I believe somebody wanted a map. There's probably something I forgot but I think this is mostly accurate for now (with the exception of India as we're still waiting to see how the Great Jihad affected the region).
 

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I believe somebody wanted a map. There's probably something I forgot but I think this is mostly accurate for now (with the exception of India as we're still waiting to see how the Great Jihad affected the region).

What the very big thing south of Ottoman Egypt is supposed to be?
 

Thande

Donor
I believe somebody wanted a map. There's probably something I forgot but I think this is mostly accurate for now (with the exception of India as we're still waiting to see how the Great Jihad affected the region).
Thanks Hawkeye, that seems some updating (I don't think it has the new ENA Confederations?) but it's a good starting point I can work from.
 
I believe somebody wanted a map. There's probably something I forgot but I think this is mostly accurate for now (with the exception of India as we're still waiting to see how the Great Jihad affected the region).

Shouldn't the Hermandad be reflected here? Also, IIRC, the Belgian outpost on *Australia was abandoned, and the Kazakh Khanate is a Russian vassal.
 
I believe somebody wanted a map. There's probably something I forgot but I think this is mostly accurate for now (with the exception of India as we're still waiting to see how the Great Jihad affected the region).

Nice! There is a problem I have with timeline and that is, I cannot remember when things actually happen. I have though (at least I think so :D ) a relatively good idea what happens.

So, Georgia should have already been annexed by Russia, Sicily should be part of the Tyrrhenian Union, Phillipines should be independent, the French still have French Guiana, Russia should have nimbled some territories of the Kazakh state, possibly vassalised it, Lithuania should be vassalised by Russia, not sure if the Beiqing should be vassalised by the Russians though. While we don't exactly know what's going on in Japan, it is going to be partitioned between both Russia and Corea. Formosa probably shouldn't be a vassal of the UPSA, Belguim should have already dropped claims to New Holland, China didn't annex former Gorkha empire, it was partitioned into Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim (all also vassalised) and northeastern India's status (roughly modern Arunachal Pradesh) is curently unknown. (I don't think the Great Jihad has anything to do with that area in partucular.)

Two things I myself am not sure of are: I think that Siam annexed all of Indochina and the territorial expanse of Finland. It was said that 'norther reaches were taken by Russia', but I am not sure northern reaches of what.

Hopefully, I didn't make an ass of myself here. (Probably did.) :D
 
What the very big thing south of Ottoman Egypt is supposed to be?

That's the Sennar Sultanate. I think Egypt's position in Sudan collapsed, in the chapter about the Magyarabs colonizing Russian Erytrea, and Sennar filled the void in the region.

Thanks Hawkeye, that seems some updating (I don't think it has the new ENA Confederations?) but it's a good starting point I can work from.

The New Confederations are there it's just that the new site design makes it harder to see.

Shouldn't the Hermandad be reflected here? Also, IIRC, the Belgian outpost on *Australia was abandoned, and the Kazakh Khanate is a Russian vassal.

Thanks, I'll fix as much as I can. I'm not sure if I'll show the Hermandad though since to me that would be like showing NATO or the Commonwealth of Nations on a map. Then again the EU is shown on a lot of maps so I guess it wouldn't be that odd.

BTW Thande, the Hermandad seems unreasonably unbalanced (being the UPSA's empire in all but name). Why are so many nations eager to join it? Or is the UPSA's authority in the organization just something that evolved over time?
 
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Thande

Donor
As you say the Hermandad is de jure a customs union and treaty area so should not be shown on a conventional map.

Some countries do join it willingly for strategic reasons (typically those a long way away from the UPSA and who want help resisting encroachment, e.g. the exilic Dutch states) but the majority are essentially bullied into place by Meridian economic and military power. Consider it equivalent to how the United States exerted influence over Latin American countries in the early 20th century in OTL, albeit somewhat more formalised and wider ranging.

edit: I was worried I wouldn't be able to update while the Wiki was down, but I found a way to access some of the pages providing they have been edited recently, so I now have access to all my lists of kings and so on.
 
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Thande

Donor
Part #222: Fizzing With Opportunity


“No K, I’m sorry, there’s no chance before the election. You know why. PS but keep a space in your jewellery case, hint hint... Dave”


—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
NOTE: This was a dot matrix printout of gibberish, clearly a code. Indentations indicated that the reader had been decoding it on another piece of paper but at one point had accidentally let the two overlap so traces of a few words of the actual message were left detectable on the original printout. This was enough for our analysts to crack the code and reproduce the intended message. – THANDE INSTITUTE FOOTNOTE


*


From “Great Lives” by Patricia Daniels (1979)—


Vicente Castro was born in the Meridian city of Rosario (modern Zone3Urb4) in the year 1808, only days after the signing of the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro which formally ended the Third Platinean War. There is always a temptation to read too much into such a birth date, but it is certainly true that the man known to many as El Gerente, ‘The Manager’ in Spanish (and to others as Bettalou, ‘The Monster’ in Konkani) played a significant role in the reversal of Meridian fortunes after that defeat. Indeed, the Third Platinean War has always caused problems for historians who wish to paint a picture of an inevitable rise of Meridian power from the inception of the United Provinces (or even before, given the defeat of Anglo-American troops in the First Platinean War by a ragtag group of rebels). If one is allowed to ignore that, the trajectory does seem indisputable—but this ignores the fact that the UPSA’s rise following the Third Platinean War was partly motivated precisely by a reaction against that humiliation, and the desire that it should never be repeated. Following the loss of Peru, the UPSA never again lost territory, and gained much in influence beyond its formal borders. The Brazilian War at the end of the 1820s was the ultimate catalyst of the Popular Wars in Europe, something which a few excitable historians have unconvincingly tried to use to paint a conspiracy of all nineteenth century history dancing to a Meridian tune. That war brought not only the defeat of Portuguese Brazil and the creation of three Meridian puppet states (two of them later core territory) from its periphery, but also the Meridian acquisition of the Philippines and the former Portuguese parts of Formosa as part of a deal struck with New Spain. That was the first time the New Spanish effectively admitted that the UPSA had grown too powerful to be dealt with on equal terms—but it would not be the last.


Following the Brazilian War, the UPSA went from strength to strength. The Dutch Republic had been defeated and absorbed by Flanders to form Belgium, but the Dutch trading companies overseas were reluctant to transfer their loyalties to the new entity. In this era it was as much by the chance actions of individual Meridian ship captains and traders as government policy that the UPSA gained influence and effective colonies by aiding these Dutch exilic republics against attempts by Belgium to impose control. Not only in the Guyana Republic in South America itself, but far beyond did Córdoba’s power now stretch. The Philippines had at least been former Spanish territory and had formerly been ruled from the Novamund and sometimes legally treated as part of it. Now the Torch of Liberty flew over lands which had never known the conquistadores. Vast swathes of the Cape of Good Hope and northern Antipodea (both soon revealed to contain valuable resources) were claimed and the UPSA became the dominant non-native power in the Nusantara thanks to the Batavian Republic ruling over most of the East Indies. If the Portuguese had thought they could still rival such power, they received a rude awakening in the Timor War of 1844—and the resulting humiliation helped trigger the birth of what became a revolution in that country. Like the Dutch trading colonies before them, the Portuguese possessions found themselves suddenly faced with a choice of loyalties. Should they give their allegiance to the bloodthirsty Neo-Jacobin state ruling Lisbon or try to find another path?


By the 1850s and the aftermath of the Great American War, things had changed considerably. It was no longer the case, as it had been twenty years ago, that the UPSA expanded its power primarily through the actions of individuals acting independently. The Meridian government had finally avenged its defeat in the Third Platinean War, turning the tables on the ENA: just as Peru had been torn from Meridian hands, so would Carolina be from American ones. With this act came the formalisation of what had previously been a highly unofficial expression of Meridian influence on other powers: La Hermandad de las Naciones, the Family of Nations. It became rare from this point on for the presence of the United Provinces in a land to be purely an informal one, the only notable exceptions being the one discussed here and Siam—and it was the lack of clarity surrounding the latter situation which ultimately led to the Pandoric War and all the evil it unleashed.


