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One of the old alternate history ideas is that Germany - by force, via financial means, or some other method - is able to take over control of the Philippines as a colony as opposed to the United States. So for the moment lets just assume that somehow this has come to pass. My main interest is what this means during the Great War and afterwards. The first question has to be who invades the Philippines- is it the Japanese, the Australians and New Zealanders or a combination of the two? That's going to affect how the spoils are divided, the Japanese are going to be wanting their share whilst the Australians and New Zealanders, plus the US to some extent aren't going to be too keen on Japan gaining more territory. If the Japanese got there first it's going to be much harder to tell them to go take a hike, the Philippines are also north of the equator so that's already holed the north-south split solution of our timeline. Rather than one single state could we perhaps see the emergence of two countries, a bit like North and South Korea, with Japan controlling the northern islands and the British or Australians the southern ones?

This leads into the second question, if not the Japanese then who will control the Philippines? They're a pretty sizeable. Now Australia and New Zealand looked after the gains in our timeline but they were fairly small, here would the British decide that the Philippines were too large and important for the Australians to take care of, or would they again effectively farm it out to them? The other interesting thing to consider is how the Australians might go about administrating the place. First the Spanish, then twenty odd years of the Germans and finally fifteen years or so of the Australians should make for a rather interesting cultural mix.
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