Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk

Given when the Pandoric War happened, that isn't especially surprising. For all that the Pandoric war was caused by a death of one person in some remote region, it was stumbled into much more accidentally than the net of alliances that spread WWI. The Black Twenties actually has two large alliance networks combating eachother, sort of (though mostly just Russia vs everyone else)
I feel as though this is the WW1, whereas the Pandoric War is far more of a "what if". Even looking at the technology, the Pandoric War was very much a pre-OTL WW1 fight. Radio coming into play later on, sublionhearts, early submarines... Feels like the American Civil War tech-wise, projected onto a global stage.

And I must pay my respects, Thande - magnificent writing, and thank you for it!
 
I feel as though this is the WW1, whereas the Pandoric War is far more of a "what if". Even looking at the technology, the Pandoric War was very much a pre-OTL WW1 fight. Radio coming into play later on, sublionhearts, early submarines... Feels like the American Civil War tech-wise, projected onto a global stage.

And I must pay my respects, Thande - magnificent writing, and thank you for it!
OTL there weren't any major wars in Western Europe for about 40 years before WW1 - the Pandoric War tech level seems to be what could have happened if the Belle Epoque hadn't been quite so Belle.
 
Both the Pandoric War and the Black Twenties are analogous to World War I. The casus belli being the death of the presumptive heir to a major power and a revolution occurring within one of the main belligerents. The Black Twenties on the other hand have clearly defined alliances, engagements in Europe and Asia and an outbreak towards the end of the war. I don't think Thande wrote this intentionally to try to make a distinction between OTL and TTL, but it's clear that both timelines aren't supposed to parallel each other in terms of major events occurring around the exact same time with the exact same chain of events. It isn't entirely different and I wish it was a bit move divergent, but given what we know so far about the upcoming Sunrise War in the 1950s, I'm hoping the divergence between timelines grows larger.

Also, I wanting to comment earlier on the previous chapter update that I was more enticed by the current politics of present day ENA. There's something interesting about reading the headlines of different worlds.
 
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Refresh my memory please - what's the Doctrine of the Last Throw?
A tactic Carabas came up with of remaining peaceful until everyone else is exhausted and then attacking at the last throw when noone is ready to defend against you.

So if WW2 ended with Switzerland emerging in 1945 to conquer territory from the bombed out wrecks of Italy, France and Germany.

We've been told this is how the black 20s end.
 

Thande

Donor
Thanks again for the further comments.

I feel as though this is the WW1, whereas the Pandoric War is far more of a "what if". Even looking at the technology, the Pandoric War was very much a pre-OTL WW1 fight. Radio coming into play later on, sublionhearts, early submarines... Feels like the American Civil War tech-wise, projected onto a global stage.

And I must pay my respects, Thande - magnificent writing, and thank you for it!

OTL there weren't any major wars in Western Europe for about 40 years before WW1 - the Pandoric War tech level seems to be what could have happened if the Belle Epoque hadn't been quite so Belle.

A bigger Boer or Russo-Japanese War?

Both the Pandoric War and the Black Twenties are analogous to World War I. The casus belli being the death of the presumptive heir to a major power and a revolution occurring within one of the main belligerents. The Black Twenties on the other hand have clearly defined alliances, engagements in Europe and Asia and an outbreak towards the end of the war. I don't think Thande wrote this intentionally to try to make a distinction between OTL and TTL, but it's clear that both timelines aren't supposed to parallel each other in terms of major events occurring around the exact same time with the exact same chain of events. It isn't entirely different and I wish it was a bit move divergent, but given what we know so far about the upcoming Sunrise War in the 1950s, I'm hoping the divergence between timelines grows larger.

