Lands of Red and Gold
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... i meant i could understand cats as pets, but don't really get why anyone would want rabbits as pets so badly they'd import them.
i could see the reasons for importing rabbits. i mean, several had already been mentioned in this thread. I'm not That dim
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you were
However, there's not likely to be regulations against importing animals without some examples of how catastrophic such an import can be. The rabbits in Australia is one of the best examples of this. In the ATL I can't see another such example occuring soon enough for people to decide to introduce a ban.
Cheers,
Nigel.
Rabbits are pretty useful food or skin source, I think it quite likely that a W European immigrant community would introduce them. It wouldn't take much to care for them on the ship journey, and besides of which, immigrant communities or colonies may introduce species they are familar with regardless of actual need. Without some sort of systemic regulation of this from a very early point I don't see how it could be avoided.
In this *ATL, nothing in Australia quite fits the mold, and nothing in New Zealand either, but New Zealand comes closer. If anybody "pulls a Japan," its likelier to be in NZ or Tasmania, but the probability is still pretty low.
I'm not sure of all the ideas, but I think partly it was because the Dutch were mostly Calvinist, which was less of a missionary religion than Catholicism. Also partly because of their own history of religious persecution.
I'll just fire up the barbie...
Maybe, kinda, a little. There is at least one area where Europeans will be astonished about what the *Aborigines know, and it's one which is easily confirmed, too - the reaction will be "why didn't we discover that already?" In one other area, the *Aborigines have realised a physical truth long before European science did (although others also knew this, such as the Chinese), but this will not be recognised until much later after contact, partly because the *Aboriginal recognition is wrapped up in their religion, and partly because Europeans haven't worked this out for themselves.
I'm not sure what this will mean for medicine. It's not that *Aboriginal doctors are hugely more advanced; they do know a couple of natural remedies which work very well, but their main advantage is that they simply lack some of the misconceptions which European doctors had about the humours, bleeding and so forth.
A lot of individual Europeans will certainly think that. The question is whether there will be a few who are more receptive.
What could enlightened, civilized Christian Europeans possibly learn from heathen savages? My God, they don't even know of the humors!
Seriously, though, maybe in the 19th or 20th century some chemist may study the herbal remedies of *Australia and discover useful antibiotics or alkaloids, assuming that such knowledge isn't totally lost by that point. Until then, though, I doubt we'd see serious Euro interest in "witch-doctory".
There are a couple of things which might be discovered to be of use, antiseptics and alkaloids, especially tea-tree oil, but no antibiotics as such. Alas.
Oh, I agree that it will take a long time before the *Australians would even start using coal, even if they'd discovered cast iron.
By the time of Dutch contact, there's viable seaborne trade routes between western and eastern Australia. Not high-volume trade, but enough for educated people on each side to be aware of the other. The Dutch will hear some distorted stories, but I'm not sure whether they will evolve into an El Dorado style legend, or simply "hmm, let's go looting over here, too."
Also, since the *Tasmanians have access to large amounts of tin, will they use it to make storage jars ? There's something appropriate about an Australian culture inventing the tinnie before the wheel
Heh. "Tin" is sadly a misnomer; the metal in tin cans is sometimes tinplated steel these days, but no tin cans have ever been made mainly out of tin itself. It's too soft a metal, among other things.
The *Tasmanians will make much more use of ubiquitous ceramics to store things. And unlike in tin cans, at least some of the time the *Tasmanians will want what they store to rot. In a manner of speaking.
Well-put. The only other things I'd add are that Japan before it closed itself off was the technological equal of Europe (Japanese guns, for instance), and it was never completely closed off from the outside world. The field of "Dutch studies" (I forget the Japanese name) was a recognised way of learning about what Europeans were doing. All of this meant that the Japanese were primed to adopt further European ideas whenever they chose to do so.
And insofar as any part of Australasia corresponds to Japan, it would be New Zealand, not Australia. It forms a nice geographic unit, which with technological growth might achieve political unification even before European contact. It's also in the same position vis a vis Australia that Japan was with China; far enough away and a less tempting target, so most of the efforts might be aimed at Australia instead. The Maori also had a receptiveness to allow outlanders to live among them and share their knowledge. In OTL, the "Pakeha Maori" included a couple of thousand Europeans who lived in New Zealand amongst the Maori. Some were kept as slaves, but some were high-ranking advisors, too.
For all the reasons you list above, there's no way that the Maori are going to catch up to all or even most of European technology. The most obvious problem is that they are going to be hit by all the Eurasian diseases, amongst other things. But it will be interesting to see how far they do come. They may have the advantage of being far enough away and organised enough to be turned into a protectorate of sorts, rather than being colonised wholesale. Of course, this is a world apart from having the Maori turn into a colonial power of their own.
