracy to ensure that these taxes were paid and that cash crops were grown. With the introduction of the steam ship, the travel time between the East Indies and France was cut, ensuring that it was more economical to transport goods from one place to the other, which further cemented France’s economic dominance on the island with French exports and imports undercutting those from elsewhere in South East Asia and China. Having paid a high price in blood for her Javanese colony, France was determined to wring as much worth as she could from it.


After the death of King Henri in 1831, the new French government that assumed power along his successor Louis saw the revenues of Java as an excellent way to pay for the conquest of a great overseas empire. More Javanese peasants were forced to grow cash crops for export, and these all met taxes on their way out of Java with much of the money finding its way back to France. This contributed to the general impoverishment of the Javanese peasant, and encouraged a large amount of emigration to areas of the East Indies outside of French rule such as Malaya, Sumatra and Borneo. The Javanese would become the second largest diaspora in South East Asia after the Chinese. Despite the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Javanese during the 19th century, the population of Java began to explode once the Javanese War had ended, increasing from 8 million after the war to around 13 million in 1860. This population growth boosted French revenues but also required the cultivation of ever more land. To achieve this, the French organized corvée labour to slash the jungles of Java, to be replaced by farmland.


Java in the mid-19th century was enjoying an economic boom, as its economy became ever more integrated into that of the world economy, and transportation links throughout the country were improved. However, despite the evident growth in GDP, there is much evidence to suggest that if anything, the condition of the Javanese themselves actually declined somewhat during the period. The Irish medical missionary Sir Charles Lewis noted that the inhabitants of Java seemed somewhat malnourished when compared to those on neighbouring islands. Much of the money made from the burgeoning trade in cash crops went to the French government, or to native land owners who had been co-opted into the colonial system. Inequality rose throughout the island, turning people not only against the French, but against those elites who were cooperating with the French. However, the inhabitants of Java, with the memories of the ferocious Java War still fresh in their minds, were sufficiently cowed for the time being.

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Author's Notes - European is now being felt ever more intensely in the archipelago regions of South East Asia. Java is suffering under French rule, and is becoming something of a cautionary tale to others in the region, who are now going down different avenues to preserve their independence. Kedah appears to be further ahead than most small Malay Sultanates, though her proximity to Siam may prove to be her undoing, and Johor seems to have the better strategic position. Aceh may prove to be an important player too as the British and Italians play a bigger role on the stage.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Empires of the Mind - Philosophy and Ideology in the 19th Century

Liberalism and Secularism in the Muslim World​

As the Muslim state physically closest to Europe, it was no surprise that it would be the Ottoman Empire that would first encounter some of the new philosophical ideas concerning religion that originated in Western Europe. Whereas the Enlightenment of the 18th century had barely had an impact on the largely illiterate Empire of the time, the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century with its reformed education system proved a more receptive ground for new ideas coming from Europe. With the rise of “National Liberalism” in Western Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, the first ideas of a Turkish Nation appeared in the heads of some intellectuals in Constantinople, but they made little impact on the largely traditional society as a whole, which still saw Islam as the basis for the Ottoman State. However, as the first universities came to the Empire and literacy rates rose, an increasing number of people within the Empire, both Christian and Muslim, were exposed to radical ideas emanating from the West.


The idea of the separation of Church and State is still something of a troublesome subject in the Islamic world. While many Muslim thinkers argued that without established religious institutions parallel to the Catholic Church and various state churches in Europe, that the concept was redundant when used in an Islamic context, lesser numbers argued that the concept worked best when understood as a call to break the social power of the ulema, and to weaken the hold of the Sharia on Islamic societies. In the 1840s, their numbers were few, but these early secularists in the Ottoman Empire were gaining ground amongst the educated in Ottoman society. While the punishments for apostates had been quietly dropped in 1849, society as a whole took a very dim view upon those who challenged Islam’s traditional position. There are very few recorded instances of violence in this period, though it was common for the “New Thinkers” to be shunned by traditionalists. Although European ideas of secularism and anti-clericalism had established themselves within the ideological mix of the Empire, they appeared to be peripheral at best, limited to intellectuals who were increasingly isolated from the mainstream of Ottoman Society.


However, the “New Thinkers” were becoming more numerous in one key section of society. The Ottoman Army had made the education of its officers a greater priority from the 1820s onward, with all officers required to be literate in a decree in 1839. A surprising number of senior Ottoman officers had received a secondary education, still a rarity in the mid-19th century. As well as improving the efficiency of the Ottoman Officer Corps, the education of the officers made them more open than the general population to the ideas of the “New Thinkers”. In the army that was still thought of as the “Sword of Islam”, a startling number of officers had open sympathy with secular ideas. However, these ideas were still not common enough to lead to disobedience when the Sultan called for a Jihad, or Holy War against the Russians during the Russo-Turkish War. While prior to the war, some in the officer corps wanted to move away from an emphasis on religion in government, following the great wave of patriotism stemming from the victory at Çatalca ideological differences between the army and the government as a whole seemed to wane.


However, as the Sultan’s unpopularity began to mount following the economic troubles of the 1860s, the army now more than ever seemed to take a different stand to that of the government. In 1862, the Sultan had reportedly mulled over a purging of the officer corps to remove independently minded generals with those more loyal to the Sultan. He was reportedly dissuaded when warned that the disloyalty of the army was such that it could not be guaranteed that a purging of the ranks would not be met by mutinous action on the part of the army. This was a watershed moment in the history of the Empire, and marks the first time since the assassination of Osman II that there was a serious threat to the Sultan from his own army. In the Ottoman Empire, the rise of secularism and similar ideologies only seemed to add to the many divisions within Ottoman society.


The only other Islamic societies in which secularism was present in the ideological landscape were Persia and Egypt, the only Islamic States with ties strong enough to Europe for secularist modes of thought to be introduced, and populations large enough for an intellectual class of sufficient size to exist. In smaller nations such as Tunisia or Morocco, this trend would not appear until later on in the 19th century. However, unlike the Ottoman Empire in which the various stresses and strains encouraged the propagation of secularist thought as well as a general suspicion of the Ulema, those who identified as secularists remained a minority in Persia and Egypt, and did experience something in the way of discrimination in both societies. This was particularly true in Persia, where the Ulema remained a highly organized strata of society, a holdover from the days when Persia had been a Shia country in the Safavid era.


The political power of secularists was limited in these pre-democratic societies. Whereas the Ottoman Empire had a sufficient representation of secularists in the educated sphere to ensure some representation in government, especially in the army, this was not the case especially in Persia. As such, those who openly criticised existing religious authorities were likely to face discrimination or worse. Perhaps the only avowedly secular and possibly atheist Persian of his time, Ruhollah Kasra, was famously jailed after condemning escalating intercommunal violence in “Kafiristan”, the region now known as Kalashestan. No other voices were raised when the local government used Pashtun militias motivated by religious fervour to attack the pagan people of the region and forcibly convert them to Islam in the 1860s, and the very public defence of the “unbelievers” of the region went quite some way towards leaving the impression upon mainstream Persian society that secularists were simply the sympathisers of unbelievers, and quite possibly unbelievers themselves. However, in Egypt, where intercommunal violence was far less marked, secularism was seen as an ideology that would allow for the coexistence of the Muslim community and the sizeable Coptic Christian community.

* * * * * *

Muslim Reactions to the loss of Political Pre-Eminence
​

For much of the Eastern half of the Islamic world, the middle of the 19th century was a time of an adjustment to a strange new reality. Whereas previously, few Muslims had been ruled by non-Muslim rulers, and generally Islamic states were among the most vigorous in the region, this had swiftly changed in the closing years of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. In Java, the most populous Islamic land of the East Indies, the relatively light hand of the Dutch was replaced by the French, who imposed direct rule on the whole island and went some way toward suppressing organized Islam on the island. With the possibilities for the political articulation of Islam largely taken away, the Muslims of Java began to look at the reform of the personal practice of their religion, and many syncretic practices were now abandoned as a version of the religion that more closely resembled that practiced in the rest of the Islamic world took a hold. Clothing changed to cover more of the body of both males and females, and the veneration of Hindu gods largely disappeared with the exception of isolated rural areas. This standardisation of Islamic practice mirrored what had already taken place in the more maritime areas of Islamic South East Asia.


In India, the previously powerful Muslim community was sidelined following the Indian Wars, which saw much of the subcontinent divided by the Sikh ruled Punjab and the British Raj. Although the Muslims were able to draw concessions from the British when it came to missionary activity aimed at the Muslim community, the Muslims of India remained politically weak and increasingly economically deprived. The Muslims of India began to embrace a reformist school which was named the Rohtaki movement, which advocated a purification of belief and practice and a non-interference of politics. The movement benefited from relative toleration on the part of both the British and Punjabi authorities, which saw the movement as a bulwark against schools of thought which advocated for a more muscular role for the Muslim community in India. Elsewhere in lands where Muslims were a minority, there began to be a gradual articulation toward an anti-Western and in some respects, an anti-Christian line of thought. In China, the Hui Muslims gave their support to the anti-missionary White Turban movement, and were rewarded with relatively preferential treatment under the Wu Dynasty.

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Author's Notes - Just a short update to give a bit of flavour to the Muslim world. Next update we'll have a look at South East Asia and the developments going on there, before moving on with the rest of the world.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Enver Mehmetoglu; Perfumed Land: South East Asian History Reconsidered

The End of Burma's Golden Age​

By the end of the 18th century, Burma had reached its apogee and had become perhaps the most powerful state in South East Asia. Not only had it defeated its Siamese rival by sacking Ayutthaya, but it had expanded to the west, exploiting chaos in India to seize the rich city of Chittagong. The wealth and security provided by these conquests allowed both the strengthening of administration within the Irrawaddy Basin, as well as the expansion of Burma’s army. Burma appeared invulnerable to any challenges from her neighbours, and even from the expansion of Europeans. When the British signed a treaty with the king of Burma in 1812 agreeing on a border between Burma and British-ruled India, it appeared as if Burma’s great gains to the west were now recognised and protected forever more.


However, this was misleading. Although the ethnic enemies of the Burmans in the core of the Burmese Empire, the Mon and Shan, were increasingly marginalised and subdued, the same could not be said of the Bengali population of Chittagong. The Burmese had always had a troublesome relationship with their Muslim subjects, and with the annexation of millions of Muslim subjects in Chittagong, the tensions between the Buddhist and Muslim populations of the Empire began to rise. Throughout the early 19th century, the Buddhist Burmese struggled to impose a second class existence on the Muslims of Chittagong, often resorting to brute force to any unrest. The King Myingyan attempted to improve relations between the Buddhists and Muslims, even going so far as to give royal grants to mosques, and bestowing lands on Islamic Waqf. Throughout his twenty year reign, it appeared as if Burma was going some way toward reducing the tensions within the Empire and if not integrating, than pacifying the Muslim population. However, with Myingyan’s death in 1854, the old policies of repression returned, and the Burmese soon found themselves handling an open revolt led by Mahmud Akhter, the self-styled “Emir of Chittagong”.


Although the Burmese were able to push back the rebels in some areas, it became increasingly difficult as the Bengalis resorted to guerrilla tactics. Even to the hard-line Burmese King Kyangin, it became apparent that Burmese hopes to hold a population equal to that of the Burman population of the empire in thrall were unworkable, and a negotiated peace saw Mahmoud Akhter confirmed as the Emir of Chittagong, independent of Burma. While Chittagong did not appear to be too significant of a territory when looking at a map, the population of Chittagong Province was around 4 million, or over a third of Burma’s population as a whole. This represented a huge loss of trade and tax income, as well as a blow to Burmese prestige. Now the other subject peoples of the Empire, particularly the Karen and the Shan, attempted to throw off the yolk of the Burmans. Although by the 1860s these rebellions had been put down, Burma’s previously preeminent position in South East Asia had disappeared, and she was faced with a resurgent Siam on her southern border. With European influence in the region growing, the increasingly divided and threatened Burma did not seem to be in a promising position for the future.

* * * * * *

The Rise of Modern Siam​

With the death of the King Sumate in 1832, the Siamese throne was occupied by his eldest son Suphanthuwong. Unlike his father, Suphanthuwong was a cautious ruler who was more interested in internal development than the conquest of outlying areas. He had fought the Cambodians and Vietnamese in the war, and had developed a strong aversion to violence. Thus, he chose not to war with the Burmese or the Vietnamese, and even decided not to punish Kedah for her expulsion of a Siamese garrison during the previous war with Vietnam. Under his rule, Siam saw the intensification of cash crops in the Chao Phraya Basin, as the economy of Siam became stimulated by the increasing demand from Europe. The population of Siam continued to rise in this period, and the population of Thonburi reached the startling figure of 250,000, making it the largest city in South East Asia. The growth of the population in Siam’s cities was mirrored in the countryside, and the population of the whole of Siam reached over 5.5 million by 1850.


