From which point on did OTL become a Eurowank?
- Thread starter baltur2
- Start date
-
- Tags
- culture europe eurowank technology
It's not as easy as one might think it is, as one cannot simply compare continents to each other without regarding their strenghts and, in my humple opinion more important, issues. Europe was in different eras behind in different aspects, be it science or socio-economic affairs.
But I can't deny that Europe had many, many, many geographic advantages over other areas of the same size; complex river systems allowed for easy trade and the huge amount of resources, coal and iron in particular, allowed not only many products to be produced, but also gave rise to many wars and rivalries that in one way or another only gave more incentives to invest in science and power projection to gain an edge over the other.
And while Sub-Sahara Africa had to fight many geographic issues such as a marginal amount of navigable rivers, many East Asian nations, in particular China, grew increasingly more isolationist after the Mongol Storm which hindered cultural and scientific exchange between the nations of the world.
A PoD to stop all this is hard to give, not because it's impossible, but rather because "domination" is quite hard to define in terms of geopolitics. But in my view, the "easiest" PoD to destroy European hegemony over large swaths of the world is either to change its geography which is by definition ASB, or to
- Keep strong and huge states like France, Russia and the UK from forming by fragmenting them. Less manpower and less resources mean less influence on areas outside of Europe. Requires an early PoD before the 1000s, I suppose.
- Buff Europe's neighbours. Have the Turkic people like the Kipchaks or Khazars coalesce into larger nations with more authority given to a high king. Stop tribalism. Let the Mediterranean be a sea contested between Christians and Muslims. Give the natives of the New World immunity to the various diseases brought by Europeans by allowing them to get into contact with them prior to any serious European colonization endeavors. Etc.
- Stop absolutism and imperialism. Pretty self-explanatory.
If you lock out India and China which PODs are reasonably easy to do so then all Europe would have would be the New World. Even Africa would likely be contested, and perhaps the West Coast of the Americas.
India was in a particularly weak position with a power vacuum right as Europeans arrived. Have the Mughals be in their ascendancy or have already finished collapsing and it would be far tougher. India is also ripe for industralization which was already occuring in Bengal when the British arrived.
With China have Zheng He not be margainalized post-death, have any Emperor just wake up one morning and decide they want a tribute from every capital in the world, or have China broken up into many competiting states. If you do this in the year 1000 then I suspect China would be the one industralizing and dominating. As it was the lack of competition meant that there was little incentive to accept changes which would disrupt social order yet improve warfare capabilities.
India was in a particularly weak position with a power vacuum right as Europeans arrived. Have the Mughals be in their ascendancy or have already finished collapsing and it would be far tougher. India is also ripe for industralization which was already occuring in Bengal when the British arrived.
With China have Zheng He not be margainalized post-death, have any Emperor just wake up one morning and decide they want a tribute from every capital in the world, or have China broken up into many competiting states. If you do this in the year 1000 then I suspect China would be the one industralizing and dominating. As it was the lack of competition meant that there was little incentive to accept changes which would disrupt social order yet improve warfare capabilities.
Alternatively, wank a huge state like France until it becomes a China analogue, dominating everything nearby and able to turn its back on the rest of the world.
I think this is the key. Europe had a lot of states in competition with each other for supremacy and this spurred innovation and exploration. A single dominant European state has less incentive to sail around Africa and cross the Atlantic, etc.
Somehow make it so that the resource rich New World isn't mostly populated with neolithic peoples when the Europeans come knocking.
Deleted member 109224
The issue is that Europe's geography makes such a megastate unlikely to exist.
I can see France going to absorb much of Germany and Italy through a mix of direct annexation and achieving the Holy Roman Crown... but then what do you do about England, Scotland, Spain/Castille, Portugal, Sweden, and Denmark?
You marry into them. The Habsburgs managed this fairly well IOTL, to a point. Worked for Castile, Aragon, Hungary, and, for a while, Portugal, and might have worked for England.
Well, Austria, Portugal, and Spain have all been ruled by the same house, so...
Deleted member 109224
And the thing was so ungovernable that the Common House chopped the thing up.
So then you would say that the Eurowank started in 1689 when Aurangzeb finished his conquest of the Deccan, notwithstanding the innovative nature of the Maratha kingdom, which arose in rebellion? In any case Mughal hegemony over the subcontinent only lasted for a decade or so before local actors across the subcontinent, even in the Mughal heartland formed their own states, all of which competed for supremacy which spurred innovation and pushed them further along the path towards centralised states. Perhaps owing to Indian historiographys extreme bias to focusing on the empire controlling Delhi, to the exclusion of all others, the military and political innovations of the Deccan sultanates and Vijayanagara successor states are overlooked and people might get the impression that early modern India consisted of one important mega state that basically controlled the subcontinent, with smaller peripheral polities at the edges.