Also, I wanting to comment earlier on the previous chapter update that I was more enticed by the current politics of present day ENA. There's something interesting about reading the headlines of different worlds.
I am trying to split the difference between 'exactly the same as OTL' and 'unrealistically different for the sake of different'. As these commenters have said, I'm trying to go for wars that aren't too similar to the OTL world wars because their eras are different (and the pace of technological advancement is different, e.g. chemistry has moved faster and electricity has moved slower) but there are certain echoes. My main inspiration for this was Tony Jones' "Monarchy World", which has three world wars set in what in OTL are in-between eras (IIRC).

One thing I try to do with TTL is to try to look at the historical currents in a vacuum and not compare it to OTL lest I run into that trap of 'being different for the sake of it'. So for example the Pandoric War ends with a defeated Germany (among other things) but I was generally trying not to make this parallel the end of WW1 in OTL - with the exception of emphasising a few differences like the monarchy is still around but is growing discredited, and is the one associated with trying to blame minorities for the loss.
 
285.1

Thande

Donor
Part 285: A Greater Foe

“Protests have resumed in farming towns across the region following a court ruling that the majority of the responsibility for the egg fever[1] outbreak two years ago rests with farmers and not with distributors. The ‘Magnolia Stamp’ Farmers’ League have repeated their position that the decision to use feeding and washing techniques that require the eggs to be chilled for transport are consistent with the Milwark II Common Agreement for One Continental Agricultural Policy or ‘Emm-Cow-Cap’ signed in 2013. Distributors, including the powerful Pop-Mart company of Sir V. Emmaus Bradleigh, contend that requirements for continuous refrigeration of eggs place the burden of safety unfairly upon them and are not sustained under their own trading agreements. It seems likely that the Magnolia League will be challenging the decision through appeal to the Assizes...”

– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 26/03/2020​

*

From: “The Black Twenties” by Errol Mitchell (1973)—

Epidemiologists and historians argue about the precise dating of the spread of the Third Plague Pandemic across the world. One common way to do so is to look at local newspaper archives, seeing how war news is gradually challenged, initially by small stories of local outbreaks, before being overwhelmed as the front page is taken over by the invisible enemy. However, this method naturally suffers from some drawbacks. As in the Pandoric War before it, there was often heavy government censorship of the news media, with stories of disease outbreaks being suppressed or minimised for a while due to fear it would undermine the war effort. Such censorship tended to suddenly reach breaking point overnight, as the plague outbreak in the newspaper’s home city reached the critical point where it could not longer be ignored. Due to this factor, looking at newspapers often gives one the false impression that a city went from nothing to a devastating outbreak over the course of days.

Papers from neutral countries are somewhat more reliable, but taking them at face value alongside others suggests that the plague was transmitting much faster in some places than others, which is also misleading. This is particularly problematic given that the plague actually was transmitting more effectively along some routes, which played an important role in how the pandemic changed the course of the war and the history of the world.

Though plague had probably been simmering beneath the surface for years in isolated Yunnan Province, it was the Treaty of Guiling negotiated by the French between China and Siam in 1919 that allowed the plague to begin spreading along reconnected trade routes. Only small, seemingly inconsequential local outbreaks were reported up until the end of 1922, at which point a threshold appears to have been reached. The Chinese New Year celebrations of early 1923 then spread the plague across China as many people made long journeys to visit their families, and China was hit by a widespread epidemic in the first half of the year. Control measures were implemented, principally quarantine and a new system of internal passports. These were generally more effective in the southern provinces than the north, which was still somewhat reliant on Beiqing-era administrators who were barely aware of modern medicine. The Chinese Government also struggled to crack down on snake oil salesmen selling alleged ‘miracle cures’ based on traditional Chinese medicine, although we should not leap to sneer at this, as later the Western world would have plenty of its own unhelpful trends of this type.