However, while previous periods of population growth had also resulted in a decline in the living standards of the population as more marginal lands came under cultivation and per-capita income fell, Siam was able to avoid this as cultivation within the Chao Phraya basin increased, and agricultural yields improved through new farming techniques. This growing agricultural wealth supported the cities, where Chinese craftsmen in particular enjoyed success in a market that was only just beginning to feel the effects of cheap European manufactured goods. This growth in the prosperity of Siam allowed king Suphanthuwong to increase the administrational intensity of his government. It was during the reign of Suphanthuwong that appointed bureaucrats became a more common feature in outlying non-Thai areas of Siam. The growing use of a centrally accountable bureaucracy to rule rather than tributary rulers loosely tied to the centre spoke to the growing sophistication of the Siamese administrative machinery.


Suphanthuwong ruled for twenty three years, presiding over some the swiftest economic growth Siam had seen in her history. To his eldest son, Thamrong, he left a kingdom that unlike Burma had seen peace for decades. Thamrong however, was not in the mould of his father. He was influenced by thinkers who now argued that Siam was the rightful “Prime Power” in South East Asia, now that the influence of the Chinese had receded. A small class of intellectuals based in Thonburi saw the innovations of the Europeans as a possible tool to strengthen Siam and assure her dominance over the other states of the Indochinese Subcontinent. Thamrong’s initial few years in power, after defeating challenges to his rule in the outlying provinces of Pattani and Chiang Mai, were marked by the first Westernising reforms in Siamese history. In 1855, Siam’s traditional currency was replaced by the Western style Baht bank notes, though this would take decades to spread across Siam. The beginnings of a modern telegraph system were also introduced, and the King relaxed restrictions in foreigners in the country.


Suphanthuwong also harboured ambitions in regards to his neighbours. Luang Prabang and Cambodia had both remained in Siamese orbit while avoiding direct annexation. However, Thamrong harboured the desire to bring these distant kingdoms under the direct rule of Siam. In this endeavour, his main challenge was Vietnam, which now saw the kingdoms as the last remaining buffers to Siamese expansion. When Thamrong sent troops to occupy both kingdoms, the Vietnamese sent their armies to oppose Siam. The conflict was a hard fought one, but with the aid of French advisors and modernised weapons, the Siamese were able to force the Vietnamese out of the kingdoms, ending the conflict with the occupation of Hanoi in 1859. The subsequent Mekong Treaty granted the Mekong Basin to Siam with the exception of the delta, leaving Siam as the unquestioned greatest power in the region. With the Vietnamese cowed, Thamrong now had the opportunity to bring the recalcitrant Malays to heel. Another rebellion in Pattani was defeated, and the Sultans of Kedah, Perak and Kelantan were once again made to pay tribute to Siam. A Siamese army even made its way as far south as Selangor, marking the high-point of Siamese power on the Malay Peninsula. Its position assured, Siam signed a treaty with the French, promising greater cooperation in the future.

* * * * * *

Defeat and Development - Vietnam in the Mid 19th Century​

The great legacy of the Siamese-Vietnamese war of the 1820s was one which allowed the Nguyen dynasty to further its mission of creating a great Vietnamese nation. Already relatively homogenous compared to the other South East Asian powers of Burma and Siam, the Vietnamese embarked on further campaigns against the Cham and Khmer peoples in her own borders, even as she made overtures to the rulers of Cambodia to ensure their hostility toward the ambitious Siamese. As well as these victories against the ethnic minorities in his kingdom, the emperor Hiep Dihn was also able to encourage greater cultivation in the Mekong Delta region, turning the fertile area into a key engine of the Vietnamese economy. In many respects, it appeared as though Vietnam was positively thriving in comparison to both Burma and Siam, which were beset by unruly territories and other internal conflicts.


However, this image of strength was somewhat superficial. Particularly in Siam, the maritime nature of power there, as well as the challenges brought by rebellious Malays in the South, encouraged the rulers of Siam to look “outside the box” for solutions. In Vietnam, where traditional Sinic methods of rule were perfectly adequate for dealing with the challenges faced by the Emperor, there was very little impetus for the kind of reform seen in Siam. It was felt by many in the Vietnamese court that with prosperity rising, and internal and external threats apparently waning, that the country was entering a golden age and that the only priority was the further perfection of the Confucian system in the country. This of course, belied the changing nature of the world in the 19th century. While the Siamese began to adapt Western technologies and ideas, the Vietnamese remained in a kind of stasis, adopting some technologies such as guns, but ignoring others such as the telegraph. As in China, the rulers also took a less than positive outlook on trade with the West, preferring to keep it limited to a few ports.


Vietnamese conceptions of her situation were smashed in the disastrous war she fought with Siam in 1858-59, in which her client states were annexed by Siam and one of her major cities, Hanoi, was occupied by the Siamese after a hard-fought campaign. The scale of the defeat was a great shock to the Vietnamese. After the old emperor Hiep Dihn died of a heart attack, the new Emperor was determined to shake up the system to preserve his kingdom. Mirroring the alliance between the French and the Siamese, the Vietnamese courted the British as allies, signing a commercial treaty in 1861 and allowing British missionaries to spread their word in Vietnam. It appeared as if the shock of the war with Siam had been enough to wake Vietnam up to the changing realities of the world around her.

* * * * * *

Stefan Kovac; "Ghost Rulers" - A History of Europeans in Asia

Building a "Model Colony" in the Philippines​

Following the loss of New Spain and her other colonies in Latin America, Spain was now left with no option but to reform the administration of the Philippines, which had previously been ruled from Mexico City. However, little changed in the day to day ruling of the islands until the coup of Filipe VI, who wanted to modernize Spain and reform it along French lines. As well as liberal reforms at home, Filipe and the Spanish National Liberals wanted to change the administration of Spain’s remaining colonies, of which the Philippines was the largest. However, whereas France imposed a system of colonial exploitation on Java following the Javanese War, Spain’s policy toward the Philippines was less a matter of exploitation to support empire building, and more of a showcase for the benefits of Spanish rule. The Spanish administration focused on improving the provision of education, ensuring that by 1860 around 10,000 Filipino children a year attended primary schools. The universities of the Philippines, which had mainly been church-run institutions, were secularised and their curriculums now aimed toward the liberal arts more heavily than theology.


Infrastructure was also a key concern for the government. The Spanish began building a system of roads in the 1830s, and 1851 saw the building of South East Asia’s first railway in the Philippines, which covered the distance from Manila to San Fernando. The economy of the Philippines grew following international trends in this period, mainly in tropical cash crops. Although the growth in exports was less than that of Java’s, some colonial reformers looked more positively on the Philippines, noting that the peasantry of the country were not as malnourished, and that with lower taxes on exports, the people of the Philippines retained more of the benefits of the economic boom. The islands saw steady economic growth, and by 1860 the GDP per capita of the Philippines had moved beyond not only that of countries like China and Siam, but beyond colonies such as Java and British Sumatra.


Lest one is left with too rosy a picture of the Philippines in this era however, the progress made in education and the economy has to be contrasted with the political repression and racism of the Spanish. Although the National Liberals had been keen to promote increased democracy and political freedoms at home on the Iberian Peninsula, the colonies were left with little in the way of power. Concessions had been made with the election of advisory bodies to compliment governors appointed by Spain in 1857, though the franchise was limited to Spanish-speaking landowners, essentially disenfranchising the vast majority of the population. While calls for independence were unknown in this era, some educated Filipinos complained at the paternalism of the Spanish which in treating the natives of the Philippines as children in need of rule by more advanced peoples, denied them of their most basic rights. To quote the poet Jose Cabrera “To explain to me to my very face that I lack the capacity to think, to dream, is the height of ridiculousness. I am a man as much as a Castilian or Catalan, and I pray for when I am recognised as one”.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - In Southeast Asia, we see the fall of the formerly imposing Burmese State into relative weakness and the rise of Siam following her earlier checking by the Vietnamese. Siam is probably the state that is benefiting most from immigration from China as in OTL, where Siam's cities where heavily Chinese. This is along side the cultivation of the Chao Phraya basin, which in OTL allows Thailand to be the world's largest rice exporter. Siam seems well placed to be the most powerful native state in Southeast Asia. Across the region though we see the continued integration of the region that readers of Lieberman's history of Southeast Asia may be familiar with. More than in OTL, the region is also avoiding the colonization that she experienced in OTL, with European powers preferring to ally with natives rather than seeking to rule them.

Interestingly enough, the Philippines was economically successful in the 19th century OTL, and it is only subsequently that saw the loss of the Philippines economic lead over other Southeast Asian countries (now even Indonesia is significantly ahead on a per-capita basis).

 

[Nassirisimo]

Miyamoto Ryuji; Japanese History After the Sengoku Jidai

The Opening of Japan​

In the 1840’s and 1850’s, attempts on the part of individual captains without the sanction of their home countries to break Japan’s isolation became ever more frequent. While most expeditions were chased off with little issue, there were two encounters which differed from the rest. The first was the attempted Russian embassy in 1853, following the conclusion of the Sino-Russian War. The Russian Admiral of the Pacific Fleet, Vitali Lukyanenko, visited the port of Nagasaki with a fleet of eleven ships. Rather than threatening them as was the usual custom with unwanted visitors, the Japanese allowed the Russians to resupply at the port, and to stay within the city under supervision for three weeks. In their time there, the Russians commented on the high standards of organization within Japanese society, as well as the high rates of literacy that compared favourably with their own country. However, following this visit, the Russians were informed that they would not be allowed access to Japan once again. While the Russians of the Pacific Fleet left Japan with positive impressions, news of the visit began to spread around Europe. Both British and French officials were left worried that the Russians would follow up their success in China with the expansion of its influence in Japan, and both prepared expeditions to the country.


However, it was the French who arrived first, with a modern fleet led by the later Duke of Wallonia, Gerard Laurent. As opposed to the Russians who politely asked for permission to dock at Nagasaki, the French opened fire upon Japanese shore batteries when their initial overtures were spurned. The Japanese cannon, half of which were fake decoys and the other half of which were very poorly maintained and outdated, were no match for the modern French rifled cannon. The French were allowed to dock and after weeks of negotiation and thinly veiled threats, were able to secure a treaty with the Japanese, largely along the lines of the relations that the Dutch had enjoyed with the Japanese prior to the French capture of Batavia. The Japanese hoped that with this concession, the majority of their country could remain closed to the Europeans. However, this was a forlorn hope, and by 1860 the British and Russians had joined France in securing treaties with Japan. In the key seaports of Edo, Osaka and Nagasaki, European merchants became increasingly common sights as Japan was steadily opened to the world.


Although the Japanese government recognised the inability of Japan to assert herself against the Western powers and implement the policy of Sakoku, a growing number of Japanese believed that the new ideas brought from outside were damaging to Japanese society. Western Missionaries were particularly hated, and were seen as the most insidious form of Westerner. A string of murders in the early 1860s were met with a strong crackdown on anti-foreigner and anti-Shogun groups and individuals across Japan. Among Clans which had been given Japan’s poorest lands after choosing the wrong side at Sekigahara over two centuries ago, resentment was brewing. Opposition to the Shogun grew following the granting of extra-territorial rights to European citizens, and it only grew as the Europeans meddled in China’s civil war. Japan in the 1860s was increasingly a country divided, between the Shogun and his followers who believed that cooperation with the European powers was the way to preserve Japan’s independence, and those against the Shogun who wanted a two stage revolution, removing the Shogun and then expelling all foreigners in Japan once again.

* * * * * *

Lajos Csapó; A History of Chinese Civilization

The Fall of the Qing Dynasty​

Unrest had been mounting in China for quite some time before the beginning of the White Turban Rebellion. China’s amazing growth in prosperity and power that she had experienced during the 18th century was coming to an end by the 19th century, and her population now had to deal with ever more pressing concerns such as overpopulation, environmental degradation and drug abuse, which was especially acute in the South. Despite the efforts of dedicated officials such as Xiaofeng Li, in the 1830s, the Opium Crisis became so acute, that Beijing itself sent officials to try and negotiate an end to the trade with the British. While successful for quite some time, the tide began to turn and with the strengthening of the British position in South East Asia and India, the Chinese government took the unprecedented step of legalising the opium trade, instead levelling import tariffs on it. While this kept the British on side for the time being, this also had the effect of infuriating traditional Confucian sentiment, which regarded opium addiction as a great moral blight.


At any rate, this could not resolve the other great ills that affected China. Over a million Chinese left the country in the 1830s and 40s, mostly going to South East Asia where they settled in Siam in great numbers, but with others going to Malaya, California and even Australia. While insignificant when compared to China’s population as a whole, the fact that so many Chinese were willing to leave the country was of increasing concern to the bureaucratic gentry. Also of concern were the impact of Christian missionaries in China, who were for the time being mostly limited to Canton, but whose teachings conflicted with the Confucian cultural base of Chinese society. The Wànróng Emperor limited the ability of the missionaries to travel through China, and even wrote tracts against Christianity. He was not alone in characterising it as an “Insidious, destabilising force” and while damaging to foreign relations, his anti-Christian attitudes won him a great deal of support from many elements of Chinese society.


Wànróng’s efforts though, were at best keeping a lid on the worsening situation in China. Unrest in the countryside was leading to depopulation, contributing to a general sense of decline, or even disaster. When Wànróng died and was succeeded by the Tiānzhì Emperor, who was young but possessed the desire to engage with the challenges China faced. Unlike his predecessor, Tiānzhì was interested in many of the ideas and technologies of the westerners, and began to train an army that was organized along Western lines. More controversially, he overturned the ban on Western Missionaries, though their scope was limited to a few provinces. He was less interested in Christianity itself, and more interested in the diffusion of what he saw as modern ideas to the Chinese populace. There is still some debate as to why he desired this, though one likely explanation was that he thought a population that had been “inoculated” to Western ideas would be more amenable to a root and branch reform of the Chinese State. However, he did not quite have the effect that he hoped for.


The gentry in Chinese society were restive as what they saw as the subversion of Confucian values. Many were of the opinion that Western influence promised only disruption for Chinese society, and with the events of the 1840s, their opinions became more common amongst much of the rest of Chinese society. When the Yellow River flooded in 1849, killing over a million, many interpreted the event as a sign of Heaven’s displeasure, and in the province of Fujian, a traditionalist secret society murdered 23 British missionaries in the course of a week. Although the Qing government took efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice, the British found this insufficient, and launched a war against China. This would be the first war that China decisively lost in many decades, and following a few devastating battles, a treaty was signed which gave the British the port of Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze river, as well as freedom of movement in the whole of Guangdong Province. Most humiliatingly of all however, came the concession of extraterritoriality for British citizens, allowing them to be under British jurisdiction in Chinese territory rather than the laws of the land.


This defeat at the hands of the British exposed Chinese weakness to the rest of the world as well as to her own people in a humiliating fashion. China had barely absorbed the psychological shock of defeat before she found herself at war with a European power once again, this time with the Russians over a territorial dispute in the Amur Valley. Although the pace of the war was far slower, the Russians forced the Chinese to concede the whole of the north bank of the Amur River, leaving the Russians threateningly close to the Qing dynasty’s homeland of Manchuria. These two defeats, and the prospect of further attacks by European powers and the loss of sovereignty seemed to discredit Tiānzhì’s efforts of reform, and give credence to those who wanted a return to a more traditional system. Efforts to subdue renewed rebellion amongst Muslims in the West were only just successful, and within the core of China a number of secret societies formed in opposition to foreign influence and increasingly, the Manchu-dominated government. In 1857, a number of different secret societies joined together in Hunan province to form the “Righteous Society of White Turbans”, an armed group which was dedicated to overthrowing the Qing and closing China to foreign elements.


Initially limited just to Hunan, the movement gained steam after the great famine of 1859, winning over many dispossessed peasants and by the end of the year had captured much of Southern and Central China, as well as Nanjing, which it declared as the capital of the Wu dynasty, ruled by the Fùxīng Emperor. European interests were galvanised with the massacres of Chinese Christians and Manchurians, though it was too late for the Qing dynasty, which found itself largely without allies among the majority Han. Beijing and Guanzhou were captured in 1860, and the British were threatened with the loss of Shanghai, which the Wu dynasty and their White Turban warriors promised to leave unmolested in return for a reduction in British support for the Qing in the Civil War. With tensions rising in Europe, Britain had no choice but to acquiesce and by 1861, the last pockets of Qing resistance had been stamped out. Millions of people had died in perhaps the largest conflict of the 19th century so far, though to call this a revolution may well be somewhat misleading. Although the Wu promised great change for China, this was to be an emphasis of traditional Confucian values and a rejection of the West. The limiting factory system was once again imposed on the European powers, most of whom were far too distracted by events closer to home to protest.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - Japan has finally been opened up, though with no American presence on the West Coast, this has been left to the French. With the stresses of the country opening up, the Bakufu appears to be in great danger, though this doesn't automatically follow with a Meiji Restoration and Modernization programme as OTL. The Boshin War could have been a Tokugawa victory, and those hostile to opening Japan could have come out on top.

In China, the Han have violently overthrown their Qing masters in a rebellion aimed as much at Western influence as it was at the rule of the Manchu. European reaction to the rebellion has been surprisingly muted, though this is due to crisis in Europe. The Wu appear to have saved China from a century of humiliation, though there will come a time when the Europeans are not so distracted. How China develops in the coming decades will determine her fate.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Ifeyani Nnaji; Cradle of Humanity - A History of Africa Before Colonialism

The Rise of the Buganda Caliphate
​

Although Islam had been a powerful force on the East Coast of Africa for many centuries, it was only in the beginning of the 19th century that Islam had made its impact felt in the Great Lakes region. It was the Buganda people who were the first to accept the word of the prophet, and for many decades, Islam spread amongst the elite, with diffusion to the lower social orders a slow process. However, in the 1840s this changed with the rise of the Buganda Sultan Umar Hajji. Having completed the Hajj as a prince, and visited Egypt, the new Sultan envisioned uniting much of the Great Lakes region under the banner of Islam, and upon taking the throne, began building an army to defeat the pagan rulers of the region. In doing this, he utilised links built with the trading cities of the Swahili coast as well as the further Muslim World, building an army which was the greatest that the interior of Africa had ever seen.


Umar’s army was disciplined, comparatively large and motivated by religious zeal. As in the Sahel, the Muslim warriors saw great success against their pagan opponents, bringing the other Lake Kingdoms to heel and often forging alliances with local people, usually cattle herding tribes, many of whom quickly accepted Islam. Promising swift advancement for capable people of any tribe who embraced Islam, Buganda was able to use a combination of military might and local cooperation to establish a great Islamic Empire across the lakes region by 1854. Not only this, but she had also created a new Islamic elite amongst many of the peoples of the Empire. Although his Empire would scarcely outlive himself, Umar Hajji had expanded Islam’s direct influence deep into the heart of Africa. Although no more than 30% of the population of his Empire was Muslim upon his death, the spread of the religion among the social elite ensured that even when his Empire fell to infighting after his death, that he would forever be remember as the “Sword of Islam in the Lakes”, who created an influential and Muslim Central African state. This, perhaps, is explanation of why even to this day he is revered among his Buganda people.


As well as bringing Islam to the Great Lakes region, Umar Hajji brought the region to the attention of other Muslim rulers. He made a great statement of support for the rebels in the Sudan, who were fighting the Christian Ethiopians. He even sent some emissaries as far away as Isfahan and Constantinople, where requests for reciprocal recognitions of greatness fell on deaf ears, though where at least the news of the spread of Islam in distant regions from the world proved to be a pleasant curiosity in light of territorial losses closer to home. However, the expansion of the state also made the Congo more accessible to slave traders, who now had an easier journey than ever to bring slaves captured there to ports in East Africa where they could be shipped across the Indian Ocean. The scale of the slave trade increased throughout the 1860s, to the point where even Britain and France were becoming concerned. However, as Europeans began putting pressure on the slave trade at sea, the supply of slaves dropped after the Buganda Empire fell to infighting after the death of Umar Hajji in 1865.

* * * * * *

The Limits of Ethiopia's Empire​

By the 1830s, Ethiopia was perhaps as powerful as it had been during the reign of the great Zara Kwestantinos in the 15th century. Her ascendency over the previously fearsome Somali Sultanates had been confirmed, some level of trade had been established with the outside world and internally there were fewer threats to the Ethiopian Emperor than there had ever been. Indeed, the situation now seemed to promise a period of peace and stability for Ethiopia, but this was not a priority for the Ethiopian Emperor Kwestantinos. He was ambitious, and had a great zeal for fighting his Muslim neighbours. Having previously defeated the Somalis, making them send tribute to him and all but destroying the slave trade in captured Ethiopians, Kwestantinos now turned his attention west to the Sudan, ruled by the Sultan Agban, who had previously fought off an Egyptian invasion of his homeland. Kwenstantinos requested the allegiance of Agban, as well as tribute, though this was brusquely rejected by the Sultan, who replied that any gold would have to be taken from them.


The Ethiopian invasion of the Sudan initially went fairly well, defeating the famous black-horsed cavalry and seizing the capital of Sennar, which was looted in a great orgy of violence. The Ethiopians seemed to be having much more luck than the Egyptians in defeating the Sudanese. With organized resistance to the Ethiopian army largely wiped out by 1836, Kwenstantinos returned to the Ethiopian Highlands to embark on the last great project of his reign, the building of a new capital for his empire at Debre Tabor. However, when Kwenstantinos finally died in 1841, his armies were still occupying Sudan. After Agban had been killed, other self-proclaimed leaders now rose to resist the Ethiopians, engaging in a guerrilla struggle that was draining Ethiopia’s treasury. Initially, the new Ethiopian king Yohannes, was averse to becoming personally embroiled in the conflict, preferring to delegate the fighting to his generals. However, when one guerrilla leader had united the others under his banner and was able to start engaging Ethiopia’s armies in pitched battles, Yohannes made an effort to stop the rebellion in the Sudan once and for all. However, he and his army met their fate at the Battle of Sinjah.


Yohannes’ brother Iyasu now became Emperor, and was convinced that there could be no meaningful victory in Sudan. His priority was to stop the wars which were impoverishing the royal treasuring and focus instead on building internal stability. Within a year of becoming Emperor, he had agreed with the new “Sultan of the Sudan”, Abd-al-Rahman Badawi a peace treaty between equals. This was followed by challenges from the Somali rulers who now refused to pay tribute. Iyasu chose not to undertake action against these, apparently thinking that a war for comparatively little gain was not worth the effort. Instead, Iyasu’s reign would be one of relative peace, which saw agricultural advances as well as a flourishing of Amharic literature and culture. This was a development which now saw the previously proud Oromo peoples adopting more and more Amharic customs, which was now seen as the prestige culture of Ethiopia.

* * * * * *

Sheldon Roth; Cradle of Humanity - Africa from the Prehistoric to the Present

The Last Days of Isolation? ​

1861 was a watershed year in African history. In South Africa, it marked the break between the Netherlands and her distant “Cape Colony”, which had by now began to expand far beyond the original perimeter of the Cape of Good Hope. With a rapidly rising population, the European inhabitants of the southern end of Africa began to put increasing pressure on the native peoples of the region such as the Xhosa and Zulus. Although they did not lack for brave warriors, these people did lack for the organization or technology that the Afrikaners at the Cape possessed. Gradually, their cattle herding territories were taken over to become farmland. Those who did not flee became farm-workers for the Afrikaners, working as menial labourers on land that had once been theirs. In the newly independent “South African Republic”, to be black meant a life of displacement, dispossession and servitude, a reality which was not recognised in the lofty wording of the South African constitution. Indeed, when it came to the politics of this new state, the African inhabitants who still made a majority of the population were largely treated as inconsequential. The Constitution made little reference to them, not imposing any great handicaps but not offering citizenship either, which was offered only to Dutch speakers of European descent.


Elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa however, Europeans were not the important players that they were in the South, largely thanks to the barrier of the tropical diseases that made life for Europeans in the region a very difficult proposition indeed. As the British and French found a rare project for cooperation in the fight against the Slave Trade, the slaving kings in West Africa increasingly geared their exports north toward the Sahel and the great Fulani Sultanate. Although still relatively free of the chattel slavery which could be found in areas of the Americas such as Lusitanian Brazil and Columbia, plantations using slaves now became a feature of the Fulani economy, especially around the important textile towns of Hausaland, which were thirsty for more cotton. Within the cities too, the slave population increased to the point where Kano’s population were mostly slaves by the middle of the century. In East Africa too, the British and French clamped down on the slave trade which exported Africans to much of the rest of the Indian Ocean basin. Slaves from East Africa now rarely went further than the great plantations of Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast, which produced large amounts of spices and tropical goods for export.


Although Christian Missionaries were expressing more of an interest in converting the heathen souls which inhabited much of the continent, it was still Islam which was gaining more ground in the continent. The Fulani Caliphate greatly facilitated the growth of the Islamic religion within its own territory, and had made Islam a prestige religion beyond its own borders, though it was not the only Islamic polity to see growth. The short lived Buganda Empire which ruled the Great Lakes region turned Islam from a curiosity into the dominant religion in the area. Even as its rule receded, the new kingdoms that emerged were all ruled by Muslims, and the region became more connected to Coastal East Africa as a result of its religion, which facilitated trade and to some extent, the movement of people. The semi-nomadic peoples between the lakes and the coast such as the Nyamwezi were also increasingly Islamicised, and often set themselves up as middlemen to compensate for the poor quality of their soil. These great gains for the Islamic faith on the continent made the conversions to Christianity of small numbers of people on the African coastline pale in comparison.