With the downfall of Portugal and the retreat of its royals to Brazil, the latter was forced into the Hermandad and several Portuguese colonies came with it. It is important to realise that this was not inevitable. The Portuguese colonial governors and traders regarded the Meridian-influenced Kingdom of Portuguese-Brazil as only barely preferable to the Neo-Jacobin murderers back home; after all, many of them were veterans of the Brazilian War against the Meridians a generation before. When former Portuguese colonies did become part of the Hermandad, it was only through direct action by the Meridian Armada to gently but firmly urge them to go along. This is why Angola joined the Hermandad while Mozambique fractured and Bissau and Cape Verde were taken by the Royal Africa Company (the precursor to modern Guinea). To an extent the ability of the UPSA to make such acquisitions was limited by distance, given the increasing importance of steam fleets and the meagre coal resources of the UPSA. By the time of the Pandoric War, the Meridians had successfully ‘kept up with the Joneses’ sufficiently to build an impressive-looking steam fleet of lionhearts and older armourclads that was capable of sailing at least three or four of the seven seas...providing its supply lines were one hundred percent operational and reliable. This was seldom the case even in peacetime, and the ultimate outcome of the naval war was predictable. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.


It was not merely an issue of geographic distance but also of the level of the government’s interest, considering the more top-down approach to colonisation and control now taken by Córdoba. Mozambique is a good example of this—it concealed resources that would become highly valuable in years to come with the growth of new technologies, but this was not apparent at the time and so it was allowed to fall by the wayside and be divided by Matetwa, Scandinavians and Italians. Much the same could have been true of Portuguese India. It was about as far from the UPSA as one could get, unlike potential colonies straight across the Atlantic or Pacific from the Southern Cone which had always excited more government interest on security and naval support grounds. This was illustrated by how Ceylon had been allowed to fall into Belgian hands in the 1830s, unlike the rest of the former Dutch colonies. Some Meridian traders had operated in India, but not many—China and the rest of East Asia had always been of more interest, especially after the acquisition of Nagasaki and the surrounding hinterland (with Batavian help) following the collapse of the Southern Yapontsi court in 1862. Vicente Castro was one of the exceptions to the rule. He had fought the Portuguese in the Timor War and had ironically made a friend of one of his foes, a man named João Oliveira. The two soon became comrades in arms, with Oliveira joining Castro in working for what were private armies in all but name. They worked for Algernon Davis’ Gulf Fruit Company enforcing law and order on its plantations in southern Mexico, for FélixOcampo’s Standard Freight Incorporated guarding its barges of Standard Crates as they travelled up and down Platinea’s rivers and canals, and they eventually came to work for one of the world’s biggest private corporations, the Priestley Aereated Water Company. Director-General Roberto Priestley had an eye on new markets. In particular, the quinine tonic water that the Company sold as an anti-malarial treatment was facing increasing competition from Peruvian rivals and the Biafra Cinchona Company run by the RAC in Africa. India seemed like a potential growth market to compensate. This might have been a good idea, but it was poorly timed to say the least. Castro and Oliveira formed part of a trade mission to Goa in 1852 – arriving just as the Mahdi’s Mujahideen were overrunning most of the Maratha Confederacy that had been under Portuguese influence.


The Viceroy of Goa, Afonso Ribeiro, was faced with a terrible situation. He had managed to resist some of the Jihadis’ earlier attacks, aided by some support from Lisbon, but since then the Pânico de '46 had robbed him of that and the attacks by the alleged Caliphate had only increased in frequency. If he had hoped that the Mahdi’s highly-publicised death at the gates of Haidarabad in 1852 would rob the Jihad of its driving force, he hoped in vain: indeed, as some (though not all) of the anti-Nizam Haidarabadi revolutionaries joined the Mahdist force, his hopes of being able to protect the Portuguese-Maratha lands became ever bleaker.