From China, the plague spread initially to Siam along the new trade routes and Corea along older ones, followed by the Philippine Republic and the Societist-controlled East Indies. The outbreak in Zon7Urb1 (formerly Batavia) is particularly difficult to date, as the Societist authorities were as careful to control the spread of information as the plague itself, and even their own private records were subject to frantic editing by the Biblioteka Mundial in later years. Nonetheless, most experts believe the outbreak was relatively early in the pandemic, perhaps as early as April 1923. This played a major role in the wider Societist response to the plague, which seemed to outsiders so well-planned and –organised that many conspiracies have sprung up (then and now) that they actually started it themselves. The more mundane reality is simply that much of Alfarus’ attention was on the conquest and cultural annihilation of the East Indies, and so the plague outbreak was taken seriously in the corridors of power early on. Societist scientists, including the vast chemical industry inherited from the old UPSA, were studying the plague almost as early as their counterparts in China, Corea and Siam.

As previously discussed, this pandemic was different to the two earlier plague pandemics. The nature of how the plague spread, and its incubation period, had meant it was almost impossible for plague to cross a vast ocean like the Atlantic or Pacific. It was only the advent of steamships (and, to a much lesser extent, some aerocraft) that allowed the plague to leap from the Old World to the New for the first time. Not crossing the Atlantic first, perhaps surprisingly, but the Pacific, entering California in October. The Societists enjoyed a certain advantage that the Pacific gap between China (or even the East Indies) and South America is much larger, making it still effectively impossible (even with steamships) for plague to spread from one to the other. When plague did enter South America, it would be via trade ships from California and Mexico, not directly from Asia.

Popular perception still paints South America as almost unscathed by the plague, which is an interesting example of how even diehard Diversitarians sometimes take Societist propaganda at face value. In reality, though South America certainly got off much more lightly than North America (for example), there were certainly several major outbreaks. The only one of these which is well-known is that of the city formerly known as Lima, which probably began around January 1924. This was too large for the Societists to officially deny, but instead fed into their propaganda about how their brilliant grasp of Human Science had led to them developing countermeasures at short notice. In reality, as said above, they had already been working on the East Indies outbreak months earlier.

There is no denying the fact that Societist scientists, in this era of relative freedom (Alfarus did not try to police their thoughts so long as they got results) did indeed make several breakthroughs that saved millions of lives and drastically transformed world perceptions of their movement. The key figure in this push was Alfarus’ wife, Maria Vaska, née Maria Vasquez.[2] She is often referred to in the Anglophone world as ‘Madame Alfarus’ or ‘Amiga Alfara’ but the Societists, like their Meridian predecessors, did not have the wife take the husband’s surname. Prior to the pandemic, she was best known because Julius Quinonus (nephew of Rafolus Quinonus[3]) had sought both to curry favour with Alfarus, and turn public opinion unless the last holdout Garderistas,[4] by starting a Marian personality cult identifying Vaska with the Virgin Mary. His goal was, building on some vague comments by Sanchez and his disciples, to create the idea that all human cultures shared the concept of a ‘mother goddess’ or personification of motherhood, which Catholicism had historically blended with Mary. If such an idea existed, then clearly the holdout Garderistas were being Anti-Human by arguing that motherhood should be eliminated. Quinonus’ plan broadly worked, though many historians consider it to be more a symptom than a cause of how Societist views of women, the family and religion were evolving under Alfarus. In the short run, however, one unintended outcome of the movement was to elevate Vaska at a time when her opinions suddenly became highly relevant.

Vaska was the younger sister of Alejandrus Vaskus (né Alejandro Vasquez) who, prior to the Revolution, had run Rosario Chemicals, one of the smaller companies that had piggybacked off the dominance of PAWC. Some biographers argue that Vaska actually married Alfarus originally to try to save her brother and his company, which had been imprisoned and shut down (respectively) by Monterroso’s purges. However, this seems unlikely, given that most historians (admittedly talking about a very hazy period) believe Alfarus was not a prominent figure in the Societists at the time Vaska married him, so could not have been relied on as a protector unless she saw a potential in him. Societist sources on this are, naturally, less than useless, but by patching together scraps of more reliable information, the majority opinion among historians is that Alfarus and Vaska had a genuinely loving marriage.