Even without the profound European influence that would come later, Africa was a changing place. Even areas of the interior were now seeing a greater integration into the world economy that was a defining feature of the times. Traditional religions were in some ways, losing ground to the “Great Religions” of the world, though often features of these Animist and Fetishist religions were maintained after official conversions, mirroring the syncretism that was found in places such as South East Asia. However, to many outside of her, Africa remained the “Dark Continent” by virtue of her isolation, a place in which few outsiders travelled deep into, and whose diverse peoples, political systems and landscapes were still unknown to even the most curious men of learning elsewhere. With advances in transportation, medicine and most importantly weaponry, how long this would remain to be the case was no longer certain.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - The coastlines of Africa are increasingly feeling the impact of Europe, except in West Africa, where a decline in the demand for slaves is forcing a shift in the economy of the region. Islam is still making greater headway in the interior than Christianity, though with quinine and the machine gun on the horizon, this will probably change soon. In South Africa, we have seen a slower colonisation of the Highveld without the Mfecane, and one in which whites have been the bigger culprits than the Zulus in ethnically cleansing the original inhabitants. Ethiopia has also discovered her own limits, but still remains a great challenge for Muslim rulers in the region, though they may soon all find out there is something worse than each other in the world.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Erzsebet Fehér; The History of the New World after Independence

Citizens against Caudillos - Post-Independence Struggles​

Spain’s American colonies, with the exception of her islands in the Caribbean, had gained independence by 1826. In Spain, this triggered the rising of the National Liberals and a change in the direction of the country, but in the former colonies themselves, this did not result in some of the changes hope for by some. With the exception of Chile, none of the emerging nations were Democracies in the sense that Allegheny was. Almost all of the Latin American nations had to face enormous internal divisions, mainly between liberal localism and conservative centralism. In Argentina, this turned into full scale Civil War between 1828 and 1839, after the assassination of the Caudillo Manuel Ortiz. Following the destructive civil war, the Federalists under the leadership of José O’Connor took power in Buenos Aries, but this marked the only full-scale triumph on the part of the regionalists in Latin America [1]. In Granada, there was some level of compromise, but in Mexico and Peru, the Caudillos managed to cling onto power with the support of the powerful landowning classes.


The emerging differences in the political situations of the former Spanish Colonies each had an impact on the economies of their respective countries. In Argentina the Federalists, who were admirers of Allegheny, wanted to create a nation of moderate yeoman farmers who would be free in an economic as well as a political sense. In reality however, this led to an economy which was more closed off to international trade than those of its neighbours, without the mineral resources of Chile and Peru or the large plantations seen in Lusitanian Brazil or Granada. In Mexico, although some concessions toward economic modernity were made such as the abolition of the tithe, the first part of its economic history following independence was largely one of stagnation. This began to change in 1850 with the discovery of gold in California. The region was dominated by large landowners who struggled to move labour from the densely populated southern half of Mexico to their estates to extract the gold. Eventually, these landowners settled on imported Chinese labour who could be easily controlled, and who by 1860 had grown to become a majority in the state of Alta California. This massive influx of foreigners in a sparsely populated region worried the government in Mexico City, who began imposing laws discriminating against the Chinese across the country.


Indeed, outside of Argentina and Chile, racial tensions began to play an ever larger part of politics in Latin America. In Lusitanian Brazil and Granada, slavery played a large part of the economy in both. In Brazil especially, not only was economic power determined by the number of slaves one owned, but so was one’s societal prestige. While both countries proved quick to import Western European fashions, there appeared to be far less stomach to import abolitionist sentiment from France and Britain. But as both of these powers clamped down upon the slave trade out of Africa, Lusitanian landowners had to turn to other sources. Many looked upon the growth of the slave economy in Columbia in North America and saw a system worth emulating, and across many plantations in Brazil, efforts were undertook to encourage a higher rate of reproduction among slaves. In Granada, where a greater amount of blacks were free, a system of discrimination kept them on the lowest rung in society, in a form of racial discrimination that proved much more amenable to European sensibilities.


Greater than the other racial tensions however was that between those of European or partial European descent in Peru, and the Indigenous peoples of the country, who made up a majority of the population. Initial efforts on the part of liberals following the 1828 Amerindian uprising to negotiate a balance of power between the two groups floundered on the opposition of the warlord who rose to become the undisputed leader of the country, Javier Diaz. Diaz instead instituted a policy of discrimination, favouring landowners and mestizos above the natives, who were for the most part denied any place in government whatsoever. With a hard line of repression, native demands for more equal treatment were silenced though this policy became untenable following the loss of the Argentine-Peruvian War in 1839. The weakness of Diaz’s government was exposed, and the largest native revolt since that of Tupac Amaru’s broke out initially among the Aymara people. In 1843, the revolt had spread to the Quechua people, and had engulfed almost the whole country. It was not until 1845 that the war ended, with Peru being split between a neo-Incan state in the East, and a Mestizo dominated rump Peru in the West.


The rise of the neo-Incan Republic, officially designated as Tawantinsuyu, the native name of the old Incan Empire was an interesting development, as it remains to date the only totally independent native polity in the Americas. The initial years after independence were marked by political chaos, as strongmen competed with each other and local councils over what form the nation would take. After a half decade of a low-intensity civil war, an Incan constitution based on the Argentine one was written, which declared the country as a bi-lingual federal republic. The Incan Parliament took to work building the new nation, undertaking land reform and improving infrastructure in the mountainous country. However, despite growing stability, the country began to fall behind economically, especially as neighbouring Peru entered the prosperous years of the “Guano Boom”. While free from famine in a way that native-ruled states in Asia were not, the Incan republic was far from being a prosperous state in the way that some other American nations were becoming, and its GDP remained significantly lower than all other nations in the Americas. Not for nothing did the French Prime Minister Louis de Villeneuve dismiss the Incan Nation as “An Asian country which has by the curiosities of history found itself in the New World”. The irony that the neo-Incan State was the only state in the Americas ruled by natives was clearly not lost on him.


The Nations of Central and South America were mostly on broadly similar paths in the first half of the 19th century, with only Argentina and Chile moving away from the pattern of ethnically stratified societies which were increasingly economically unequal. And coincidentally, it was only these states that had thus far managed to build democracies, though this was not to say that the desire for liberal and democratic reform was absent in other nations in the region, as the 1861 uprising in Mexico showed. While the region had either broken from the political control of Spain, or in the case of Brazil, had established itself as an equal with its mother country, it remained culturally linked to Europe. Economically too, independence seemed only to bring stronger economic ties to European countries, though it was more likely to be with Britain and France rather than Spain.


[1] – Because it just wouldn’t be a world worth living in if it wasn’t for Latin Americans of Irish descent.

* * * * * *

Change and Challenges - The Caribbean Islands​

Although the islands of the Caribbean would not begin to gain independence until the turn of the century, this is not to say that the colonies in the region did not experience profound change in the 19th century. A widespread and organized rebellion had begun in the French island of Saint Domingue in the 1790s, and reached its height in the following decades when all of the mountains, as well as significant swathes of the lowlands on the island were controlled by black rebels. However, the rebels lost steam afterward, following the French ban of the slave trade and subsequently the institution of slavery (in 1810 and 1816 respectively) French troops were more effectively able to wage a campaign against the rebels. Following the defection of the Rebel commander Henri Holophene in 1819, the armed conflict on the island was over. This did not mark the end of tension in the colony of Saint Domingue though, as blacks and mulattos found themselves free yet heavily discriminated against by the planter classes. In the middle of the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of blacks from the colony emigrated to Louisiana, where much more free land for settlement was available and conditions were somewhat better. This trend was only somewhat lessened with the purchase of the Spanish half of Hispaniola.


Spain had lost most of her colonies on the American Mainland, but retained her possessions in the Caribbean. With the exception of Santo Domingo, which was sold to the French, Spain intended to hold in to her Caribbean colonies. In Cuba particularly, efforts were made to build on the earlier Bourbon reforms in reforming the administration of the islands. However, despite the slogan of “Prosperity and Justice” that the Spanish proclaimed following the National Liberal Coup, the Spanish colonies remained backward in many respects. Whereas Britain and France had banned Slavery in the 1810s and 20s, the Spanish continued to hold onto the institution. For the Spanish Planters in the colonies, slavery was crucial to maintain the profitable sugar and coffee industries, both of which provided much-needed revenue to Spain. While many National Liberal politicians in Spain personally opposed slavery, they were unwilling to challenge established interests in the colonies and jeopardise Spain’s precarious budgets. Despite the continuation of the institution of slavery, the free black population in Cuba far exceeded that of the slave-holding Republic of Columbia to the north.


Britain, who held most of the small islands in the Caribbean, as well as the larger island of Jamaica, saw less change outside the abolition of slavery. In Guyana, Britain’s largest colony left in the Americas, the colonist population was limited almost entirely to the coast, with much of the interior inhabited by natives with little or no contact with the Western world. As Britain concentrated on building an Empire in Asia, her remaining colonies in the Americas suffered something in the way of neglect. Even as slavery was abolished in the colonies, the white populations of the islands instituted perhaps the harshest system of racial segregation. In Jamaica, there was a rebellion on the part of the black population following a scandal in which the colonial government had been selling prisoners to slave traders in Columbia. It was this enormous shock which finally brought something in the way of change to Britain’s colonies as even the king himself made public condemnations of the officials involved in the trafficking. However, this did not change the dynamic of the islands, which largely remained as sugar-growing colonies run for the benefits of elites who lived back in London, Liverpool or Bristol.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - I publish this update with the caveat that my own knowledge on Latin America is rather weak, beyond an oddly required appreciation for their music. While still powerful, the Caudillo strongmen haven't quite gotten the whole of Latin America under their thumb, and this is likely to have much in the way of interesting ramifications in the future, as is the new Inca state. The mere presence of a Native-rule state in the Americas is likely to have an enormous impact on natives across the Continent, even if it is in what was the most populated part of the Americas before Columbus.

Saint Domingue remains under French rule, if unhappily. Just because slavery is gone does not resolve the deep racial inequalities of the island. Without a powerful America to threaten Cuba, things may turn out interestingly there in the future, though it could make it harder for Cuba to break away from Spain in the future unfortunately.

Comments/criticisms always welcome!

 

[Nassirisimo]

Pierre Moreau; Great Power Politics Revisited: The Economic and Military Power of States 1500-2000

Anglophone North America ​

Of all areas of the world, it was North America that saw the most immigration by quite some margin in the 19th century. As technologies such as the railway and the steam ship began to make the vast continent more accessible, increasing numbers of people, not all from Europe, went to make their new lives on the continent. Initially, it seemed as though it would be Alleghany that would benefit the most from this immigration. Its population skyrocketed, from around 5.5 million in 1835 to over 8 million by 1860 as people fled from the poverty and repression found in Europe. Many of these new arrivals settled in the rapidly growing cities of the East Coast, particularly Boston, Philadelphia and above all, New York. New York’s population quadrupled in 30 years, a testament to the swift growth of cities in Allegheny, a feat which up to that point had not been emulated anywhere else in North America. The cities of Allegheny were quickly becoming “Shock Cities” of modern industrialism, to a similar extent of Leeds and Manchester across the Atlantic.


Columbia, the erstwhile cousin of Allegheny, tended much less toward the path of urbanization. Her population grew far more slowly, reaching around 6 million by 1860. This was in part due to lower rates of immigration from Europe, who had far less factory jobs and free land to be attracted by, but was also caused by the phenomenon of runaway slaves. Columbia remained the only corner of the North American mainland where slavery was still legal following Mexico’s abolition in 1836, but there appeared to be no lessening of the intensity of the institution. The slave population grew in relation to that of free blacks, especially with the emigration of the latter to Allegheny and increasingly Louisiana. Among the elites in Columbian society, the value of slavery in maintaining appropriate relationship between different races, as well as in ensuring quality of life for slaves was emphasised, though this contrasted to the cruel reality found on most plantations. After the slave trade out of Africa was cut off in the 1820s, the slave trade within Columbia intensified. The growth of the cotton trade in the Deep South in particular led to an internal pattern in which slaves were sold from Virginian farms to the more productive cotton plantations of southern states such as Alabama and Georgia.


The changing dynamics of the slave trade also had their impact on the economy of Columbia. Despite the opposition of many governments in Europe to slavery, there was little pressure on European manufactures to stop importing from the slaveholding south, nor was there much in the way of pressure on Columbia to curb the practice. While the manufacturing based economy of Allegheny did grow in the first half of the 19th century, it could not compare to the massive boom in exports from Columbia, based mainly on cotton. By 1860, Columbia’s exports were worth 50% more than those from Allegheny. Many of the profits from these exports went to the planter class, who as well as building elegant houses on their estates, maintained neoclassical villas in Charleston. Numerous European visitors were greatly impressed by Charleston, and contrasted the elegant buildings, clean streets and general air of prosperity favourably with the squalid conditions in many of Allegheny’s cities. It seemed to be limited to a few liberal activists to point out that the city’s prosperity was based upon the largely invisible human misery inflicted on millions of slaves throughout Columbia.


Both of the Anglophone American states saw economic and population growth in the era, which added to the increased desire for more land to settle, in Allegheny for family-owned homestead farms, and in Columbia for further fertile land for cotton plantations. Aside from occasional border clashes, both states were too scared of the other to consider a war for expansion, and considered the densely populated border areas as unsuitable at any rate. Hungry eyes instead turned westwards to the Mississippi Valley, controlled by France. Both Columbia and Allegheny were aware that intrusion by either of them would mean an unwinnable war with the strongest power in the world. Nevertheless, demands from settlers, as well as politicians who saw the future potential of the Mississippi Valley, put pressure to find some accommodation with France. After the death of King François in 1831, the new French government proved more amenable to selling the east bank of the Mississippi. After two years of negotiations, the three powers agreed on a purchase and fair separation of the land. For the enormous sum of 50 million livres each, both would gain hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of land, as well as access to the east bank of the Mississippi.