The Great Jihad has been compared by some historians to the Thirty Years’ War and the Crusades: not merely because it was also religiously motivated, but another parallel to those conflicts is that it was propagated far beyond the natural lifespan of a war, beyond the usual point at which men would give up in disgusted fatigue, by ‘virtue’ of the fact that more fresh new starry-eyed recruits from far away were always pouring in. Just as Gustav Adolf’s Swedes had rejuvenated a fading Protestant war effort in 1630s Germany, new mujahideen from as far away as Arabia, North Africa and the Kazakh lands ensured that every bitter old Rajasthani Muslim throwing down his sword in despair would be replaced by two more fighters.


The Great Jihad had a profoundly destructive effect on India. It is routinely ranked in the top five of ‘History’s greatest manmade disasters’ – some even place it second to the Last War of Supremacy (or the Pandoric Revolution which ultimately led to it). Estimates of the dead and displaced will always be heavily reliant on guesswork, as even before Faruq Kalam arrived on the scene India was divided into a patchwork of many nations which had different approaches to record-keeping (and what records were kept were often destroyed in the Jihad itself). Nonetheless to an extent ‘before and after’ maps speak for themselves. Before the Jihad, European colonial powers had certainly nibbled away around the edges of the Indian subcontinent: the British in Bengal, Bombay and the Malabar Coast, the French in the Carnatic and southern Kerala, the Belgians in Ceylon, the Scandinavians in Tranquebar and Calicut.[1] But the interior of the subcontinent had remained under the power of native states, admittedly for a given definition of native state (witness the Persian or Afghan origin of many dynasties) and often under informal European influence, but nonetheless. Oudh, Mysore, Haidarabad and the multiple confederate Maratha states dotted the map. After the Jihad had finally fizzled out in the early 1870s, India was unrecognisable and it would take years more for a new map to even be made given the dangers of the Gangetic Plain. In the map of India of 1880 native states have practically vanished from the map, replaced by at best big, complicated sphere of influences overlapping over zones of nothing but local governance scattered with question marks.


After the Rape of Lucknow Oudh collapsed and would never re-emerge as an independent state: the modern nation of Panchala, which Lucknow presently forms the capital of, dates only from the twentieth century and emerged after Chinese ‘supervision’ of the north Gangetic Plain into a single authority, influenced from their possession of Nepal. Similarly, Boutan fell under Chinese influence at this time and Bihar was sold off by privatised Bengal, becoming a Chinese vassal in turn. Further south, Haidarabad collapsed after its revolution and civil war. The BEIC held onto the Circars for a while, but in the end the whole region (including most of the former Haidarabad and Berar) ended up being divided into questionable spheres of influence by different states, formally governed by the International Settlement in the coastal city of Guntoor. This was where many of the up-and-coming European powers sought to gain their place in the sun by rather unscrupulous means, including Germany and Italy. The fragmented nature of the International Settlement’s organisation meant that even small countries could gain some representation there, including the Kingdom of Ireland and the Republic of California. To an extent the whole affair was a matter of national prestige, making a mockery of the high-minded claims of ‘enforcing peace and stability’. The exposure of the colonial exploitation in the International Guntoor Region by the Russian journalist Sergei Voroshilov in 1889 was a huge shock which prompted considerable navel-gazing and eventual reform by the international community. To an extent this may also have been backlash from the fact that the countries running the International Settlement had decided to informally exclude Russia; in any case this did not apply to Russian allies, and Corea sought to one-up China’s activities in the land of Buddhism via acquiring a slice of former Haidarabadi land.