Australia might be lucky enough to avoid the Red Fox, although that depends if the British ever colonise part of the continent. I'm not sure about monkeys; much of Australia may be too cold for them, and the Dutch are mostly in the south, not the north. I do suspect that, alas, the Tasmanian devil will go the way of the thylacine, since there will be dogs there for longer.
Korea was just by way of example of showing what the Japanese actually did - they managed to become a colonial power. Of course, strictly speaking in OTL the Maori became a colonial power too, they just had to charter a European ship to accomplish it.
Hmm. The sorts of forceps which *Aboriginal doctors use are small and designed for individual teeth. It would take quite a mental leap to adapt them for obstetrics. I suppose it's not impossible, but I'm not sure if it would occur to anyone. Forceps were used in obstetrics in Europe c. 1600 anyway, but kept largely secret. (At least according to the Armenian Genocide).
Talking of brass, it's been mentioned that the native Australians of this timeline invent brass musical instruments.
Now all they have to do is invent the valve and, viola, Aboriginal brass bands
Now that would be entertaining. I've no idea yet whether it's plausible - I'll look into it - but it would certainly be fun.
*Australia is as tempting a target as the East Indies, at least in the short-term. The attraction comes mostly from precious metals; gold for Europe, silver for the China trade. There are various other spices which will turn a decent profit, albeit nothing along the lines of the main Spice Islands.
Probably more of an outlier; it's a bit far away. However, south-western Australia may be a victualling station for the main route to the East Indies.
Similar to what other people have already answered, cats and rabbits will almost inevitably be imported. When they do, the ecological effects are going to be bad. The only interesting question would be whether domesticated quolls had been grown large enough that if they went feral, they would act as competitors to cats. If so, though, I suspect that would also mean that domesticated quolls would be capable of doing ecological damage on their own.
"Pulling a Japan" in the sense of adopting all European technology wholesale is beyond the bounds of plausibility, alas. What New Zealand (and maybe the two main Tasmanian nations) might be able to do is have enough political organisation to hold themselves together on first contact with Europeans. If so, and if they are viewed as unattractive targets by European nations, then they might be lucky enough to end up as some sort of protectorate which preserves some of their own political organisation. Maybe.
But it's more fun just to have the snakes... I'm not sure if the Dutch would bother to bring them in - since mongooses mainly eat other animals besides snakes anyway. If they did, though, mongooses would be devastating, although maybe not as bad as foxes.
Yes, I don't think the Tehuelche or the Fuegians had been exposed to European diseases in 1619. And even if they had, they probably wouldn't have had the numbers to make those diseases epidemics, and thus, they wouldn't have become inmune.
As late as the 1870s there were reports stating that Smallpox caused terrible casualties among the Indians who lived in the pampas (1), even if these peoples where much more in touch with sedentary populations subjected to this diseases than the Tehuelches or the Fuegians were (both in 1870 or in 1619).
(1) Lucio Mancilla, IIRC, a Coronoel who went on a sort of diplomatic mission in what was back then "Indian territory", trying to convince the Ranqueles to abandon the tribal confederation led by Calfucurá and to allow the Argentine government to build a railway line across their lands, wrote that, when smallpox stroke a group a home, the rest of the family members would abandon the tents, mount on their horses and ride as far as they far as they could.
Whether or not the Europeans will send missionaries depends less on what faith they prctise and more on which nation is doing the colonization, since each of the colonial powers had their own motives:
SPAIN saw its colonization as a continuation of the Reconquista, and sent soldiers and priests into the Americas.
PORTUGAL looked east rather than west, concerned only with securing its routes to India. As far as I can tell, Brazil was colonized for the heck of it, and during the 17th century, the Dutch were more interested in Brazil than the Portuguese.
HOLLAND was interested in trade, not conquest, and its colonies, other than Belem and Nieuw Amsterdam, were little more than trade posts.
FRANCE's goals were similar to Holland, though they did send some missionaries.
ENGLAND's colonies were founded with one of two goals in mind - escape religious persecution (New England and Pennsylvania) or get filthy rich (Virginia and Carolina).
SWEDEN's colony was little more than a prestige project, and was abandoned to the Dutch when it was clear it was going nowhere.
Oh, and the Japanese study of western subjects is "Rangaku."
SPAIN saw its colonization as a continuation of the Reconquista, and sent soldiers and priests into the Americas.