* * * * * *

Francophone North America​

After the death of King François, France’s policy toward her North American colonies began to change somewhat. In his last years, even he had become somewhat wary of their developing identities, which came as the population of New France began to skyrocket. Nervous that the process that had taken place in Britain’s colonies would happen to her own, the French implemented various measures, including regional parliaments to keep her colonies loyal to the metropole. However, with British and Alleghanian support of the independence movement, the Quebecois felt confident enough to declare independence in 1836, precipitating a war that would last four years before the French recognised the independence of her erstwhile colony. New France, now renamed the Republic of Quebec, forged close relations with Allegheny and to some extent followed her model. The city of Montreal began to grow, though not quite to the same extent of New York, while the countryside became dominated by small farmers.


In Louisiana however, the circumstances were rather different. Far more sparsely populated than Quebec, the French government saw little use for the colony, and had at one point mooted selling almost all of it to pay off some of the national debt. However, the 1820s saw the growth of the port of New Orleans, as well as increased immigration into Louisiana both from Europeans as well as Free Blacks from elsewhere in the Americas, attracted by the lack of restrictive racial laws. By 1835, the population had exceeded a million, and many of these had been greatly angered by the sale of much of the East Bank of the Mississippi to Allegheny and Columbia. Voices for independence grew louder, but envisioned a different kind of state than any of the existing North American states. More than any others, the founding fathers of independent Louisiana were inspired by “Classical Liberalism”, a pro-Industry ideology that had emerged in the United Kingdom. Rather than a nation of smallholding but poor farmers, or of a slavery-dominated export economy, the founding fathers of Louisiana envisioned free markets that would guarantee an increase in prosperity.


Louisiana proved to be very prosperous indeed after independence. As the Mississippi and Ohio valleys became increasingly populated, it was New Orleans more than any other city in North America that benefitted. The wealth of rapidly growing cities in both the Anglophone and Francophone areas of the Mississippi such as Losantiville and Memphis, as well as the growing agricultural wealth of the Mississippi basin all flowed to the outside world through New Orleans [1]. As a result, the population of the city skyrocketed, to hit around 400,000 by 1860. The increasing prosperity and population of Louisiana however did leave some “Old French” settlers uneasy about the pace of change. In the 1860s, a new religious movement that echoed Christian Revivalism in the Anglophone world and which preached a simpler, less materialistic life, supposedly in the mould of Jesus Christ himself, emerged among French Protestant communities in Louisiana and to a lesser extent, Quebec. These communities eventually settled in the “Great Plains” region of America led by their charismatic leader, Claude Cartier, and numbered some 50,000 in all. Following the “Treaty of the Open Sky” with many of the native peoples of the region such as the Lakota, a government based on mixed white-native sovereignty and cooperation was founded.


This model of cooperation between whites and natives contrasted with the dispossession of the native peoples experience elsewhere in North America. In the Anglophone territories and Louisiana, native peoples continually saw white settlers move into their lands, often acting violently toward the native inhabitants. “Indian Removals” became part and parcel of government policy in both Columbia and Allegheny, though this did not happen without protest among the white populations of both countries. In Mexico, the native peoples fared somewhat better due to the distant nature of Mexico’s central government. Although in coastal Alta California, natives saw themselves dispossessed due to the influx of Chinese labourers, natives in the interior such as the Apache and Comanche peoples enjoyed a measure of autonomy. Indeed, during the period the Comanche people prospered in the absence of white settlement and with various victories over their native American neighbours.


[1] – Losantiville is Cincinnati in OTL. Memphis in this timeline is a French speaking city on the opposite bank of the Missisippi

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - North America's much more fragmented political geography when compared to OTL is starting to show its effects. As Louisiana becomes increasingly more populated, it becomes unlikely that Anglophone settlers will ever be able to push into the "Wild West", which buys the natives of the Far West quite a bit of time. An equally interesting development is a kind of alt-Mormonism (though only in the sense it is a new religious movement) among the small Francophone Protestant communities that appears to be positively accepting of the natives. Although tensions do exist between the Great Plains Indians and the new arrivals, a collective shunning of alcohol and attempts not to infringe on each other could mean that the Great Plains Indians may do somewhat better than OTL. And of course, without much in the way of white settlement of the Northwest Coast, Natives there are doing somewhat better.

Although the split between the North and South, as well as the limitation of its settlement is having a big effect on Anglophone North America, it is nevertheless doing fairly well for itself.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Theodoros Marinou; The Mountainous Periphery: A History of Southeastern Europe

The Consolidation of the Modern Balkans​

Upon winning their independence from the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan Kingdoms of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria were seen as nothing more than “Bandit Kingdoms”, to use the phrase of the British King William. Although their former Turkish rulers were not seen in any more positive of a light, the Balkan nations were viewed as backward, with almost none of the amenities found in “Civilized Europe”. While the British and French sneered at the new nations, both the Russians and Austrians attempted to wield influence in these new nations. Indeed, it was largely Russian actions that had secured the independence of the Balkan states with their war against Turkey. Due to this, as well as the sympathy generated by their common Orthodox faith (and Slavic ethnicity in the cases of Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria), Russia was seen by many to be the dominant ideological influence in the new states. However, most of the new countries were landlocked, sharing borders only with the hostile Turks as well as Austria. No matter what vague feelings of brotherhood remained toward the Russians, for Serbia and Bulgaria it became paramount to maintain good relations with Austria, who was the primary trading partner of each country.


Greece however, even at this early point appeared to be diverging somewhat with the other two larger Balkan countries. Unlike Serbia and Bulgaria, she was dominated by her long coastline, which endowed her with a more maritime-focused identity. Utilising her connections with large Greek communities that remained under Ottoman rule, Greece steadily began to build up a comparatively large merchant marine, making up for in trade what she lacked in agricultural potential. However, Greece was also hobbled by the stronger regional interests, who strongly resented the imposition of a centralised state upon them. The first king of Greece, Andreas Pierrakos, lasted a mere four years on the throne before he was unseated by a coalition of warlords from the Morea, who placed his young son Ioannis on the throne. For ten years, Greece was dominated by regional warlords and chieftains, who had been the chief force in driving out the Ottomans but who were now also beginning to seriously harm Greece themselves as the countryside fell to disorder. Once Ioannis came to the throne, it was hoped that he could be safely dominated, but the young king had a mind of his own.


Properly securing the tax base of Attica, and more importantly, some income from the many merchants based in Athens, Ioannis began building up his own personal guard. With their distinctive Fustanella uniforms, the size of the guard was built up into the most significant armed force in Greece. This would be the core of the Royalist army in the Greek Civil War of 1844-47. During this fierce conflict between the king and Greece’s powerful regional rulers, much of Greece was left devastated and the government was kept afloat only by loans from Britain, keen to cultivate an ally in the region, as well as by the activities of its merchant fleet. Eventually, King Ioannis triumphed and was able to establish himself as more than just a “first amongst equals”. He was able to push through a number of reforms that centralised power in his state. While he had gone some way toward centralising Greece however, he was left with a country which largely had no sense of itself. Local and religious identities prevailed over a national Greek identity, which made the task of governance somewhat harder. It was only in the 1850s that the beginnings of a Modern Greek identity, looking in equal parts to restore Byzantine greatness, as well as that of Classical Greece, was born.


While both Serbia and Bulgaria emulated Greece’s strategy of developing an incipient nationalism from looking back onto medieval glories, the ways in which the two states dealt with the difficult internal situations of their own countries differed. The Prince of Serbia attempted a policy of consensus, working with local elites to give them a share of power in his own government and for a time, even tolerating what remained of the Muslim populations of Serbia’s towns. By mirroring the Muslim concept of the Dhimmi, he taxed the Muslim population while allowing them a measure of freedom. In Bulgaria, the remaining Muslim population fared less well, yet those local elites who had fought alongside the new King of Bulgaria during the war for independence were allowed a great deal of autonomy. Unlike Greece which was going down the path of centralisation, the other large Balkan States were aiming for consensus and local autonomy. Yet common to all three was a sense that the national missions were not yet complete, and that more homeland remained to be liberated from the Turk.


However, following a formal alliance and a steady rise of tension at the borders, full-blown war erupted between the Balkan Nations and the Ottoman Empire in 1854. Traditionally, the narrative had been that the Balkan Alliance had underestimated Ottoman strength, though more recent studies emphasise that the war had actually been launched due to concerns about the growing strength of the Ottomans. By 1855, the Ottomans were gaining ground, and the alliance was only saved due to the intervention of the Russians, who swept the Ottomans from much of the Balkans and came within sight of Constantinople. However, following a valiant defence at Çatalca, the Turks were able to gain back some ground and establish defensible borders over a hundred kilometres from Constantinople. Despite the setback at the end of the war, the subsequent Treaty of Vienna left huge swathes of the Balkans in the hands of the new Balkan states. Despite initial scepticism amongst many in Europe about the durability of the new Balkan states, which incorporated huge heterogeneous populations, the predicted Great War for supremacy in the 1860s never occurred. This was in large part due to the need to focus on internal consolidation and general war exhaustion on the part of the Balkan Nations. As each year passed, it seemed as if the tensions which had dogged the Balkans were now beginning to lessen.

* * * * * *

James Hamlin; Great Power Politics in Europe, 1700 to 2000

Russia in the Mid 19th Century​

With the Triumph of France over Austria in 1829 and the subsequent reordering of Europe which saw France preserve the Hapsburgs and Poles as a shield against Russian influence in the Continent, Russia’s influence in Europe reached its nadir. Tsar Alexander’s attempts of turning the Balkans into a Russian sphere of influence had largely failed, and had left Russia weakened for the “decisive conflict” in Europe at the end of the 1820s. His foreign policies largely recognised as failure, he turned his energy as best he could toward internal governance. For the reactionary Tsar, this meant crushing all impulses toward liberalism and nationalism, and the preservation of Russia’s autocratic system of government. A Lithuanian uprising in 1828 was crushed, as was an attempt by army officers to implement a parliament among French lines in 1830. For ten more years, the Tsar kept Russia backwards and increasingly isolated from the outside world, though in practice this did not mean that Russia saw no change. The country’s population began to grow, easily keeping pace with France’s which she would overtake in 1847. In Moscow and St Petersburg, rising rates of literacy saw the popularisation of newspapers as well as a flowering of Russian culture in which novelists such as Mikhalkov and Vorontsov made their marks.


The cities, and to some extent the Russian aristocracy began to change, with French being abandoned as the language of the aristocracy in favour of Russian. However, for the rural peasantry, approximately half of whom were not free but were serfs, there was less change in their day to day lives. Russian agriculture, outside of some modernized estates, remained medieval. The focus of day to day life was the Mir or village, to which Russian peasants including those who were free remained tied to. Unlike in North America, there was little migration to the wide open spaces to the South or to the East, and the Russian population was concentrated rather in “Old Russia” or the Ukraine. Due in part to Russia’s increasing isolation from the rest of Europe, there appeared to be little desire for reform among the majority of the population, although with so few peasants literate, this cannot be confirmed with certainty. However, peasant uprisings were still not so uncommon, especially when compared to Western and Central Europe, and the Tsar’s armies found themselves involved in many a police action.


Change at last began to come to Russia with the death of Tsar Alexander. With the accession of his son Konstantin, a reformer came to the throne of Russia, albeit one with similar expansionist tendencies as his father had possessed in his youth. However, in contrast to his father Konstantin was far less of a conservative, and believed in implementing at least some of the social, organizational and technological innovations coming from Western Europe. In 1847, Russia’s first major railway was built between St Petersburg and Great Novgorod. A system of state funded schools was established in the major cities of the Empire, and the army was reformed with the advice of a British military mission. However, despite these advances, no concessions were given toward political liberalisation, or the abolition of serfdom which had already been undertaken in the rest of Europe outside the Balkans by this point. Instead Tsar Konstantin would let the “Régime du Sabre” do its work, and win the approval of his subjects with military adventurism.


The first target of Russia was the ailing Qing Empire in China, which had recently suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the British. Using the pretext of a territorial dispute along the Amur River, Russian troops attacked Manchuria, the homeland of the Qing. Following several defeats, the Qing signed a treaty with the Russians fixing the border in Manchuria at the Amur River. Realistically this gained Russia little in the way of economic resources or even strategic advantage, though the Tsar was keen to brandish this victory, a task made easier with the new technologies of the telegraph and photography, which allowed a front that was thousands of kilometres away from Moscow to remain within contact. With success in the Far East, as well as consistent gains against Kazakh nomads in Central Asia, Konstantin turned his eyes south to the prize that had eluded his father. The Russians had long been enemies with the Ottoman Empire, and in the past century had gained the upper hand in the conflict. Although in the 18th century the Ottomans had been protected by Persia, the 19th century saw real gains against the Ottomans, with the Crimea seized and multiple areas of the Balkans liberated in 1825.