It is certainly true, however, that the continuation of the old Meridian chemical industry under new management, with many of the surviving Sanción Roja-era corporate monopolists able to retain more modest positions of power as a compromise, was likely in part due to Vaska’s influence. It is easy to imagine a scenario where the Societists had decided to turn on the unpopular corporations to appeal to the people, as Monterroso already had. Instead, they benefited from an almost direct continuity of the industrial power of the former companies, which were now directed to produce for the ‘Good of the Classes’ rather than profit. During the First Interbellum, they focused principally on chemicals to help agriculture, notably the infamous pesticide Tremuriatix. One area in which the Societists initially fell behind was fertilisers, relying on their near-global monopoly on guano to both fertilise their own fields and raise profits selling to others. This changed when the Refugiado chemist in the Philippines and then California, Enrique Prieto, developed the process that bears his name.[5] For the first time, illuftates [nitrates] could be produced industrially, and from around 1915 guano became obsolete as a resource. The annoyed Societist chemists quickly worked to duplicate the process themselves and produce artificial illuftate fertilisers – and explosives, initially ostensibly said to be for mining purposes.

Herbicides were also developed. The first and most important of these was Antauxin, developed in the very same Rosario factory in which Vaska’s brother still worked in a reduced capacity.[6] Antauxin could kill off broad-leaved weed plants while leaving crop plants untouched, and dramatically increased agricultural production in South America almost overnight. As with Tremuriatix, the Societists had an export policy of shipping the chemical only to countries which they felt could be manipulated with the prize, and which probably lacked the ability to analyse and duplicate it for themselves. The actual pricing of the chemicals was deliberately low, at least at first, but they nonetheless continued to make a profit for the Combine’s balance of trade in an era otherwise dominated by Alfarus’ policy of udarkismo or autarky.

Antauxin was not the only herbicide deployed in South America itself, though, with more broad-spectrum herbicides being used (together with more traditional burning techniques) to clear areas of rainforest for farming. The same practice would also be transferred to Africa as Karlus Barkalus’ black-flag empire grew. In hindsight it is easy for us to look back on this in horror, and many naturalists will bemoan the loss of biodiversity, as well as point to its contribution towards Torrid Expansion.[7] In the short term, however, these policies allowed the Societists to live up to their promises of Equality of Necessity; every poor urban dweller could be given a small self-sufficient farm to operate if he chose to take up the offer. The same policy would be particularly popular in Africa, although it did not kick into high gear there until the age of the Second Interbellum and the Electric Circus. Alfarus’ urban planners also plotted out new ‘Human Cities’ in the cleared areas, built according to the dreams of architects who drew questionable parallels between the earliest Sumerian cities and their own block-grid designs. Markus Lupus and his faction successfully advocated that these new cities should be populated not only by an encouraged increased birth rate among the current people of the Zones of South America, but by immigration from the East Indies and Africa. The latter remained controversial to many Societists, whose commitment to the universal brotherhood of mankind tended to slip a bit on being actually confronted with the idea of living next door to people with a different skin colour. Nonetheless, for all his faults, Alfarus does appear to have been a true believer in this regard, and silenced such critics.

When the plague broke out, the Combine was therefore in a strong position to mount a scientific response like unto the world had never seen. It was Maria Vaska who pushed her husband to take the problem seriously from the start. The Societist effort was mirrored in China and elsewhere, but though China’s scientific and industrial base had improved dramatically over the last century, the Chinese response was fundamentally hampered by the fact that the plague had already overwhelmed many cities with thousands of cases and deaths before her government realised what was happening. For this reason, Siam probably had the best response of any country in Asia, calling in scientists from overseas to work with her own on studying the plague. It is important for us to recognise that what we now consider to be obvious facts about the plague – that its active agent is an animalcule, spread primarily by flea bites from fleas living on rats – were entirely unknown in 1920.[8] Historical epidemiologists still believed that the mediaeval Black Death had been spread by contaminated food, and did not know its disease agent. While much had been invested in studying other killer diseases such as influenza and cholera, the plague had seemed to belong to the pages of history books and had attracted little notice. European and much Novamundine medicine was caught unprepared to deal with this threat. The first breakthroughs in study of the plague came simultaneously by the multinational team in Ayutthaya and, secretly, in Zon7Urb1 among the Societists. The former group named the plague animalcule Garcia pestis after the Refugiado scientist who first identified it. It is uncertain what term the Societists used.

