alternatehistory.com

Hello! I am posting this as a sounding board for little ideas that I had, ones that really have no organized timeline or whatnot. Comment on quality or ASB-ness. My regular timeline (see sig, red text) has POD so far back that anything recognizable isn't truly possible within the TL, so more familiar fare (alt-WWs, alt-cols, and other things) will be attempted here. It will probably range into the 20th century, but I posted it here because otherwise it'll be buried under Nazi-thred number 1376485 or some other thing.

Anyways, here is the first "little mirror": The Rise and Fall of the VOC


The VOC was originally started in the mid-16th century by merchants in the Burgundian marches of the HRE, then being re-centralized by various factions. The rulers that controlled the Burgundians at the time were the Premsylid rulers of Bohemia-Moravia, Saxony, and Austria, their realms Germanized completely by that time. Ruling land from Triest to Dresden, they inherited the Kingdom of Burgundy towards the end of the 15th century.

The company was started by merchants of the various ports of "Holland", such as Amsterdam and Antwerp. Taking the same route as the Portuguese, they managed to reach the Indias in 1567, and soon began operating in the region. Using the vast coffers and military might afforded them by the Premsylids, they managed to begin establishing treaty ports and lands in the region. They managed to first gain the port of Calicut from the Ibadi sultan of Travanacore, and expanded north into Cochin. In response to the Portuguese conquest of the last of the Tamil states in 1574, the VOC began playing the Travanacori nobles off of each other, and ended up conquering the entire state in the years 1577-1580. This rivalry, in addition to being economic, was also religious.

The Portuguese were devout Catholics, and followed the Pope as the continental religious scene broke apart in the late 15th century. The Premsylids, however, adopted the Reformed Quistian teachings of Dietrich Hiedler, a native of the Empire. The church of Hiedler drew off of previous teachings within the HRE, and soon spread to both Bohmen and Burgundy.

While the Portuguese evangelized to the Tamils, the VOC was less zealous in their ministrations.

They also expanded into the Spice Islands. The Portuguese, at the time, owned all the Maluku Islands and Irian, along with the islands of Lucon and Mindoro to the north, which they had to defend from the Sulu sultunate to their south.

The VOC, by dealing with, exploiting and conquering local kings, began to set up their own spice trade. They first made trade and protection deals with the Sulu, and, during a civil war in the 1620s, conquered the entire sultunate (which would be converted wholesale to a Tagalog version of the Hiedler canon).

In the meantime, the VOC won control of Java and Bali-Lombok by vassalizing the local Majapahit king, who controlled both sets of islands. the VOC, acting in the "interests" of the Great Majapahit, also set out to control Flores, Timor and Sumba, and succeeded in these endeavors. The VOC spice trade had been thoroughly established.

In the Chinas, the Portuguese had taken control of the Viet kingdoms in name, helping them expand against the Lao and the chaos that was China during the period. The Portuguese, from their treaty port of Hanoi, managed to gain control of both the Viet and the Lao lands, and declared themselves protectors of the Viet king, whom they converted to Catholicism. They gained Chinese border lands, in the name of the wronged Viet, and had suzerainty there. In China itself, the Portuguese owned Macao and islands around it.

The VOC were thoroughly less successful in China, having lost out almost entirely to the Portuguese. Instead, they focused on the Thai kingdom, which, having been forced out by the Cham-Khmer lords, controlled a bit of land and then the long peninsula ending in the VOC port at Singhapur. The Thai were indebted and protected by the VOC, and did give money, concessions and soldiers to VOC merchants. However, the VOC did own Formosa for a time, and ended up controlling Hainan for quite a long time.

In the north, the VOC and the Portuguese were threatened by the Empire of Japan, which was not... friendly to European power on its soil. The VOC was allowed to trade at Kagoshima, and Portuguese missionary activity got it kicked out Asia. In addition, the Russians, which had been active in Asia since the Czagataj Khanate formed the Tsardom of all the Russias that stretched into Asia, already had power in the north- they had fully subdued the Manchus, made vassals of the Korean kings, and sent their own, more successful missionaries to the Japanese. The VOC, while given trade rights, was largely a font of Western progress into Japan, and Bomagaku, as VOC knowledge was known, led to the modernization of Japan.

In 1678, the Emperor, by then both sovereign and Shogun, converted to the Orthodox church, but also threw out all the European traders. Armed with their own guns, and having ships of their own, the Japanese would become a rival in the region, seizing the VOC ports in Jeju and Formosa as their own.

The VOC did not have a large presence north of Singhapur, but it was also more accepted, and more versatile, than the aging Portuguese Empire. They focused more on integrating Kerala and the Spice Islands, and did not have to waste money on the Thai as much as the Portuguese did fighting the Chinese for the converted Viet kings.