Konstantin wanted to emulate this success, and saw his opportunity when low-scale struggles in the Balkans erupted into full scale war in the 1850s. When the international situation had become less amenable to the Ottomans, the Russians dispatched their forces south, defeating the Ottomans in a number of key battles. At home, newspapers loyal to the Tsar announced that the retaking of Constantinople or “Tsargrad” for Orthodoxy was almost in sight which inspired a great deal of euphoria among the middle classes and the religious. However, following French intervention and an Ottoman victory at Çatalca, the Russians were forced to pull back some 100 kilometres where the front stabilised. The war had won vast swathes of territory for Russia’s Balkan Allies, though Russia herself had gained little even for the loss of over 50,000 men. In the end, Russia was left exhausted and indebted due to the conflict, and had little to show for it but some rather independently minded “client states” in the Balkans. In 1859, Greece signed an alliance with the British, ending any fiction that the Balkans were the Russian sphere of influence that was hoped for.


Tsar Konstantin’s popularity never quite recovered from this setback. Unrest in the countryside was on the rise in the 1850s, and under pressure from reformists as well as the peasantry themselves, the Tsar finally followed the lead of the rest of Europe and abolished Serfdom in 1860. However, Russian peasants were still not free in the sense that those elsewhere in Europe were, as they remained tied to the village. Although this went some way toward resolving the tensions that existed in Russia, it did less to solve the problem of Russia’s growing foreign debt, or the exhaustion of her army. When Europe appeared to be on the brink of a general war in 1861, Russia was once again in no condition to be a serious player in the conflict, and it was to be this continued rehabilitation that was to sting the Russian psyche for many years to come.

​

* * * * * *

​

Author's Notes - Historically, the Balkan Kingdoms had a difficult time actually building nations. With an earlier birth, and growth into Ottoman territory, these difficulties have been far more severe than OTL. Rather than fighting each other for the scraps gained from the Ottomans, the Balkan Powers will have to struggle to hold onto what they have and prevent their states from falling apart into warlordism. This is likely to have its own significance for the development of national identities in the Balkans.

Russia appears once again to have rolled the dice at the wrong time. Cheated out of the great prize of Constantinople, it remains to be seen what Russia will do in the future. Further expansion into Europe is likely to provoke a reaction, so any expansion on the part of Russia will likely have to be timed well to exploit division on the continent. Despite Russia's setbacks though, she has undertaken a few key reforms a bit earlier than OTL. With the Ottomans destroyed as a Great Power to the south, future expansion may be directed further east in China, or dare I say south in the direction of Persia. All depends on how well Russia can exploit her growing resources.​

 

[Nassirisimo]

Frederick Cregan: A History of Modern Europe

The German States​

The restoration of the “Old Order” in Germany appeared to mark a great defeat for the hopes of nationalists. The Frankfurt Parliament was powerless to prevent the advances of French troops on German territory, and ultimately the German Princes were more attached to their crowns than any German national ideal. With the defeat of the Austrians and British and the restoration of French domination in Germany, it appeared as though the National Movement had been dealt a crushing blow. And yet these events were somewhat deceiving. The “Old Order” was never restored in full in Germany, with hundreds of states which characterised the former Holy Roman Empire consolidated into 27 different states, with Prussia, Saxony, Hesse and Bavaria confirmed as the largest German states. Austrian influence had been pushed out of Germany, and the German kings and princes had turned their backs on the incipient force of German Nationalism.


However, the allure of Nationalism was not forgotten about. Instead, the growing middle classes were attracted to the movement, and it became a focal point for anger not only toward the French and their domineering policy toward Germany, but towards the reactionary German rulers. German Nationalism became overwhelmingly a middle class and bourgeois movement, solidly republican and increasingly sympathetic to a truly democratic government. The seemingly radical turn of the movement in the 1840s and 50s caused much in the way of alarm in the German states, who invested ever more resources into secret police to shut down Nationalist associations and parties. In the decades between 1829 and 1861, an estimated 200,000 Germans were imprisoned for political reasons, and another 100,000 exiled. The vast numbers of people involved point toward both the popularity of German Nationalist movements, as well as the huge resources involved in trying to suppress the movements. Although the governments of the German States attempted some rear-guard concessions such as the abolition of serfdom in the 1830s and limited representative bodies, the movement had become irrevocably opposed to the Ancien Regime by the 1850s, and nationalist pamphlets routinely called for the formation of a federal and republican German state.


Whilst political tensions grew, so did the economy of Germany. Mirroring events that had already happened in Britain and to a lesser extent, Northeast France, industrialization began to take hold of the German economy in areas such as the Ruhr. Despite its strategically vulnerable and politically unclear position, the region was steadily becoming an industrial powerhouse due to the huge amount of coal that could be mined there. By 1860 2 million short tons of coal were mined in the Ruhr valley and that number was steadily increasing. However, the difficulty of maintaining enterprises across state lines hampered growth in the region, and contributed considerably to capitalist antipathy for the existing political situation. As German entrepreneurs looked toward the thriving industrial regions of Lancashire, Wallonia and Bohemia, they were increasingly envious of their success in comparison to the Ruhr, and for many the cause was the system of states that divided the Ruhr and the reactionary governments of those states [1]. Even railway building was hampered by the need to coordinate with several different governments to build relatively short lines. While industrialization brought tensions to many countries, these were not quite as acute as in Germany where it mixed with an existing resentment. Germany was growing economically, though it was beginning to be left behind by its neighbours.


However, the East of Germany, comprising of 3 of Germany’s big 4 states, fared somewhat better. The abolition of old feudal divisions left these states with little in the way of internal barriers, improving trade and allowing for the integration of market economies. Saxony in particular began to build up a considerable amount of industry, though this was still insignificant compared to neighbouring Bohemia and Silesia. There was a great deal of agricultural growth in Prussia, where the Junkers attempted to devote themselves ever more to improving the profitability of their lands, though this contributed somewhat to the general view of Prussia as a land of “Bumpkins”, with “Two feet in the soil and two in the Bible”. Whereas the somewhat better economic situation did save East German society from the stagnation and related tensions found in the West, it was not enough to stop the growth of Nationalist parties and societies, as well as the flow of emigration out of Germany.


[1] – The economic weakness of the Ruhr compared to OTL will have some grave ramifications for Germany’s economic future.

* * * * * *

The Hapsburg Empire​

Austria found herself at a crossroads following the defeat against France in the German War. Although she had fought with honour, particularly at the Battle of Regensburg where she experienced something of a valiant defeat, it had nevertheless been demonstrated that Austria was most certainly not a power equal to that of France’s. This realisation led to a great deal of soul-searching amongst Austria’s elite. Some, the Emperor Karl included, wanted to re-emphasise Austria’s status as a dynastic state centred on the Hapsburg family. Others wanted to try and regain a position of leadership within Germany, and a handful wanted to reimagine the empire as a polity of multinational cooperation. For quite a number of years following the war, it was the Emperor Karl and his faction that won out. Reformists such as the “Hero of Regensburg” Franz Karl, were marginalised within the court, and Ancien Regime forces such as the Catholic Church were given a larger role within areas such as education. However, the period of reaction could not last forever, and following liberal riots in Vienna the Emperor chose to bring Franz Karl back into his inner circle.


Although some of Franz Karl’s proposals were seen as simply too radical, some concessions were made to him and the growing liberal middle class of the Austrian Empire. Education was secularised, and a state-funded school system was built. In 1843 serfdom was abolished, as were other feudal obligations and dues, and this was followed in 1844 by the creation of an elected parliament, albeit one that was still rather weak when compared to the British and French parliaments. Subsequently, Franz Karl, dissuaded from pursuing any further political or social reform in the Empire, was encouraged instead to reform the army. Many of the concessions made by the Hapsburgs in this era were large, though the fundamental nature of the Austrian state was not changed. As a result, the growing numbers of nationalists in the Empire, particularly the Hungarians and Czechs, were still greatly unsatisfied with the situation, and agitated for more autonomy within the Empire. In 1855, a breakout of riots, mainly among students, was met with bullets as the emperor sent in the army to quell unrest in the Empire.


This harsh action taken against protestors did not meet with approval abroad. In France and Britain, public opinion was inflamed at the stories that Austrian troops had killed dozens of civilians. The governments of both countries had a certain interest in seeing the status quo maintained, with the French viewing the Austrians as a useful foil against the Russians and the British still viewing Austria as their preferred partner within Europe. As such, the voices of protest against Austria’s harsh crackdown were limited to newspapers such as “The Times” and “Le National”. However, among a younger generation of liberal politicians in both countries, questions were raised about whether the realpolitik of preserving the “Jail of Europe” was morally justifiable. However, internal pressure only grew further, especially following war in the Balkans, which saw the multinational territory of the Ottoman Empire ripped apart and replaced with smaller nation states which the Hungarians in particular saw as a model for their own potential state. It appeared that nationalism within the subject peoples of the Empire was building into a potentially lethal force. When Archduke Franz Karl was finally exiled in 1859 following his “Five Crowns” report which called for a redistribution of power within the Empire, “Young Hungary” resolved to try and establish an independent Hungarian State.


However, it would be simplistic to characterise the period as a simple struggle between the reaction and the reformists. Culturally and in many other respects, these were boom times for the Empire, and Vienna in particularly benefited greatly from a program of urban renewal and modernization which saw the city walls transformed into the “Ringstrasse” and great new boulevards laid through the city. The period also saw the beginnings of an industrial revolution in Bohemia and Silesia, as coal production increased and manufacturing began to thrive, especially following the removal of internal barriers to trade. Although not quite as swift in as the economic growth of Britain and France, Austria nevertheless was able to outpace other Central European countries, especially in the Western part of the Empire. Austria’s great power role was also confirmed following the Balkan War, during which she had played a key part in the peace conference, enabling the Ottoman Empire to maintain defensible borders within Europe and to avoid a conflagration between the expanded Balkan States.

* * * * * *

Poland​

In the struggles of 1828-1829, Poland’s independence had not come under serious threat. The Russians were still far too exhausted from their previous war with the Ottomans, and both the French and Austrians had an understanding that an independent Poland would be far preferable to the alternative. Thus, Poland managed to emerge from the struggles with relatively little change, and perhaps most importantly, without any chastisement for its moral support of the German National Liberals. Her independence was guaranteed by both all major European powers, Russia excepted, and with the majority of her population Polish (around 60% of the total), she did not quite have the problems with internal divisions that the Austrians to the South had. Although the Lithuanians had lost some of the influence they had once wielded, both they and the other minorities of Poland were well aware that they had more political freedoms than in neighbouring countries, and there was no mirror of the nationalist movements seen to the south in Austria.


Without Austria’s national problem, or without such a strong reactionary impulse in her court, Poland was able to move more along the lines of Britain and France rather than Eastern Europe. Toward the middle of the 19th century, the Polish Sejm gained ever more prerogatives, especially following the death of King Michał in 1846 and the accession of his daughter Ewelina. Most historians have picked this as the point in which the Polish Sejm became the primary power of the country. Although Ewelina was an intelligent woman who took an active interest in politics and current affairs, she was an ardent admirer of the British Parliamentary system and considered it improper for a monarch to be the leader of the country’s governments. Although she maintained close ties with Polish Prime Ministers, in particular Stefan Bukowski, the true power in Poland from the 1840s onward was with the Prime Minister in the Sejm. From 1851 to 1866, Poland was dominated by the Conservative Party, led by Bukowski with the exception of a brief retirement in 1863. For the most part, the party defended the large landowners of Poland as well as the Catholic Church, which was able to maintain its control of the educational institutions of the country.


The landowners in Poland experienced a great time of prosperity, as the growth of the 1820s in the Polish economy continued. Agricultural modernization continued to spread in the country, enriching the landowners rather than the peasants, many of whom barely saw any rise in their incomes despite the growth of agricultural productivity. By 1850, Poland was exporting more wheat than any other European country, and yet the countryside’s population had stagnated due to emigration to Poland’s cities. Within these cities, the expansion of the industrial urban economy was beginning to take place, spearheaded by Jewish emigrants from nations such as Russia, who found the relatively liberal Polish state a far more attractive place to settle than the harsh rule of the Tsar. An “Industrial Belt” from Warsaw to Krakow was emerging, powered by the rich coal reserves of Poland and taking advantage of the relatively low wages required by Polish workers. The railways began to link Poland up to her neighbours as well as its port of Danzig (Gdansk). Between 1845 and 1860, Poland’s railway network had gone from being non-existent to possessing over 4,000 kilometres of track, the most extensive network in Central Europe. Although her cities were small and economy unindustrialized when compared to the West, Poland was developing a modern society and economy that would come to challenge the established order of landowners and the church in the Sejm.