It was only in the south of India, where revolts in support of the Jihad had always been more muted, that India largely escaped unscathed. Mysore successfully resisted the Mujahideen, meaning that the French Carnatic was never threatened and, expenses aside, France emerged from the conflict as the most powerful European colonial power in India. The Anglo-American and Scandinavian possessions along the Malabar Coast also escaped for this reason. Bombay on the other hand did not, being burned by a Jihadi attack in 1853, and it was eventually rebuilt by Meridian hands—thus bringing us back to Vicente Castro’s story. The PAWC mission had some troops and relatively modern Meridian military equipment (having had the good fortune to leave before the Great American War led to the requisition of everything nailed down). More importantly, they also brought funds, gifts for recalcitrant native rulers and the means to make a great deal more money in the form of PAWC industrial processes. Viceroy Ribeiro, observing the destruction of the armies of the great Maratha Houses of Scindia and Holkar by the Mujahideen, hastily cut a deal with the PAWC men. PAWC money helped pay for new mercenaries and workers to build new defences for Goa, and PAWC artillery rescued the Peshwa’s army from a siege in Poona. In the early part of the war the Portuguese had at least always had artillery superiority over the Jihadis, but when Haidarabad had fallen some of the Caliphate factions had acquired some of ‘the Nizam’s Beautiful Daughters’, the late ruler’s prized cannon. Fortunately the PAWC men included many veterans of wars, albeit often minor ones, and this restored an advantage over the heavily armed but often inexperienced fanatics of the dead Mahdi. It was during this conflict that Castro fought at the head of battalions, often leaving Oliveira to run the Company’s outpost in Goa in his absence, and achieved both many of the great feats and bloody crimes de guerre that he is remembered for. Many of his actions were based on ‘giving back to the Mahdists as they have given to us’, but he often escalated matters further – if the Jihadis burned one Portuguese/Maratha village, he would burn three of theirs in revenge. When confronted by a Portuguese officer about his actions, who told him ‘history will judge you’, Castro retorted ‘If there are still men left who can write and read history, then my actions justify themselves’—apparently in reference to a particularly extreme heterodox Jihadi faction then attacking Indore which claimed the Koran was so holy that reading it would only sully it, promoting voluntary illiteracy and routinely blinding prisoners.


In the end the Peshwa, Narayan Rao III, was slain in the Jihadi attack on Goa in 1854. The siege was beaten back with heavy losses, aided by an outbreak of malaria in the Jihadi camp after a plague of mosquitoes which both Hindus and Catholics attributed to Divine intervention. The PAWC men used their remaining stocks of trade quinine, dissolved in the phlogisticated water produced in the new small factory they had set up, to distribute antimalarial tonic water to the Portuguese and Maratha armies (well, at least the officers) and won some goodwill for themselves. With the loss of the Peshwa and most of his power structure, Viceroy Ribeiro declared that the House of Bhonsle, still theoretically holding the office of chhatrapati (emperor) of the Maratha Empire, would henceforth have their power restored rather than it passing to the Peshwa. There had in fact been multiple rival branches of the House of Bhonsle based in multiple cities, including Colapore [Kolhapur] and Satara; however, aided by the fact that many of those Bhonsles had also died in the war, Ribeiro instead seemingly quixotically chose the Bhonsle Maharaja of Nagpore [Nagpur] to be the new Maratha ruler. The Nagpore branch of the Bhonsles had not even claimed to be chhatrapati, but purely by coincidence Nagpore happened to lie much deeper into the interior of India, and thus gave the Portuguese and their new backers a claim to legitimately extend their influence further as the Jihad began to collapse. Not all the old Maratha lands would come under Goa’s control, though. Gujarat, whose Gaekwa ruler had died heroically fighting off the Jihadis as one of their first conquests, would eventually be freed under a Persian-backed sultanate, and Persian influence would also be felt in the fragmented successor states of Rajputana. In the short term at least Delhi itself had escaped damage, as Nader Shah II had hoped when he made his deal with the devil with the Mahdi; however as the Jihad ground on into hopeless, endless war, once again the parallel with the Crusades and the Thirty Years’ War reared its ugly head. Religiously motivated violence against the infidel blurred into selfish rape and pillage aimed at the defenceless regardless of creed. Nonetheless Delhi was less affected than most of its surroundings, leading to a wealth disparity with neighbouring, resentful Panchala that continues to impact lives in the twentieth century.