PORTUGAL looked east rather than west, concerned only with securing its routes to India. As far as I can tell, Brazil was colonized for the heck of it, and during the 17th century, the Dutch were more interested in Brazil than the Portuguese.
HOLLAND was interested in trade, not conquest, and its colonies, other than Belem and Nieuw Amsterdam, were little more than trade posts.
FRANCE's goals were similar to Holland, though they did send some missionaries.
ENGLAND's colonies were founded with one of two goals in mind - escape religious persecution (New England and Pennsylvania) or get filthy rich (Virginia and Carolina).
SWEDEN's colony was little more than a prestige project, and was abandoned to the Dutch when it was clear it was going nowhere.
Oh, and the Japanese study of western subjects is "Rangaku."
The Sandman
Banned
Yeah, I suspect that the domestication of quolls means that there isn't going to be much of a niche left for cats when the Europeans arrive; presumably, domesticated quolls gone feral will have occupied them. It also means that rabbits will be slightly less of a problem, assuming that quolls are like cats in terms of being willing to hunt pretty much anything that moves and is small enough for them to kill. And the domestication of quolls, while almost certainly not great for native birds and such, won't be as disastrous as the introduction of cats simply because the bird life is already familiar with the quoll and therefore has at least some conception of having to avoid the damn things.
New Zealand is going to be a race to see whether quolls or cats drive a given species extinct first, though.
And I do still say that the sort of society you envision developing on Tasmania is likely to try to preserve/tame thylacines and/or devils as a sort of prestige animal. Again, any ordinary schmuck can have a pet dingo but it takes a real Tasmanian Viking to have a domesticated Thylacine.
New Zealand is going to be a race to see whether quolls or cats drive a given species extinct first, though.
And I do still say that the sort of society you envision developing on Tasmania is likely to try to preserve/tame thylacines and/or devils as a sort of prestige animal. Again, any ordinary schmuck can have a pet dingo but it takes a real Tasmanian Viking to have a domesticated Thylacine.
Cats and rabbits as invasive species are bad enough, but what about the black and brown rat (european mice also)?
There are 60 species of native Australian rats, but once the black and brown rats jump ship and invade what would be the ramifications? IOTL the cereals of Europe were the crops of choose, but here the *Australians won't switch to these, keeping the crops better suited for the environment. Does this hamper the rats invasiveness or do they still take over allot of the native species niches and eating the harvested crops?
There are 60 species of native Australian rats, but once the black and brown rats jump ship and invade what would be the ramifications? IOTL the cereals of Europe were the crops of choose, but here the *Australians won't switch to these, keeping the crops better suited for the environment. Does this hamper the rats invasiveness or do they still take over allot of the native species niches and eating the harvested crops?
What could enlightened, civilized Christian Europeans possibly learn from heathen savages? My God, they don't even know of the humors!
Seriously, though, maybe in the 19th or 20th century some chemist may study the herbal remedies of *Australia and discover useful antibiotics or alkaloids, assuming that such knowledge isn't totally lost by that point. Until then, though, I doubt we'd see serious Euro interest in "witch-doctory".
Europeans did pick up a number of remedies and curative plants from the Native American cultures (most notably Quinine and Coca, but there were others as well), I'm pretty sure Europeans of a scholarly intent (Jesuits if a catholic power has lots of interaction with Australia) who spends significant amounts of time in an Australian city will spot the obvious things that work medicinally.
That certainly seems to have been the case for much of the Americas. For all that Europeans in one form or another claimed most of the continents, there were still large areas which were virtually untouched by Europeans (except maybe indirect transmission of diseases). The other major example I remember is in North America, where in the Pacific Northwest the Haida were devastated by Eurasian diseases (especially smallpox) during the nineteenth century.
The Portuguese still fought an ultimately successful campaign to drive the Dutch out of Brazil, so I suspect that they cared about the place a fair bit. That may have been mostly due to potential rather than actual wealth, although the brazilwood trade was quite profitable even from the early days.
Although sometimes a bit of farming and settlement was encouraged for transport purposes, such as the Cape, which if memory serves was used as a victualling station where some food was grown locally to support ships. Only later did the Cape become a target for some immigrants, especially religious refugees.
Yup. And Courland's colonial empire was even more limited than Sweden's.
In a broad sense, the motivations of the main colonial powers of the LoRaG timeline will be similar. In particular, the Dutch will mostly be interested in trading. Going for out-and-out conquest will only be pursued if they see that as a long-term source of profit (see Indies, Dutch East). The motivations for any other colonial powers in Australia would be similarly focused on profit, with the possible exceptions of Spain and Bavaria.