* * * * * *

The Italian Peninsula​

After the death of Charles Emmanuel and the total defeat of Piedmont and the incipient Italian National Movement at Milan, it appeared that both Italian Nationalism as well as the Count of Asti’s hope for a stronger Piedmont were both dead in the water. Although France had stopped Austria from making territorial gains at Piedmont’s or the largely defunct Republic of Venice’s expense, Austrian influence was stamped upon the Italian Peninsula. The rulers of smaller Italian states, traumatised by the events of the revolutions, looked to Austria as a defender of the status quo in Italy. With the exception of the Papal States, and the Bourbon Dynasty in Naples, the Italian Peninsula was dominated by an Austria whose main objective was to keep the situation much as it was in the 18th century and to suppress any form of liberalism and nationalism. In Piedmont, the Austrians weakened the government by collecting an indemnity imposed at the end of the war, as well as influencing the curriculum taught in state schools. Through the 1830s, Piedmont appeared to be little more than a client state of the Austrians while it seemed as if it was Naples to the South which was becoming the greatest of the Italian states.


However, the ground began to shift in the 1840s. In Piedmont, the “October Days” of 1843 saw the pro-Austrians in government collapse, and a parliament was elected in which Italian National Liberals were a majority. Demands among parliamentarians and the press for a vigorous national programme were moderated before actually becoming policy, but there was a noticeable shift. Although he would die in 1852 still in exile in London, the Count of Asti wrote approvingly of the Italian National Liberals regularly in the British press and reinvented himself as an ardent Nationalist, in part perhaps to punish Austria for the “Carthaginian Peace” imposed on Piedmont. Although the National Liberals were restrained in the measures they could undertake due to fear of Austrian reprisal, there was nevertheless some progress made. In the 1850s, the diplomatic situation began to improve as Carlo Caretti, the Piedmontese foreign minister from 1854, leveraged public opinion in Britain to produce a break in the Anglo-Austrian Alliance as far as Italy was concerned, enabling Piedmont to once again strengthen her army and fund pro-Nationalist press organs in other areas of Italy. The pessimism of Italian political culture had by the 1850s given way to a renewed Liberal Nationalism that the king of Piedmont appeared unable to stand against.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - A bit of a long update, but I really had a lot to get in here. Without even a strong Prussian state, Germany is being even more held back by her disunity than she was in OTL. Certainly, with part of her OTL industrial region in French hands, industrialization and economic development will be retarded somewhat. In Austria, the nationalists that dogged her in OTL are rearing their heads again, though due to the different circumstances things may not work out as they did.

Poland however is having something of a happier time than the Poland of our world. Free and relatively forward-thinking, Poland is undergoing a period of growth and in comparison to Germany she is doing rather well. At the rate things are going, Poland may become the industrial area of Eastern Europe alongside Bohemia and Silesia. And in Italy, Piedmont struggles to regain the status she had lost, though mounting problems in Austria may soon give her an opportunity to make up for lost ground.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Frederick Cregan; A History of Modern Europe

Political and Economic Change in Great Britain​

The coup of Filipe of Cadiz in Spain did little to change Britain’s strategic situation. Spain had been a loose ally of France prior to the coup, and the alliance was only somewhat strengthened following the rise of the National Liberals there. However, the perception of the rolling French triumph in helping Filipe to the throne, and of securing Spain as a key French ally, was nothing short of political disaster for the Earl of Derby’s successor, the Duke of Cambridge. Originally chosen for his strong stance on free trade, much of 1828 was spent trying to resist Tory calls to take a hard line against France as she prepared to intervene in the mounting chaos in Germany. Britain did not join other European countries in recognising the Frankfurt parliament in August, nor did she react when France mobilized the following month. With public opinion convinced that a French invasion of Germany was imminent, Cambridge could no longer resist the weight of the opposition against him, and after the collapse of the Whigs in Parliament the King appointed a Tory government led by the relatively young rising star of the party, Edward Colne. Although Edward did send troops to Germany, the French victories against the British expeditionary force, the German Parliamentary forces and the Austrians left Britain’s position untenable.


Edward Colne did not survive as Prime Minister in the aftermath of the British defeat, though the Tories remained in power and he was shifted to the position of Chief Secretary of Ireland. The Tory government of the 1830s was based on two unshakeable positions, namely the defence of the landed interests of Britain against the urbanites within and against the cheaper producers without, as well as a stern opposition to French hegemony on the Continent and expansion outside of Europe. In this latter endeavour, they actually met with more success than the Whigs had done previously. British support was key to the successful independence movement of Quebec, and it has been long supposed that the British nurtured Louisiana’s pretentions at independence subsequently. In Australia, an agreement was brokered with the French that guaranteed much of the east of the continent for British settlers. The attempts on the part of the Tories to contain France outside of Europe were actually successful to quite some degree. While French domination within much of Western and Central Europe was something of an unavoidable fact, it seems as if Kevin Waterford was correct in stating that “with the resources that she was left with, Britain did an admirable job in combating French hegemony in this era”.


Also of interest was the intensifying naval race between Britain and France. Attempts to gain naval supremacy were made by both sides, though the British tended to come off better except for a brief period in the 1850s when iron cladding and steam rendered previous ships obsolete. French attempts to secure exclusive naval basing rights in South Africa and Malta failed, and their latter attempts to overthrow The Knights in Valetta were thwarted by a hastily signed British guarantee of their independence [1]. The hope on both sides was that in any future war, they would be able to decisively defeat the enemy and cut them off from their overseas empires. However, the French hope of keeping Britain out of continental affairs in this way became more of a forlorn hope as the 1850s came to a close, and the thriving British economy was able to pay for a navy significantly larger than France’s. For the time being at least, France’s attempts to challenge Britain on the waves was thwarted and this represented a threat to France’s ambitions.


Internally, British politics were greatly affected by the changing social and economic circumstances of the country. Although industrialisation was now beginning to spread in France, Britain’s economy still maintained a significant lead and was growing at a faster pace than any continental economy. The growing affluence of Britain’s cities led to tensions with the traditional landowning political class, and political tension was particularly marked over agricultural tariffs which protected the interests of landowners but kept food prices high, raising costs for factories through wages. The “Great Tariff War” that had become an increasingly significant issue was finally brought to an end with a series of free-trade reforms in the 1840s, which removed the tariffs and marked a new epoch in which the increasingly self-confident cities of the United Kingdom had more of a voice in government. After the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1824, and a formal codification of the Constitution a decade later, the political franchise of the United Kingdom was now more geographically representative, though only 20% of the male population had the vote by 1834. Following these seismic changes, the party system settled into the Conservative Party, dominated by landowners and rural interests and the Liberals, who found their support from urban manufacturers and the growing middle class.


These emerging political parties differed in some key ways. The Liberals supported a “Free Market” approach to governance, with low tariffs and government intervention in the economy, while the Conservatives went some way toward protecting rural areas, earning great scorn in the 1840s for the significant government aid provided to the Irish following the potato blight [2]. Although popular amongst rural constituencies, the Liberals were able to exploit this focus to paint the Conservatives as a reactionary party of “has-beens”, and with their general election triumph in 1849 were able to consign the Conservatives to opposition for over a decade. It would not be until the growing tensions in Europe in 1860 shepherded a nervous public toward the Conservatives under Colne that the Liberal hold on power would be weakened. The Tories, it seemed, had found a different route to power with the emphasis on international strength and patriotism.


[1] – Yes, the Knights Hospitillar are still alive and kicking. At the rate they are going, they may end up as one of those strange European reminders of the Ancien Regime


[2] – The Potato Blight is not quite as devastating as it was in OTL thanks to the provision of aid by the British government for affected citizens. While hundreds of thousands have died and emigrated, it has not hit Ireland’s population as hard as it did in OTL. This fact, and the absence of the famine as the defining moment of British rule in Ireland will have some big effects in the future.

* * * * * *

France after Henri the Great​

France had launched her war to prevent the unification of Germany for a number of reasons. The aging King Henri had established France as the hegemonic power of Western Europe in the 1800s, and was loath to see this position threatened by the rise of a German State that could potentially ally with either the Austrians or worse, the British, to end this French domination. However, there were also a number of internal political reasons for the war. It was hoped that a decisive defeat of the incipient German Parliament in Frankfurt would discourage Germans on the French-ruled left bank of the Rhine from nationalism. It was also hoped that a successful war would serve to bind the French public, increasingly dissatisfied with the Bourgeoisie nature of the regime. The French King had long seen wars as a powerful tool for popularising his regime at home, part National Liberal and part Ancien Regime. This strange contradiction had managed to work in part due to the personality of Henri, but the first cracks in the French system appeared following his death. His successor Louis was determined to continue this path, but his first years in power were marked by setbacks, with Quebec gaining independence.


The main threat to the French monarchy however came from within, and the famed “Paris Mob” was feared greatly by the king and his government. For a while in the 1830s following the loss of New France, a move back to Versailles was considered, but Louis ultimately decided to remain in the Tuileries. As a prince, Louis hoped for something of an expansionist policy but as king he was forced mainly to focus on consolidation, a task he undertook with somewhat less competence than his father. More so than Henri, Louis was forced to rely on ministers who were often appointed from the elected Estates General of France. Throughout the reign of Louis, the cabinet were increasingly appointed from the Second Estates of the Commoners, though rather than representing any increase in the influence of “The People”, this represented the growing strength of France’s Bourgeoisie. As the industrialisation of France began to pick up pace, businessmen, factory owners and merchants began to matter more in economic terms than the traditional landowning aristocracy. Unlike in Britain however, the French Bourgeoisie did not envision a small state, but rather a large one which would support the development of infrastructure and maintain a large army to secure the nation.


This more muscular vision of government was a defining characteristic of National Liberalism, viewing the state as a guarantor of individual freedom rather than a threat to it. The difference was that while Henri had in some ways guided the development of the ideology, it took on a life of its own in the reign of Louis. In the elections of 1848, the National Liberals ran as a coherent party for the first time, revealing a programme which was based around the values of patriotism, prosperity and liberty. While broadly supportive of Louis’ governments, this party was not the arm of the king in the Estates which the earlier and looser faction had been, and publically disagreed with the king on the Louisiana Question. Despite this, the French Estates at this time was not the openly disobedient chamber that it would later become, as the Conservatives and National Liberals both supported the French Monarchy to various degrees and Republicans made up a very small portion of the Estates overall. In the 1850s, there was something of a resurgence of the Catholics in French politics as well, though efforts to move education back into the Church’s control ultimately came to nothing.


The most significant changes in France during these days however were the social, economic and to some extent cultural changes that were a result of the Industrial Revolution. Although it had spread to North East France by the 1830s, Industrialization picked up steam in the 1840s and ‘50s in particular as increases in demand as well as decreases in the cost of raw materials such as coal led to a great increase in the industrial production of the country. Although absolute figures remained somewhat behind Great Britain, France raced far ahead of any other Continental European country in both manufacturing output and the production of coal. In particular, Wallonia and the Nord Pas-de-Calais grew tremendously as huge reserves of coal were found there. The landscape now began to look like that of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, as coal mines and mills dotted the region and turned the traditional peasant society into a modern one of industrial workers. This growth in manufacturing produced an enormous amount of wealth in French society, which catapulted Paris into being the second financial city in the world after London. Many mill-owners built grand houses in the affluent west of Paris, further adding to the allure of the city which was entering a golden age as the 1860s dawned.

* * * * * *

Spain under the National Liberals​

Upon the coup of Filipe the VI, there was a great hope in Spain that a corner had been turned, and that the long national decline had at last come to an end. Reformists in Spain hoped that the Spanish State could be reorganized along French lines, that her remaining colonies could be consolidated and that Spain would be put on the path to regaining her rightful place among the European Great Powers. However, Filipe and the Spanish National Liberals would soon find out that it would take more than ambitious ideas to improve the lot of Spain. The Spanish government’s budget was seriously unbalanced, with the government receiving less revenue adjusted for population than even Sardinia and Austria. Her efforts to hold onto her American colonies had near bankrupted her, as well as shattering her prestige. In addition to these problems, Spain found herself suffering from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, as British textiles soon made Catalonia’s thriving cottage industries uncompetitive, producing a great deal of unemployment and consequent dissatisfaction among the Catalans.


Filipe’s solutions to Spain’s problems were very much inspired by the reforms that France had undertook more than twenty years prior. The efforts toward rationalisation and secularisation that had begun in the Bourbon Reforms were renewed, with education now being the remit of the state rather than the church, and the Spanish Inquisition being ended once and for all. The administration was centralised and the Cortes was reformed to be something of a more representative institution, though only mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands had representation in the body, leaving Spain’s Caribbean possessions and the Philippines without a voice. There was nothing unusual in this, and with the enormous size of Spain’s Empire it would have been quite impractical for representation of an Empire this large. However, combined with efforts to bring the colonies under stronger Spanish control with little thought given to a native voice in government, this produced a significant amount of unrest in the colonies, even if they were relatively well-governed. While Spain saw no major revolts in her colonies until later in the 19th century, an outpouring of anti-Spanish literature in Cuba and the Philippines in particular speak to a deep set dissatisfaction with the situation.