From a casual glimpse at that fragmented, destroyed map of late nineteenth century India, the bitter legacy of a madman who claimed to want to expel foreigners and infidels and India and achieved the exact opposite, it would seem as though the Portuguese/Meridian presence in Goa and the former southern Maratha lands was much the same as any other colony. Certainly many deputies in the Cortes Nacionales in Córdoba thought as much. This led to La Confrontación de Goa in 1884. At this point President-General Eduardo Corominas was drawing to the end of his term and it seemed that the Adamantine Party had become dominant in the UPSA, with the Unionists unable to come up with an election-winning message and the minor parties, never that influential at the best of times, had been crushed by the Sanción Roja (Red Sanction) crackdown against ‘infiltration of the military’ following the Nigale Incident a few years before. Corominas wanted to help pave the way for his preferred successor, Adamantine President of the Cortes Manuel Perales, with a foreign policy coup as one of his final acts. The independence of the Philippine Republic in 1880 had proved a divisive policy. Though the new Adamatine Republic was under heavy Meridian influence as a Hermandad member state and arguably served Meridian interests better in such a manner without being a direct drain on resources, the Meridian people did not see it that way and regarded the ‘retreat’ as a sign of weakness. This sentiment was naturally something played on heavily by Raúl Caraíbas and other Societist leaders as an illustration of how the proletariat were unsuited to judge high state affairs and a criticism of the UPSA’s democracy—at a time when the latter was under threat from other quarters.


If the people wanted a flag-waving annexation, Corominas thought, he’d give them one. Goa had been run informally under Meridian influence via the PAWC for years, but now Castro was dead and it was being ruled by the elderly and politically suspect Oliveira—now it would come under direct control. A law to that effect was prepared in the Cortes. The Board of Directors of the PAWC, led by Rodrigo Jiménez (grandson of Agustín) and Carlos Priestley (brother of Roberto) protested, and were backed by both the Unionist Party and a sizeable segment of public opinion. The government was thoughtlessly talking of nationalising a valuable offshore possession of one of the UPSA’s oldest and largest companies, with no apparent compensation for shareholders. What would the man on the Córdoba steam multicarriage think to such an act? Would his bank be next, writing off his life savings?


In reality Corominas’ actions had merely been somewhat misjudged, influenced by the genuinely legally ambiguous status of the entity governing a chunk of India out of Goa and rebuilt Bombay. However, the Unionists had a sufficient share of the press on side (whose market share had been considerably boosted by the suppression of ‘suspicious’ newspapers supporting minor parties in the Sanción Roja) to reach the crucial tipping point of public opinion. Corominas’ initiative bogged down in the Cortes and was thrown out in the wash-up before the presidential election, which in a shock upset was won on the second round by Pedro Orantes of the Unionist Party. Orantes defeated his rival Perales and for the first time in twelve years, the UPSA had a Unionist President-General. This was the beginning of two world-shattering changes in that part of the world. Firstly, a legal precedent had been set that had put the government on the back foot against the increasingly powerful private corporations in the Hermandad which transcended borders, ruled distant colonies and vast swathes of the South American interior, and now wielded influence in the very corridors of power. For all that the downfall of the Adamantines’ position had originally happened with public support, Caraíbas’ warnings of the fickle nature and short memory of that public were proved correct as outrage then ensued against the companies dismissing old workers’ rights legislation out of hand, smashing trade unions and hiring cheap labour imported from Hermandad nations. After a while the companies didn’t even need to use their pet bribed deputies to repeal the legislation – they felt they could simply ignore it.


Secondly, Meridian relations with the ENA took a dive again, helped by the retirement of Michael Chamberlain in 1885 and the return to power of a Supremacist-led government. Increasingly the UPSA became a bugbear for American politicians again, not merely as an external military threat but as an example of the dangers of allowing too much corporate influence over governance, something which strongly influenced American political theory in this era. However, not only did this lead to the nationalisation of the remaining trading companies within America, but the Royal and Imperial Natal Company as well—which led to further tensions with Britain, which hadn’t even been consulted.