Last edited:
1750 is a much more reasonable date in my opinion- up to that point all the British are doing in India is trading, with no real indication of lasting political power to come. When a european power achieved political supremacy in a part of India is when I would classify the start of the eurowank because India was the first politically sophisticated and economically vibrant area Europeans managed to alter the government of to suit their economic interests.
For all the talk of the resources of the new world, this means nothing when trading from an equal position meant that most of that silver went either from the Spanish and Portuguese straight to Indian and Chinese governments or through the middlemen of the Dutch and English, and arguably strengthened eastern states more than western ones.
One interesting thesis I've been exploring recently is the concept that Europe, India, and Nusantara/Indonesia all had roundabouts the same key factors that could have propelled them into a world-dominating state: Each one of those areas were filled with naval powers, had strong trading traditions, major cities which were going through proto-industrialization (though in this aspect India and Europe were ahead of Nusantara) and exploring the world around them. The biggest issue was that Europe didn't have the same kind of massive invasions India and Nusantara suffered in the Late Medieval period. Starting in the 12th century, Muslim Persia and Turkish invaders would establish massive, sprawling states across the north of the continent and destabilize the states of the south. At the same time, states like the Cholas were beginning to poke around Sumatra, and after the fall of Srivijaya the states that remained were small, though by the time the Dutch were able to decisively gain an advantage over the archipelago these states were beginning to rapidly grow.
With all that in mind, I'd put the date at which Europe pulled ahead as 1242. The withdrawal of the Mongol forces and the end of the threat of a sustained invasion of the continent from outside forces allowed Europe to industrialize on it's own terms and having there be a net influx from the rest of the world into Europe. If Catholic Europe had been unable to stem the advance of the mongols, it is rather unlikely that Europe would have become as shockingly powerful as it was OTL. Arguably, the Mongol Invasions and the Black Death culled a burgeoning rise of a proto-industrial movement in the 1200s and 1300s.
On a more esoteric note, with a POD in the 1200's or 1100's the ranking of "regions" that could have become the home of dominant thassalocratic powers as per OTL:
With all that in mind, I'd put the date at which Europe pulled ahead as 1242. The withdrawal of the Mongol forces and the end of the threat of a sustained invasion of the continent from outside forces allowed Europe to industrialize on it's own terms and having there be a net influx from the rest of the world into Europe. If Catholic Europe had been unable to stem the advance of the mongols, it is rather unlikely that Europe would have become as shockingly powerful as it was OTL. Arguably, the Mongol Invasions and the Black Death culled a burgeoning rise of a proto-industrial movement in the 1200s and 1300s.
On a more esoteric note, with a POD in the 1200's or 1100's the ranking of "regions" that could have become the home of dominant thassalocratic powers as per OTL:
- Western Europe Europe
- Nusantara
- Southern India
- Coastal West Africa
- China
- An "outside bet" like East Africa or Mesoamerica
Force them into a tributary relationship, like China did with Korea and the like.
To be fair, a France + Germany + Italy state would be more territorially coherent than OTL's Hapsburg domains, so it would be easier to govern.
I would make an argument that Mongols was the single biggest reason why Europe succeeded ... that knocked out both China and the Middle East, but failed to more than frighten Europe (Sure, Rus got a bloody nose but at this point in time even calling the Lithuanian part of PLC, Europe was a stretch) and the Mongols didn't really try (nor would they probably have been able) to leverage it into a continent-spanning sorta-unified force, rather splintering into a number of tribes again that might well have fought each other as much as they fought their sedentary "civilised" neighbours.
That said ... there's 2 wildly different ways of 'suppressing' Europe ...
1. Splinter France and Britian, keep Iberia separated (and ideally hostile towards each other) and severely lower the authority of HRE.
2. Keep Francia unified, keeping France + Northern Italy + Germany + Catalonia + Benelux, under one ruler (optionally a duality with the Pope) and effectively pacify/tributate Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the small Anglo-saxon kinglets in Essex, Wessex, East Anglia ... possibly even Mercia) ... followed by somewhat of a introverted disinterest in everything beyond defending their borders
That said ... there's 2 wildly different ways of 'suppressing' Europe ...
1. Splinter France and Britian, keep Iberia separated (and ideally hostile towards each other) and severely lower the authority of HRE.
2. Keep Francia unified, keeping France + Northern Italy + Germany + Catalonia + Benelux, under one ruler (optionally a duality with the Pope) and effectively pacify/tributate Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the small Anglo-saxon kinglets in Essex, Wessex, East Anglia ... possibly even Mercia) ... followed by somewhat of a introverted disinterest in everything beyond defending their borders
Last edited: