How much of a wank was OTL?

Wank is a relative term. One with two common meanings, in my experience. Either you compare to OTL, or you compare to other nations/people. Since you're talking about OTL, the first definition is meaningless. And since you seem to be talking about humanity as a whole, the second is equally useless.
 
I can think of three right off the bat:

1) That the Romans invited the crusaders (4th Crusade) to Constantinople in the early 1200s, then weirdly didn’t pay them after having talked about paying them, at which point the crusaders sacked the city. We think of the eastern Roman Empire as Byzantium, but they thought of themselves as Romans.

2) That the descendants of Genghis Khan seemed to alternate between awesome conquerers and hopeless drunks, and no group of elders or regional leaders rose up to assert political power?

3) That following the successful sea voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the 1400s, China weirdly turns inward?
 
I can think of three right off the bat:

1) That the Romans invited the crusaders (4th Crusade) to Constantinople in the early 1200s, then weirdly didn’t pay them after having talked about paying them, at which point the crusaders sacked the city. We think of the eastern Roman Empire as Byzantium, but they thought of themselves as Romans.

2) That the descendants of Genghis Khan seemed to alternate between awesome conquerers and hopeless drunks, and no group of elders or regional leaders rose up to assert political power?

3) That following the successful sea voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the 1400s, China weirdly turns inward?
1. The Emperor who promised to pay them was overthown and the new guy didn't want to pay them

2. The Mongols political system was stable and the empire soon decentralized and the rulers, big and small, were happy to stay in their place

3. The Yongle Emperor was the outlier, not the rule, and these voyages weren't to expand, conquer, explore or colonize, it was to establish tribute. China never had any interest in colonizing, especially not across the Pacific when there's South East Asia and Indonesia right there.

All make perfect sense in connect in context
 
OTL is the most plausible timeline by definition, so there can have been no implausible "wank" IOTL.

If you mean "wank" as in "one group doing better relative to other groups, especially due to luck," history is full of them. But every one of them were fully plausible.
 
Ottomans turning from a small beylik into a large Empire from Vienna to the Indian Ocean is pretty... wankish...

It happens but a lot have to go right.

Or the Safaviyya Order takes over entire Persia as a Sufi Order... Imagine the Jesuits or so taking over the Balkans and force convert them to Catholicism within two centuries.
 

Marc

Donor
Ottomans turning from a small beylik into a large Empire from Vienna to the Indian Ocean is pretty... wankish...

It happens but a lot have to go right.

Or the Safaviyya Order takes over entire Persia as a Sufi Order... Imagine the Jesuits or so taking over the Balkans and force convert them to Catholicism within two centuries.

I would strongly agree about the Ottomans, they do seem to be at least a 3 sigma event. However, not being a romantic about history, I would consider it very plausible that another of the Oghuz clans would eventually, broadly, duplicate their successes in Anatolia and the Balkans - as for the rest, very unclear.
 
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Pretty much everything that happened in Asia till contemporary times is a huge wank. Empires stretching a good portion of the world rose and fell there like nothing.
 
Pretty much everything that happened in Asia till contemporary times is a huge wank. Empires stretching a good portion of the world rose and fell there like nothing.
The fact that it happened so much demonstrates that it was normal, not a wank. Or possibly that history is full of wankers.
 
How much of history was a disproportionate dominance in pertinence to potential?

Interesting question, though typically, that's not how "wank" is used, by and large; it's usually only referring to a singular thing at a time, be it a nation(the U.S., France, the Mongols under the Khans, Rome, Japan, etc.), a culture, or what have you, instead of a whole universe.

@Jared has been knighted by the Queen for his excellence in representing the British people's perspectives on history

Great post, but dude's actually an Aussie, though, TBH, not British.

OTL is the most plausible timeline by definition, If you mean "wank" as in "one group doing better relative to other groups, especially due to luck," history is full of them. But every one of them were fully plausible.

I wouldn't be so sure of this, TBH. Sure, taking such an approach may greatly simplify things, and that I can understand.....but it only works to a point; there are some things that happened in our universe, that were arguably not all that plausible even by the most objective standards(like, for example, the wild success of the Mongols perhaps being one of the more extreme examples of this). Of course, where one goes from there may indeed depend to an extent on one's own worldview, though I'd think it reasonable to hypothetically put us around Type II on the AH Plausibility scale overall(maybe between that and Type III).
 
there are some things that happened in our universe, that were arguably not all that plausible even by the most objective standards(like, for example, the wild success of the Mongols perhaps being one of the more extreme examples of this).
The better you understand the period, the more plausible you realize every major historical event was.

In any case, saying OTL wasn't plausible really doesn't compute because it's the only TL that we know to have actually happened, so it's the only criterion we have to judge the plausibility of an ATL. Plausibility becomes utterly meaningless when we simply decide that OTL wasn't plausible after all.
 
OTL is the most plausible timeline by definition.

OTL is proven to be possible, because it happened. But possible does not necessarily mean most plausible. Many freak occurrences happened IOTL.

Five days ago a professional footballer (Emiliano Sala) disappeared in a plane voyage, and most likely has perished. OTL now includes this outcome. Can you really argue that the most plausible outcome for the life of this footballing star was to disappear in a plane at age 28? I think a timeline in which he survived would have been more plausible.
 
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OTL is the most plausible timeline by definition, so there can have been no implausible "wank" IOTL.

If you mean "wank" as in "one group doing better relative to other groups, especially due to luck," history is full of them. But every one of them were fully plausible.

I don't know if OTL is the most plausible by definition. If I flip a coin 100 times and it lands head 70 times is that the most plausible outcome? It's only plausible in this sense if you're a determinist and think there's no other outcome possible, but if quantum fluctuations can cause butterfly effects then I think it's reasonable to assume that a more plausible outcome would be closer to 50/50.

Just because something happened doesn't mean it was probable that seems like a fallacy. You can certainly use implausible to describe real circumstances. It was implausible for that coin to land on its edge. It's a synoynm for improbable.
 
Five days ago a professional footballer (Emiliano Sala) disappeared in a plane voyage, and most likely has perished. OTL now includes this outcome. Can you really argue that the most plausible outcome for the life of this footballing star was to disappear in a plane at age 28? I think a timeline in which he survived would have been more plausible.
Or not, we don't know the deep details about the guy, why he though flying on the channel (that has a terrible weather) was a good idea, etc. It goes the same point Intransigent Southerner made and Lord_Vespasian illustrated, in a vacuum some event can look freakish and improbable, when you research deeper, link the causes, background and realities such "freak incidents of history" makes a lot of sense.
 
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