Around the world, the plague spread in an unprecedented pattern. Historically, pandemics had typically begun in China with its vast and urbanised population, then spread westward to Russia along the Silk Road, then into Europe – both over land through Eastern Europe and, often, via sea thanks to the Black Sea and Mediterranean trade. Disease had also spread through sea traffic around Asia and to Africa, but historically this route had usually been slower.[9] The Black Twenties were different. Russia had withdrawn from territories around Manchuria as part of her successful bid to buy Chinese neutrality in the war. This, together with Tartary being consumed by an uprising which the overstretched Russians failed to put down for a long time, meant that the overland route was effectively cut. Remarkably, it seems plague appeared in California before it did in the Old World east of the Indian lands.

Outbreaks spread from Siam and the Societist East Indies westwards, initially to Calcutta and Dacca in Bengal, which reported their first outbreaks in July 1923, probably exacerbated by the aftermath of the monsoon season. Plague spread more slowly into the Indian interior, with its transport links still weaker than those around the coastline. Around this time the French had finally rebuilt their fleet enough to have another try at the Russians in Ceylon (who were reeling from Van De Velde and the Belgians debating whether to obey orders from the captive Charles Theodore III to stand down). However, at this point the plague swept across French Bisnaga; the Russians and Belgians did manage to contain an outbreak in Ceylon itself, and Ceylon would mostly be spared the effects of the pandemic. As plague battered both the Guntoor Authority and the Concan Confederacy, October 1923 saw French ships from Bisnaga spread it into Persian and Kalati ports. This outbreak played a role in the Shah-Advocate’s decision to seek peace with the Russians. Some epidemiologists believe the first Russians to be infected by the plague were actually troops sent by General Yakushkin to occupy Bandar Abbas – though others state that the outbreak in Fyodorsk in Yapon began well before the Russian authorities admitted it did.

The plague then spread westward still into the Ottoman Empire. Once again, overland transmission was initially a relatively slow process, and Anatolia had still barely heard of the plague by the time ships brought it to Venice (as well as North Africa). Just as had happened centuries before, the great Italian trade port was the gateway to Europe, and plague began to spread in earnest throughout the early months of 1924. Meanwhile in the ENA, spread from California was largely limited to Drakesland, with the Imperial government mostly managing to control the outbreak by cutting transport links with Westernesse and Michigan to prevent it spreading eastwards. In the ENA it would be the second wave that would be more damaging, spread from Europe westward across the Atlantic, but that still lay in the future as of mid-1924. Mexico and Guatemala would be pummelled by both waves.

What were the primary government responses to the plague? Initially, with little understanding of how transmission worked, governments mostly focused on quarantine, with mixed success. Many practices that had thought to be consigned to the pages of history were revived, including nailing up ‘plague houses’ and refusing to allow their inhabitants to leave until a period of time had passed. There is a wearying inevitability to studying newspapers of the time, with the papers of one country mocking its neighbour for panic and barbaric practices, only to find itself doing the same a month later as the plague spread further.