The Meridian presidential election of 1890, a date that should have been tinged with hope and promise – the centenary of the UPSA’s formal establishment in 1790 – was widely regarded as a joke, a bought election in which the privately owned Lectel networks ‘lost’ messages used by the Adamantine campaign and leaked them to the Unionists. The Unionist candidate was none other than Carlos Priestley himself. By this point even Orantes found himself uncomfortable with the government he had presided over and intended the shocking act of endorsing the Adamantine candidate Joaquín Velasco, grandson of the man who had originally founded the Adamantine Party. However, at least according to rumour and disputed papers released many years later, Orantes was forced to endorse Priestley after the Córdoba Municipal Multicarriage Company ‘lost’ the carriage his daughter was travelling on and unaccountably only found it—and her—after he did so.


Despite all these dirty tricks Priestley only won narrowly on the second round. Things might well have been different if there had been viable cobrist parties for the people to express their anger – the Adamantines, though considered preferable to the Unionists, were still regarded as quite corrupt in their own right and there was little enthusiasm for them. Yet the Colorado and Mentian Parties, though not formally banned, remained heavily suppressed by the Sanción Roja laws. The Societists, oddly enough, faced much less suppression. This may seem nonsensical from a modern perspective, but one must remember that it was easy for the ruling classes of the UPSA (both Adamantine and Unionist) to picture either a bloody revolution led by Neo-Jacobins like the one in Portugal (in the case of the Coloradoes) or vengeful immigrants rebelling against discrimination (in the case of the Mentians). The Societists’ views by contrast were considered so bizarre that simply few could picture a Societist revolution as a viable threat, and in any case Societist deputies were often useful allies when passing any bill that involved eroding trade barriers within the Hermandad.


Therefore, one can perceive the great shadow that a man can cast. Vicente Castro was in many ways a man like any other, a reasonably competent administrator, a fairly effective but ruthless battle commander. Even the PAWC sub-company established is more often known as ‘Senhor Oliveira’s Company’ than by his name, as Oliveira did most of the administrative work while Castro was fighting at the head of Portuguese and Maratha armies. Castro was dead before the Confrontación de Goa even happened, never mind his aftermath. Yet his actions not only ensured a chunk of India would fall under Meridian influence, but ultimately set in motion a chain of events which – for better and, mostly, for worse – created the world we must live in today…





[1] This author is rather overstating the idea that European colonial encroachment was not that great before the Jihad in order to play up the idea of a contrast.
 
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Thande

Donor
That was my first update written with the new Board software, hope it works OK.

I will continue to write new posts over the next few weeks but my first priority will probably be to get Volume II ready for publication, so please be understanding.
 
Hooray, another update! And Volume II will be out on Kindle soon, double hooray!

A very good update overall. India is getting africanized alarmingly quickly but that is perhaps not unsurprising given the Great Jihad. On the other hand, if as I suspect the Jihad is a stand-in for the Taiping Rebellion then I wonder why so many of the colonial powers (which now include Corea and China) are intent on building formal spheres of influence rather than indirect influence as in OTL China.

The UPSA is getting its fingers into even more pies but things are getting bad back home. I've been listening to the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan for a while now and in one of his episodes he talks about the breakdown of the Roman Republic as oligarchy took hold and the majority of the populace were locked out of the imperial system. What is happening in the UPSA at the moment seems very like that.