In Africa, the interplay between the two empires was largely absent. The Portuguese owned Mombasa, Malindi, Zanzibar and the Somali coast. The Portuguese also owned land in West Africa, established early in their imperial days and unrivaled by the VOC. The VOC, rather than seizing some native port, created their own at the Cape of Good Hope.

The Cape settlement, founded in 1654, would become the great port of South Africa. Founded as Kapstaad, it soon attracted settlers from across Premsylid lands, especially from Holland and Flanders. These settlers, speaking their own dialect, began to settle in the Cape. Encouraged by economic bonuses (and their unorthodox religious status as Quistians rather than Hiedlerites), these settlers became the first settlers of the Cape. Accompanying them from the core land of the Premsylids were the Czechs. While many had assimilated like the Premsylids, some had retained both their own language and the Hussite faith, and they too were exiled, by voluntary means or forced ones, to the settlement of South Africa.

These settlers soon had a lingua franca amongst themselves- the Holland dialect interspersed with Czech loanwords, pronunciations and lexicology. Over time, the community continued to prosper and expand against the Hottentots, bolstered by more Premsylid immigrants along with Old Prussians, Catalan Hiedlerites fleeing the repressive regime of Spain, Huguenots from Occitania and Brittany, Finnish Reformists and a host of Cossack Hussites from the steppes. These people came through the ports of Europe into South Africa, settled and assimilated into the social fabric.

The Afrikaans language began at this time, as the dialect of European Holland Germanized more and more, while the Afrikaans dialect, fueled by continuous immigration from Holland and Flanders, retained the old features of the language. As the 17th century progressed, the Cape Colony expanded into the veldt, fueled by gradual farmer settlements.

Of course, not all settlement was European. Malays and Indians began to immigrate to the colony, as did the Hainanese and the Thai. Immigration was encouraged, but cultural assimilation and religious conversion was also heavily stressed. Intermarriage, especially in the veldt, was common with the native tribes.

Eventually, the Asian peoples were sold as laborers to these veldt farmers, and intermarriage shifted from being primarily with Hottentots to being with the Asian subjects of the VOC. Eventually, Afrikaans stopped being solely European- the growing mixed population, known as Vockinders after the company and their intermarrying officers slowly began to define the rural regions as more tribes were defeated and Asians brought in as laborers. This was accelerated by the VOC conquest of the Kannada kingdoms throughout the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

South Africa was beginning to take shape- borne of Imperial company colonization and forged by fighting tribes and making it in the veldt. The colony continued to grow, despite turmoil due to exogenous factors. When the Prussian King inherited the last Premsylid and formed his great eastern state, the company was suddenly thrown into chaos. It had a new master, one that controlled Prussia, the Swiss and Lothringen along with the traditional Premsylid lands. This union, enacted in 1688, brought even more immigrants, many being French and Italian speaking Quistians frowned upon by the Prussian authorities. In addition, the slow decline of Dutch brought more immigrants, who wanted linguistic and religious independence

The VOC continued to trade vociferously, until the 1770s, when incompetent administration and European war over the entire century finally began to crumble the resources of the company. With competitors like the British, French and Norwegians, the old monopolies that preserved VOC dominance disappeared overnight. Ancient treaties with Gondwana and Rajputana vanished along with their states- the VOC was a bygone relic, watching the new pass it by triumphantly.

To compensate, the VOC began to fully restrict the Afrikaners. This, of course, did not go over well- they had become self-reliant, and the military forces in Afrika had defected wholesale. Eventually, in 1774, the overtaxed Afrikaners revolted in Kapstaad, soon accompanied by their liberty-minded fellows in the veldt. The rebels, supported by many of the VOC troops and officers, won their rights in 1776, fully independent.

Many of the VOC Asia territories were preserved by the new nationalization of the colonies, and became the German territories in Asia after Prussia became the HRE and then Kaiser of the German Reich in 1789.

The VOC had outlasted the desiccated Portuguese Empire; indeed, Ceram, Ambom, and Buru were seized by the VOC in the late 17th century, and Sulawesi was conquered in the early 18th century. The Portuguese time was gone, and so was that of the VOC.

The Scottish-dominated British Empire eventually came into the region and seized all of Northern India piecemeal, while the French conquered most of the Telugu; the Norwegians took Sri Lanka, and the Empire of Japan had seized Formosa, Lucon and Mindoro as the Portuguese and VOC empires declined. The game had changed completely by the end of the 18th century, and the 19th century belonged not to the VOC, but to the new Indian Ocean empires. The Suid-Afrikans flourished on their own, outliving the force that created them.

In continental Asia, the Norwegians managed to conquer the newly-independent Thai, the Khmer remaining defiantly independent. The time of the VOC, and indeed the semi-independent identity of the Burgundians and Czechs that birthed it, was gone, subsumed to an entirely new world order, threatened by the Roman revolution and the movements inspired by it...
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