However, things had also changed a lot since the last big outbreaks of plague in Europe in the seventeenth century.[10] Modern understanding of sanitation, driven largely by the fight against cholera, was also deployed against plague, with varying results (those who believed the plague was also transmitted through contaminated water were obviously controlling the wrong thing). Caustic lime-wash was used to disinfect houses and streets, and some countries even deployed death-luft weapons (usually muriatine luft) as a disinfectant procedure, with families returning to houses after the luft had dissipated.[11] Some unpleasant regimes, such as Portugal, faced rumours that they had not evacuated the houses first (claiming that the inhabitants had simply not listened to the evacuation warning) as an excuse to get rid of undesirables. All these techniques were somewhat effective, but ignored the fact that people could still be carrying the disease and the fleas needed to spread it – as the knowledge of this vector was still only just being uncovered.

In their celebrated response to the pandemic, the Societists made several major chemical breakthroughs (or exploited existing ones). New disinfectants, though a mundane development and one replicated in several other countries, may actually have made more difference than all the flashier and better-remembered members of the ‘Arsenal Of Health Against The Deadly Enemy Of Mankind’ as VoxHumana propaganda put it. Nonetheless, far more iconic was Tremuriatix, the pesticide that had originally been aimed at agricultural pests (and had been sold to Carolinians to combat the boll weevil infestation). Tremuriatix killed fleas as easily as it killed boll weevils, and when the Siam-based and Societist teams both ascertained that fleas were the primary vector of the plague, on Vasca’s urging Alfarus ordered increased production of the pesticide in all available factories. Billowing clouds of the stuff were deployed by Celatores in the streets with spray-guns, by repurposed crop-sprayer dromes overflying cities, and by many other methods. This was long before the negative repercussions of such mass use of Tremuriatix became known, of course, but it is reasonable to argue that the positives outweighed the negatives in such a dire situation.[12] Although, as said above, it is incorrect to take Societist propaganda at face value and act as though South America was barely affected by the pandemic, it does seem valid to suggest that Tremuriatix prevented the continent from suffering the kind of death tolls seen in North America or Eurasia.

Though the Societists appear to have prioritised South America first (another point of criticism for some observers) they then began exporting Tremuriatix first to the East Indies to help deal with the major outbreak there, and then later to Africa when the plague eventually reached it. Some analysts believe the use of Tremuriatix in Africa actually saved more lives by quite unintentionally also killing off malarial mosquitoes, almost entirely wiping out the disease in many Societist-controlled regions (and inadvertently making the Guinean and former-Meridian cash cow of quinine production nigh obsolete!)

There was much debate in the corridors of power over whether Tremuriatix should be exported outside the ‘Liberated Zones’, as it already had been to a small extent. Alfarus and Vaska were aware that, altruism aside, such a policy could be coup for Societism’s image, but production was also limited and the plague was only barely being held under control within the Combine. Vaska’s solution was for the Combine to issue a decree that Tremuriatix and other anti-plague products would be exported, but only to countries (‘the illegitimate regimes claiming to govern...’) which remained neutral in the ongoing war, or else stood down now and made peace. This ultimatum was good Sanchezist doctrine and, correctly gambling that most of the nations at war would react with outrage and reject the offer, the Societists did not have to choose between treating their own people or export. In practice, as production ramped up, Alfarus allowed a little unofficial ‘smuggling’ of Tremuriatix and other products to the countries at war, with the logic that it would let their peoples see that the chemicals worked and their rulers were denying them access to them.