Ah, yes. Thanks.
Only if cats can't out-compete quolls. Dingos out-competed the thylacine, and modern feral cats sometimes prey on quolls, so it's quite possible that cats could still become established. The caveat is that if domesticated quolls are bred to become substantially bigger, then they may go feral and be in a position to compete with cats.
Quolls certainly eat rats, rabbits and mice, although they may not eat enough of them to make a difference to invasive species.
Sadly, yes.
The problem is whether taming and breeding thylacines will do any good. As far as I can tell from historical sources, thylacines were near-impossible to breed in captivity, which makes domesticating them fairly difficult. They could be tamed, but breeding them was another matter. (I've found only one record of successful captive breeding of thylacines, in Melbourne Zoo around 1900.) If the thylacines can't be easily bred in captivity, then domesticating them is likely to be quite difficult, to say the least.
The establishment of black & brown rats seems to be linked to disturbance of the environment in general. There are some circumstances where the native Australian rats outcompete the black and brown rats (there's a current project underway in Sydney at the moment trying to re-establish native bush rats for just this reason). The house mouse, on the other hand, has become widespread and a major problem wherever grain is grown. In ATL Australia, I suspect that house mice will try to feed on stored wattle seeds, which would be a similar source of food. This would be a major problem, depending on the storage methods in a particular area.
Some of the remedies may be picked up, although it's interesting to note that it took a while for many of the New World remedies to be applied on a large scale in the old world. One thing in *Australia which might be picked up is the use of tea-tree leaves/oil (depending on region) as an antiseptic applied to wounds to prevent infection. This is the sort of thing which would be immensely useful, and might cause all sorts of broader ramifications if Europeans or other peoples catch onto the broader concept of using antiseptics to prevent infection.
The Sandman
Banned
Bavaria? Is there something you're not telling us about how history's going to go in the Old World?
I don't see why they wouldn't. Heck, the mere fact that they have a guaranteed food source should probably make them larger than the OTL wild species.
I guess it really depends on just how many feral quolls there are. Also, assuming that they'll still interbreed, even the wild quolls should be a bit tougher than in OTL due to feral domestics spreading their genes around.
If the fishing is rich enough to support a civilization primarily on that, protein-wise, what you might see is that a significant chunk of Tasmania would be a game preserve. Not in the sense of the "we leave all the animals alone sort", but in the "we leave them alone to breed so that we can be sure we'll always have more to hunt". I'm thinking almost like how Rajput nobility in India would have parks large enough to ensure a stable tiger population so that they'd always be able to hunt tigers, except in this case the real prestige would come from taking a thylacine alive and taming it. And the Rajput comparison is also because they seem like another example of the sort of society you've said will appear in Tasmania.
Now, a completely different topic. I think one consequence of *Australia's existence in TTL will be a much larger Jewish population in the Levant and Mesopotamia. My thinking is this: those areas are, unless I'm much mistaken, the sort of semi-arid regions where the Gunnagalic crop package does very well. Therefore, once the *Australian crops percolate their way to the Middle East, the carrying capacity of those regions will increase significantly. Unfortunately for the Ottomans, who no doubt would love the prospects of a larger taxable and conscriptable population in areas that were previously not all that profitable, the crops will probably be hitting at about the same time as the *Australian diseases, and the resulting 15-20% die-off is going to make it difficult to find the extra people to work the fields.
Enter the Jews of Russia, Poland, and possibly Germany. In a situation where a massive epidemic is ravaging Europe, I just can't help but figure that the Jews of those regions (at a minimum) are going to be somehow blamed for spreading the illness. Or are just going to be a useful target for distracting the terrified peasants, or are going to be a useful target to loot to make up for the tax money no longer coming in from all the dead peasants. Especially given what happened in the Ukraine in the OTL 1640s. Therefore, a whole lot of Jews are likely to find a very good reason to get the hell out of Eastern Europe as quickly as possible. And the Ottomans are probably their best bet as far as places that a)they can reach and b)that might be willing to take them.
With the sudden influx of Jewish refugees, the Ottomans will probably see this as the perfect solution to their labor shortage in the newly useful provinces and will therefore encourage the Jews to settle in those areas and farm the recently-introduced *Australian crops. And the Jews obviously have a major incentive to remain loyal to the Ottomans, given that the Ottomans took them in when the Europeans told them to fuck off.
Actually, by the time the Dutch invaded, sugar had already superseded the brazilwood trade as the main economic activity in Brazil, so Brazil was quite wealthy(and important) by then.