It has confirmed my suspicion that Societism is less this world's version of communism and more a mix of 1950s American liberalism and an intellectual version of fascism. Unlike communism, Societism isn't rising through a secretive coup but seemingly open electoral politics, and being under-estimated by the existing establishment. It does seem striking that the Pandoric War breaks out in the same year as the next UPSA election. Does that mean Societism is going to take power before the Pandoric War rather than after it, perhaps even be the spark of the Pandoric War? Possibly, it would create another twist to the Societists seizure of power alongside them taking power through elections. On the other hand, the fact that the Combine still holds Carolina (or enough of Carolina for it to be legitimately called that) suggests that the Societist takeover of the UPSA can't be too chaotic. I refuse to believe the ENA is going to have another brain cramp and be unable to apply its full force against Carolina this time. The implication in this chapter that the naval war is not going to go the UPSA's way deepens the mystery. Its going to be a wild ride all the same. Can't wait.

teg
 

Thande

Donor
Hooray, another update! And Volume II will be out on Kindle soon, double hooray!
Thanks for your comments and analysis, you raise some interesting points there. You have also reminded me I accidentally had an inconsistent date in an earlier segment, which I will now change.
 
Excellent update - I actually find it slightly easier to read long updates with the new background, a sentiment which will no doubt bring the wrath of the Help & Feedback forum crashing down upon my head in short order.

It's always a pleasure to see an India update - albeit a rather mixed one when you consider the destruction still wrought by the Great Jihad. The hints of Russian intrigue in 'the land of Buddhism' particularly stands out, although I did like the idea of Ireland and California establishing micro-colonies on the Indian coast (incidentally, it's slightly odd to see California referred to as a 'small' nation, given IOTL most people talk about the modern US state being a top-10 word economy that just happens to be part of an even larger economy...)

And the corruption in the UPSA is truly shocking; no wonder the Societists (or any other radicals, for that matter) wind up coming to power. Has the Sancion Roja been covered elsewhere, or is this the first we hear of it?

Minor continuity snaggle: I seem to recall Bombay being taken over by a 'Franco-Portuguese' administration at the end of the last volume - am I misremembering?
 

Thande

Donor
Excellent update - I actually find it slightly easier to read long updates with the new background, a sentiment which will no doubt bring the wrath of the Help & Feedback forum crashing down upon my head in short order.

It's always a pleasure to see an India update - albeit a rather mixed one when you consider the destruction still wrought by the Great Jihad. The hints of Russian intrigue in 'the land of Buddhism' particularly stands out, although I did like the idea of Ireland and California establishing micro-colonies on the Indian coast (incidentally, it's slightly odd to see California referred to as a 'small' nation, given IOTL most people talk about the modern US state being a top-10 word economy that just happens to be part of an even larger economy...)

And the corruption in the UPSA is truly shocking; no wonder the Societists (or any other radicals, for that matter) wind up coming to power. Has the Sancion Roja been covered elsewhere, or is this the first we hear of it?

Minor continuity snaggle: I seem to recall Bombay being taken over by a 'Franco-Portuguese' administration at the end of the last volume - am I misremembering?
Thanks in turn. Remember California grew exponentially (note to maths purists: I use the term loosely) throughout the 20th century - its representation in the US House of Representatives doubled with each new decade for a while! The Sancion Roja has been hinted at a couple of times but not really covered till now. I did note the mention of the French propping up the Portuguese in I believe chapter #199 but I slightly changed my ideas since then - I was going to fudge it and say it was a temporary measure in this update but there wasn't a good way to work it in, so I may just edit #199 accordingly.
 
This is one complicated India :eek:. We *desperately* need a map of this :)cool:), if only to see how many overlapping lines it has :evilsmile:.

Panchala is a little further north than I thought it would be. I imagined that it would cover the countries astride the Narmada River, but with Lucknow, it looks like it is a good size chunk of north/central India.
 
Excited to see the aftermath of the Great Jihad, and happy to see my theory regarding the naming of Panchala appears to be correct thus far! Although two questions based on the news from the past two updates:

1) if Mozambique remained outside the Hermandad, what happened to Portuguese controlled East Africa (Zanzibar, et al)? I know it's been mentioned that there's a significant Persian influence there; Persian colony?

2) How does the Meridian hold on Nagasaki work with the Russo-Corean domination of Yapon?
 
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