Although a general rise in revenues from the colonies went some way toward improving the state of Spain’s finances, the National Liberal government struggled to eliminate the deficit. Unwilling to reduce the size of the Spanish Army or Navy, the Spanish Government attempted to sell off Church lands to raise money. However, although the still strongly Catholic right in Spain had tolerated the secularisation of education, the attempted requisitioning of Church land was a step too far, and the banner of rebellion was raised, somewhat ironically by a supposed illegitimate son of the previous king. “Antonio’s War” lasted for 4 years, with Antonio relying on the strong support of conservative Castilian peasants to resist the imposition of forced sales of Church lands. However, by 1851 the last embers of resistance had died out, and Spain was once again at peace. Ironically, although the government had managed to crush resistance to her sales of Church lands, the expenses incurred by the rebellion had more or less cancelled out any monetary gain. Tensions remained high, and hopes for the revitalisation of the Spanish state began to peter out as the 1850s came to a close. Spain remained divided politically, backwards economically and less relevant to the game of European power politics.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - While Britain is powering ahead as in OTL in terms of industry, her international position is much more precarious due to French hegemony on the Western European mainland. However, the French colossus is not quite as invincible as it appears. Although King Henri managed to create a "Cossack Republicanism" to use Napoleon's parlance, the machine which he built appears to be a rather difficult one to steer, and his successors may have less luck maintaining royal power. While Spain has taken some steps toward building a modern state, she is finding it very difficult to utilise her resources in the same way that France has done.

I have been thinking a lot about the direction of the timeline, and I want to try to do things a bit differently with the next cycle. There will be more updates with a more broadly inter-regional and even global outlook, and I will try to make an effort to learn how to make better maps. I will be in Bahrain for a while after the 26th of August, and will be without a computer so there will be a lack of updates I'm afraid. Hopefully I can get 1829-1862 finished before then though.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Westminster, 4th of March, 1860​

“Well, this will certainly get bloody before it is over”

“Indeed Sir. I thought you might want to know before the papers find out tomorrow morning”

William Burns slumped into his chair. He had heard rumours of unrest in the Hapsburg Empire for several weeks now, but with the news that the Hungarians had declared independence, it suddenly appeared to be a rather unfortunate time to be Foreign Minister.

He turned to his underling. “Does anyone else in the cabinet know yet?”

“Not quite yet, I believe it is your prerogative sir. If you want me to…”

“No. It is already rather late in the evening, and I do think even the Prime Minister will have retired by now. I need to collect myself”

“Will that be all?”

“Yes, thank you Richard”

Richard nodded in acknowledgement and left the room. As soon as he was sure he was alone, Burns shambled over to his cabinet and poured himself a brandy. He was not accustomed to drinking this late at night, but nor was he accustomed to receiving bad news so late.

“There will be war, I am certain. But who will fight who? Will the Russians support the Hungarians? The French? Who do we support?”

His head was swimming before he even took a sip of his drink. He took one quick shot, downing the contents of the glass.

“I feel quite drunk already”

Burns shambled once again up his stairs to bed. There was a long, long day ahead of him.

* * * * * *​

Although almost seventy years of age, the Hero of Regensburg still had the upright bearing of a true soldier. His stiff and rigid posture belied the flexible character which had won him fame and seen him exiled from his native Austria. For a year now he had been far away from Vienna, living in a nondescript house in Belgravia. While his excellent English and reputation as a Francophobe had won him some admiration from the London Society, his somewhat haughty but typically Hapsburg demeanour had distanced him somewhat.


But he was visiting Downing Street today not for a social occasion, but for the morning’s news that the Austrian Empire had split. The British Prime Minister, Edward Colne, had reportedly flung himself into a panic at the news that Britain’s main continental partner was descending into chaos, and the Foreign Secretary Sir William Burns had turned to the former Archduke Franz Karl partially to make sense of the situation in Austria, but partially to see what Franz Karl was planning personally.


“Thank you for joining us on such short notice your highness, perhaps I can have tea brought?”

Franz Karl smiled. “Coffee would be most welcome”


The Prime Minister nodded at the attendant. “Please, do take a seat. I trust you have read the morning papers?”

“An expected turn of events. Some of the more radical elements amongst the Hungarians have been anticipating this for years”

“So perhaps your brother is prepared for this turn of events?”

Franz Karl scoffed. “He would struggle to prepare for breakfast, let alone an uprising amongst the Hungarians. His chancellor though”

“The Count of Burgenland?”

“Yes, that’s the one. New blood I presume, I must confess that I am not familiar with him from my days in the court. I suppose we shall see the quality of this new Chancellor in the weeks to come”

“But” Franz Karl thought, “I bet the man is a fucking peacock, prim and proper but no substance beyond the show if I know the kind of official my brother likes”

Prime Minister Colne nodded. Did he sense something hidden within Franz Karl? Jealousy? No, a man with as much experience as him was far beyond jealousy, it seemed like something else. Disappointment, despair, and perhaps frustration? This seemed to be closer to the truth.

“And what about this leader of the Hungarians, Lajos Somogyi I think? We do have a few files we had gathered while he was in living in Paris, but we didn’t quite suspect that he was leading this movement”

Burns interjected “Some of us in the foreign office think he may be something of a compromise candidate, a figurehead if you will. Many among the Young Hungarians disagree with the ideas held by others in their movement. For a while, we were convinced that they would tear themselves apart, but with his majesty removed from the picture, I suppose they thought it was a good time to strike”

Franz Karl nodded his head in agreement “What he said seems to be the consensus of men in the know in Vienna as well. If the Hungarians are disunited for now, it may not last if the Austrian army comes to put down their insurrection”

Colne stood up from his chair, and paced slowly away from the two men, turning his back as if frightened of his next question “So, you both think we have something to fear here?” He turned, to see both men nodding, filling the room with an eerie silence.

* * * * * *

The Dawn of the 1860 Revolutions​

Tensions had steadily built up in Hungary throughout the 1850s. Both between the Austrian Government and the Hungarian Nationalists, as well as between the Hungarian Nationalists themselves. While the more extreme wing wished to break up the Austrian Empire entirely, replacing it with smaller nation states, those on the other end of the National Liberal spectrum wished to see the Centralist Austrian Empire replaced with a confederation of different nationalities, led by the Hungarians but with wide liberties for all peoples. In Vienna, the majority of the court wanted to deal harshly to any challenge of Hapsburg rule, and although some more far-sighted leaders such as Archduke Franz Karl attempted to moderate the policies of the government, the policy towards the Young Hungarians and their affiliated parties such as the Young Czechs and the Romanian Nationals. Thousands were imprisoned or exiled in a forlorn attempt to stem the nationalist tide, but the absolutism of the Hapsburgs only pushed the nationalities toward aspirations of independence. Following the suppression of the 1855 riots, even German-speaking Liberals began to gravitate more toward the informal groupings of the Liberal Nationalists throughout the Empire than toward the autocratic but German-speaking Monarchy.​

For those left in the court who wanted to avoid what they saw as an impending revolution, hopes became dimmer. When the Archduke Franz Karl presented a report which argued for the implementation of fairly weak regional parliaments elected by universal suffrage, the moderates in the Austrian court had moved beyond the pale of what the Emperor was prepared to tolerate, and the Archduke was exiled to London. For the moderate National Liberals across the Empire, this was a signal that any hope of compromise was a futile one, and the movements for independence were given much in the way of momentum. The Hungarians unilaterally elected a parliament in the winter of 1859, and were followed in 1860 by the Czechs and the Croatians. Finally, the situation exploded in the March of 1860, when the Hungarian Parliament declared independence from Austria, creating an enormous rift in the Middle of one of Europe’s great powers. For almost a week, there was no reaction from Vienna, and Hungarian units deserted the K.U.K Army until the Emperor finally condemned the Hungarian “rebellion”, promising quickly to put an end to the “insurrection”.


However, amongst the other peoples of the Empire, sympathy lay with the Hungarians. The new Hungarian state had been articulating an alternate vision for the smaller nations of Central Europe, envisioning a loose union which provided for the common defence, but which enabled national aspirations to be realised. The Croats, already inspired by the example of their South Slavic cousins in Serbia and Bulgaria in creating Nation-States, joined the Hungarian-dominated “Confederation of the Danube” on the 12th of June, 1860, and were followed by Slovakia on the 29th of June, Silesia on the 10th of July and by Romania on the 1st of August. The Hapsburg Monarch now appeared to be on the verge of disintegration, and on the 10th of August, a full-blown revolution began on the streets of Vienna, calling for the deposition of Emperor Karl. The Austrian Empire, the “Gendarme of Europe” just months before was now on the verge of total collapse, its Empire torn away from it and its people desperate for change. A storm was enveloping Europe, and it had begun in Hungary.

* * * * * *

Marylebone, 18th of August, 1860​

“So, I must ask you Franz, what are you plotting here?”

“Plotting?”

Burns had a wry smile across his face. “In the years I have known you here and in Vienna, I’ve never known you not to have some plan forming”

Franz Karl shrugged. “I’m an old man by now, and I think my good will among the court in Vienna is spent. I admit, I would like to have some kind of conspiracy to move the direction of events towards a place that I would want, but I am afraid that these days, I lack the ability”

“Well, I am privy to some information that may be of interest to the ‘Hero of Regensburg’, as it were”

“Oh?”

“Yes, my sources within the Schönbrunn tell me that your brother is planning on abdicating. Leaving in charge his eighteen year old son…”

Franz Karl’s face turned into an uncharacteristic smile, which he immediately tried to hide from his face. “Leaving in charge his eighteen year old son, who is perhaps the only one of my relatives who I am glad to know”

“So there is a chance for you to go back?”

“Now that would depend on how the court would see it, I can understand that some would be resentful, or suspicious of the overbearing uncle stepping out from the shadows”

“But surely your nephew would appreciate your presence, and your advice”

“Yes, that much is true”

“There are those in the Foreign Office who would certainly appreciate a strong friend of Britain once again as a voice in Austria”

Franz Karl had much to think about. If he returned to Austria, he would expose himself to risk. His reputation could be destroyed, his life would be at stake. But if he stayed? He dared not admit it, but the pull of his dynasty was true strong. The Hapsburg Monarchy had to be saved, even from itself.

* * * * * *

The Revolution Spreads
​

With all the tensions that had built up in Europe since the end of the last great coalition conflict, it was inevitable that individuals, groups and even nations would use the instability created by the Austrian Collapse to settle long-held scores and revise the settlement of the conflict. It only took two months after the declaration of Hungarian Independence for the revolution to spread to Venice, where once again the Medieval Republic headed by the Doge was unseated in a Nationalist uprising. This was an event that had been anticipated by the diplomatic circles of Europe, aware of the unpopularity of the Venetian Government, but more surprising were the mounting tensions in Germany. For three decades, the remnants of the old order in Germany had kept a lid on nationalist and liberal movements, but with these groups making progress in the rest of Europe, the pressure within Germany became too much to resist. In Prussia, troops were ordered to fire on demonstrators in Konigsberg, but refused. This led to the slaughter of Prussian officers, and the unprecedented warning to the King that the army could not be guaranteed to protect his person. The Prussian king fled to exile in Paris on the December of 1860s, the first German King to be unseated by revolutionary sentiment.


He would not be the first. In February, the Kings of Saxony and Hesse were next to be dethroned, and in March the King of Bavaria was hung from the balcony of his palace. Similar fates met the princes and rulers of the smaller German states, and there was an initial fear that Germany would descend into anarchy. This was the point at which the National Liberals came in, attempting to stem the growing chaos in Germany by convening a German Parliament once again, in direct contravention of the treaty which had ended the last war. Initially, a French mobilization was dissuaded, with the interim German Prime Minister warning the French that the Second Frankfurt Parliament was all that was holding back the spectre of a properly leftist revolution in Germany and general war in Europe. The armies that had refused to protect their kings could stomach protecting a democratic parliament, and swore allegiance to the government in Frankfurt, which felt secure enough to declare a German Republic in the May of 1861. For the moment, the situation in Germany appeared to be stabilising, and it looked as though Europe would not descend into a general war as feared by some.


However, only two months later, revolutionary sentiment spread to Italy. The “Red Shirts” of the Italian Republican Guerrilla Francesco Raimondo launched a lightning campaign against the Piedmontese King, quickly overcoming the demoralised Piedmontese army and declaring an Italian Republic in Milan [1]. The spectre of radical republicanism, curbed somewhat by the moderation of the Frankfurt Parliament, once again struck fear not only in France, but in Austria and Britain too. Alongside a heightening of tensions between Austria and Hungary, Europe in the July of 1861 was very much on the brink of a war the likes of which had not been seen in decades.


[1] – Raimondo of course is a fairly distant cousin of OTL’s Giuseppe Garibaldi. We are going on the assumption here that some of Garibaldi's awesomeness must have been genetic.

* * * * * *

Author's Notes - And the stage is set for a resumption of a general European War. Austria is falling apart at the seams, Northern Italy is united under a Republican regime and the Ancien Regime cannot fight the revolution through fear of each other's motives. Although France may not have fell to revolution in the 1790s, Europe may still choke on the revolutionary spirit. We may also begin to see a decoupling between Nationalists and Liberals depending on how things go. Either way, Europe is going to see a lot of change.