I agree with your main idea, but I doubt it would be exactly as you put it (especially regarding simultaneous spreading of viruses and plants). Diseases will spread with first European ships from *Australia entering Persian Gulf, but crops could spread fast only with settlers, not with seamen. I can't imagine Dutch sailors (half of whom is sick from unknown disease) planting wattles or yams in Basra. It could be in opposite direction - Jewish refugees from Germany could spread new crops (including *Australian ones) in the Ottoman Empire, but it would happen after first wave of Gunnagalian plagues in the Eurasia.
The Sandman
Banned
Maybe a better way of putting it would be that the knowledge of the crops is spreading at about the same rate as the diseases. In other words, the Ottomans know that this new crop package has the potential to massively increase agricultural productivity in pretty much their entire empire, especially the previously marginal lands south of Anatolia. Since they need people to plant them, though, they'd basically be subsidizing the initial Jewish settlement of those regions by providing land and crops, with the expectation that the higher tax revenues and larger population to draw upon for the military will repay the initial expenditures. This also assumes that the Ottomans are deliberately seeking out both crops and *Aborigines to demonstrate to the initial wave of settlers how to plant and tend to them.
If Abdul were to drop in, he probably would have a better idea of the plausibility of this scenario, and of the long-term ramifications for the Empire. Also, I'd like to see his reaction to what amounts to a Jewish-majority Israel that is also a staunchly loyal Ottoman province.
If Abdul were to drop in, he probably would have a better idea of the plausibility of this scenario, and of the long-term ramifications for the Empire. Also, I'd like to see his reaction to what amounts to a Jewish-majority Israel that is also a staunchly loyal Ottoman province.
He'll may be dropping as much of drools I'm currently secreting right now....
That remark could mean any of at least four things:
1) Bavaria is going to become an uberpower and colonial powerhouse
2) Bavaria is going to get some fragment of coastal territory in one or other of the European wars, and use this to set up a few small colonies a la Courland
3) I was being facetious
4) It was a typo/thinko, and I was really thinking of another power.
You pick.
Hmm. Are domestic cats that much larger than their wild ancestors? Not all domesticated species necessarily become larger, unless people are deliberately breeding for larger cats.
Could happen, although much depends on overlaps in habitat and the like.
The danger I see for the thylacine isn't human hunting per se - there will be wild areas of Tasmania, whether hunting preserve or simply land deemed not worth settling. The problem is that if dingos do make it across, a few of them will inevitably go feral, and they will compete with the thylacine as happened in mainland Australia.
Indeed. Large parts of the Levant, Mesopotamia, North Africa, southern Iberia, and maybe some parts of Sicily will all become potentially much more productive agricultural regions.
Hmm. Australian crops will probably take much longer to percolate than Australian diseases. Marnitja will burn its way across Europe and the Middle East by the 1630s at the latest; blue-sleep probably around the same timeframe, or a decade later at most. Learning to recognise and make extensive use of new crops, however, takes a lot longer than that. Large-scale use of crops from the Americas took a century or more in most cases, sometimes two centuries. It takes time to bring samples back across the seas, recognise the value of new crops, persuade people to farm them (farmers often being very conservative about new crops, and with good reason), overcome any cultural resistance, learn the best farming methods for the new crops, and then get enough breeding stock to use them over a wide area.
I'm not so sure about the exact timing of that, since the crops won't be available immediately, but I do like the general idea. What may well happen is that where in OTL a lot of Jews emigrated to Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe, here they end up in the Ottoman Empire instead. That would be fun.
Ah, thanks. I wasn't sure of the timing of when sugar became an important Brazilian crop.
Yup. The diseases will definitely hit first. The crops will spread, but more slowly. One likely vector is via South Africa, then to Morocco (along the shipping lanes), and then spreading east along North Africa and into the Levant.
As per above, I'm not sure that the Ottomans would adopt this idea so early, but probably sometime around the 1660s or later there would be enough knowledge of the potential of Australian crops for them to start thinking about. Wide-scale use would probably take longer than that.
If Abdul were to drop in, he probably would have a better idea of the plausibility of this scenario, and of the long-term ramifications for the Empire. Also, I'd like to see his reaction to what amounts to a Jewish-majority Israel that is also a staunchly loyal Ottoman province.
He'll may be dropping as much of drools I'm currently secreting right now....
Heh. I was already planning on inviting his input on how Australian crops will affect the Ottoman Empire once I start up a planning thread. The planning thread won't be created just yet, since there's a bit more relevant information to be conveyed in the next few posts, but this will be an interesting idea to explore.
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