The ENA retaliated in this regard with its own chemical weapon against the plague, which debuted in November 1924, when the plague had already ravaged the west of the country. The American chemical was the result of research by agricultural scientists from the University of Plumbum, Dakota Province, Michigan.[13] Farmers across the region had been confused by cattle dying in routine operations such as de-horning, bleeding in a manner evocative of haemophilia. A team led by Dr Henry Beck identified the cause of the problem, in 1920, as the cattle being fed on silage containing sweet clover, which contained an anti-coagulant chemical. The team named the chemical Dakotine after their home province.[14] There was some initial interest in the use of Dakotine as an anti-coagulant drug to treat conditions which thickened the blood, or to prevent clotting in certain operations which would hamper them. However, the Birley Company of Whitehaven, Albany Province, New York[15] employed Beck and some synthetic chemists (including one Meridian Refugiado expert) to work on a synthetic equivalent to Dakotine (which was expensive to extract) which might be even better. They achieved this around October 1923, even as the plague entered California. The chemical they produced, dubbed Birline after the company, was more potent than Dakotine. There was some debate about whether it was too strong to use for medical purposes, but a happenstance incident with a rat breaking into stores showed that Birline could be a very effective rat poison.[16] Fortuitously for Sir Harold Birley and company, he had a patent on such a chemical just as researchers were concluding that the plague was spread by rats as a secondary vector, bringing fleas into contact with humans. The master of this then-relatively small chemical company was about to make himself a very rich man.

Birline would make a huge difference for the ENA, especially in the second wave when it arrived from Europe. Nonetheless, the ENA would lag behind the Societists for two reasons: firstly, Birline could kill rats but could not stop fleas jumping directly from person to person in crowded urban areas; secondly, the Fouracre ministry was less concerned with using the breakthrough as a diplomatic tool to influence other countries. Indeed, America initially banning Birline exports to prioritise her own people would poison (no pun intended) relations with her allies, such as France. The Americans also saw Birline versus Tremuriatix as something of a culture war, and spread false claims that Tremuriatix was ineffective or caused side effects (while Tremuriatix came with downsides, none of these had anything to do with the ones the Americans were claiming). This policy of patriotic chest-beating went down well in most of the country, but in occupied Carolina, the people – still, as yet, largely unaffected by the plague – were less than happy to find their boll weevil-killing Tremuriatix suddenly banned.

Later in the pandemic, of course, the question of vaccines would arise. The Societists would be the first to develop a vaccine, with export again being subject to Vaska’s demand that countries make peace before they receive it. A very similar vaccine (both produced by heating cultures of G. pestis to high temperatures) would be developed in Ayutthaya a few months later.[17] Vaccination against the plague made a difference in some parts of the world while the pandemic was still raging, but these early vaccines, though they saved millions of lives, were of qualified effectiveness (in particular being ineffective against pulmonary plague) and came with significant side effects. Much of the more economically developed world benefited more from the use of pesticides and disinfectants, at least in the short term – vaccination would, however, be used to prevent a resurgence of the plague later in the decade. Vaccination did make a major short-term difference, however, in China, Bengal and other regions with densely-populated cities. The Black Twenties led to an era of urban renewal, not only in Asia but elsewhere, with crammed slums replaced with larger houses with modern sanitation.

Yet, of course, it is difficult to argue with the point that as far as world history is concerned, the most important chemical breakthrough of the Black Twenties was not Tremuriatix or Birline or even the plague vaccines. It was a breakthrough that had nothing to do with the plague at all, but it was a breakthrough that would rocket the Societists to an even more exalted and feared position. The Alkahest was coming...




[1] Salmonella (in OTL named after a researcher long after the POD of this timeline).

[2] This reflects the Societists converting –ez to –us and then switching to the feminine ending, although this is not actually very grammatically sound.

[3] A Societist revolutionary leader who played a key role in acquiring Peru for the Combine, as described in Part #260 in Volume VII.

[4] In this context this means the few remaining Societist grandees who still believed that children being raised communally should be the default, universal option, not a way to punish their parents for deviationism as Alfarus’ compromise had it. Naturally most of these people had already been purged, so this is referring to figures sufficiently influential enough that Alfarus had elected to merely sideline them.

[5] See Part #269 in Volume VII.

[6] Antauxin is a contraction of ‘antagonist to auxin’, meaning a chemical that emulates auxin (plant growth hormones) in a way that stops growth altogether. The term auxin was coined well after the POD of this timeline but is an obvious coinage (from the Greek word for growth). Antauxin, in its original form, is the same chemical known in OTL as 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid or 2,4-D for short. This was not discovered until the Second World War in OTL, so its earlier discovery reflects the advanced state of the former Meridian chemical industry. In OTL it also went on to revolutionise agriculture.

[7] Global warming or climate change, given this name in TTL as its earliest discoverers thought mainly in terms of the tropical or ‘torrid’ regions of the world expanding into the temperate ones.

[8] This was also true in OTL before the Third Plague Pandemic hit Hong Kong in the 1890s.

[9] This is debatable, but the author is trying to make a point.

[10] This is an oversimplification, as – just like OTL – there were plague outbreaks from the Second Plague Pandemic (the aftermath of the Black Death) as late as the 1700s and 1800s, including some in Europe. The last outbreak in Western Europe was the Great Plague of Marseilles in 1720, which killed a hundred thousand people.

[11] Both of these techniques were used to combat the Hong Kong plague in OTL (recall that muriatine luft is the TTL name for chlorine gas).

[12] This is referring primarily to the fact that Tremuriatix (DDT) builds up along the food chain and can kill off entire ecosystems. There have also been claims it can cause cancer, but these have never been satisfactorily determined one way or the other.

[13] OTL Dubuque, IA. The TTL city is rather larger due to being a provincial capital.

[14] This is known in OTL as dicoumarol. The process of discovery is similar to how it went in OTL, except that OTL had a bigger gap between identifying sweet clover as the cause, identifying the chemical and using it as the basis for future drugs. In OTL this did not take place until the 1930s and 40s, again reflecting the more advanced state of chemistry in TTL compared to OTL.

[15] OTL Fredonia, NY – also much larger in TTL due to when certain canals were built and the fact that Iroquois/Haudenosaunee territory could not be built on for longer.

[16] Birline is known in OTL as Warfarin. Its discovery was a little different in OTL – it was first used in 1948 as a rat poison, and its medical uses were only pursued when an army inductee attempted suicide using rat poison, was brought back from the bring with Vitamin K as the antidote, and it was discovered Warfarin was actually better than Dicoumarol as a medical anti-coagulant.

[17] These are similar to the inactivated bacterial plague vaccine developed by Waldemar Haffkine in Bombay/Mumbai in 1896, of which over 25 million doses were administered in India. Superior vaccines based on attenuated bacteria or proteins alone have been developed in the years since.
 
Technological divergences continuing for another century, I like it.

Too bad those problems with America not selling its rat poison to France are probably going to continue with pre-ASN Diversitarianism. I wonder if/how much the post-Sunrise Russian policies set back their reconstruction, or if exceptions are made for that.
 
Why wouldn't it be grammatically sound? It's an artificial language. Societists set the rules after all.
Because '-es/-ez' has nothing to do with the Latin '-us' ending at all.
It is, rather, a remnant of an archaic genitive form. Rodriguez would originally have been 'fijo/filio Rodriguez' or, in modern Castilian 'hijo de Rodrigo', Portuguese 'filho de Rodrigo' The 's' genitive/possessive has long vanished in the Romance languages, but survives in a fossilized form in Iberian surnames.
 
Why wouldn't it be grammatically sound? It's an artificial language. Societists set the rules after all.
Because Novalatina rules are aesthetically repulsive and obey no logic other than maximising stupid awfulness. Its "grammar", if we are to undeservedly call it that, has no claim to soundness whatsoever.
EDIT: also, what @Dathi THorfinnsson said.
 
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Because '-es/-ez' has nothing to do with the Latin '-us' ending at all.

Why would (Old) Latin grammar apply to Novalatina? It's a different language. And on top of that, it's partially derivative of Meridian Spanish.

Because Novalatina rules are aesthetically repulsive and obey no logic other than maximising stupid awfulness. Its "grammar", if we are to undeservedly call it that, has no claim to soundness whatsoever.

No logic? I kinda doubt that. It's an artificial language, so I would actually assume it to be more logical than most other languages. At least initially.
 
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