Isn't that the whole point of Judaism?
Only according to some approaches. Yuk yuk yuk.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Only according to some approaches. Yuk yuk yuk.
First of all... thanks, everyone. I wasn't expecting that response, and it made my week. It should also make the next update that much easier to write.
In terms of publication, I still think that the structure of alternate history timelines doesn't fit well with traditional book format. With that said, though, I might try to put something together when the timeline is done, and make it available to those who are interested. If anyone wants to help, please contact me - not now, because there's still a way to go before I could contemplate such a project, but toward the end of the year when the final narrative cycle is in progress.
What we're seeing are three Jewish families who don't know how lucky they are. They remember the pogroms of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and worry about occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism and the safety of their coethnics still in Hungary, Yemen or similar places, but they look on the twentieth century as a time of emancipation and hope. And they can't imagine Berlin as anything other than a major center of Jewish life.
This is most of the reason why Zionism never caught on big in TTL, and why the great majority of Zionists who do exist are content with cultural autonomy and a role in managing Jewish historical sites.
It's a... complicated place, but one where there's a lot of diversity and cultural richness very close at hand for those who want it.
If you're interested in what's happened to it since our last visit in the 1910s, it has become a prosperous high-tech and finance hub, many of the rough edges have been worn off, and mass media (especially television) has homogenized the culture on some levels. Most people aspire to middle-class respectability, but a counterculture is forming among those who don't, albeit one that's less individualist and more influenced by religious ethics and anarchist theory than the Wandervögel or OTL beatniks/hippies.
The third group would call itself a family. They are, as you've probably guessed, an anarcho-communist association modeled after those in Venice and Friuli, but heavily influenced by the Baha'i-inflected Reconstructionist Judaism and by Ottoman radical politics.
Two Jews, three opinions. Three Jewish families...
And for the record, at every family Seder for the past thirty years, everyone has pointed at me when the contrary son was named.
I could argue that the East Africans and Hungarians in TTL, to say nothing of the Russians and Chinese, might dispute that this is a better world - but I won't. By nearly any measure, TTL's world is a more just one than OTL's, and as The Sandman says, it's not because of how many things went right but because of how many didn't go wrong. There have been brutal wars in TTL, evil and oppression still exist, and this world's progressive aspects were hard-earned through bitter lessons - but more of those lessons have been learned, and that's all it takes.
For what it's worth, I don't believe that progress and good are uninteresting, or that dystopias are inherently more interesting than (ambiguous) utopias; if you want to consider TTL an extended essay on that, in addition to the other things it's about, then you might not be wrong.
There's that too, certainly. Some of the scientists on the team were African, and I'm sure they shared stories.
The Ethio-Ottoman update will be next, and I really mean it this time.
In terms of publication, I still think that the structure of alternate history timelines doesn't fit well with traditional book format. With that said, though, I might try to put something together when the timeline is done, and make it available to those who are interested. If anyone wants to help, please contact me - not now, because there's still a way to go before I could contemplate such a project, but toward the end of the year when the final narrative cycle is in progress.
What we're seeing are three Jewish families who don't know how lucky they are. They remember the pogroms of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and worry about occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism and the safety of their coethnics still in Hungary, Yemen or similar places, but they look on the twentieth century as a time of emancipation and hope. And they can't imagine Berlin as anything other than a major center of Jewish life.
This is most of the reason why Zionism never caught on big in TTL, and why the great majority of Zionists who do exist are content with cultural autonomy and a role in managing Jewish historical sites.
I'd love to visit TTL's Salonika if I could.
It's a... complicated place, but one where there's a lot of diversity and cultural richness very close at hand for those who want it.
If you're interested in what's happened to it since our last visit in the 1910s, it has become a prosperous high-tech and finance hub, many of the rough edges have been worn off, and mass media (especially television) has homogenized the culture on some levels. Most people aspire to middle-class respectability, but a counterculture is forming among those who don't, albeit one that's less individualist and more influenced by religious ethics and anarchist theory than the Wandervögel or OTL beatniks/hippies.
The third group would call itself a family. They are, as you've probably guessed, an anarcho-communist association modeled after those in Venice and Friuli, but heavily influenced by the Baha'i-inflected Reconstructionist Judaism and by Ottoman radical politics.
Two Jews, three opinions. Three Jewish families...
And for the record, at every family Seder for the past thirty years, everyone has pointed at me when the contrary son was named.
I could argue that the East Africans and Hungarians in TTL, to say nothing of the Russians and Chinese, might dispute that this is a better world - but I won't. By nearly any measure, TTL's world is a more just one than OTL's, and as The Sandman says, it's not because of how many things went right but because of how many didn't go wrong. There have been brutal wars in TTL, evil and oppression still exist, and this world's progressive aspects were hard-earned through bitter lessons - but more of those lessons have been learned, and that's all it takes.
For what it's worth, I don't believe that progress and good are uninteresting, or that dystopias are inherently more interesting than (ambiguous) utopias; if you want to consider TTL an extended essay on that, in addition to the other things it's about, then you might not be wrong.
There's that too, certainly. Some of the scientists on the team were African, and I'm sure they shared stories.
The Ethio-Ottoman update will be next, and I really mean it this time.
That was deeply affecting, in a wonderful way. I really hope you do something to bring this story to a wider audience, because I would buy all of the copies for my friends and loved ones.
So would I. This timeline is one of the greatest pieces of fiction I've ever read. It really reaches out and touches the soul in the way great literature does, while also being a fascinating intellectual exercise of what could and perhaps should have been.
I've just finished reading all of the posts on TTL, both guest and your own, and I have to that this is one of if the absolute best alternate history stories I've ever read. Keep in mind that this includes published fiction, not only is it incredibly well written and optimistic, it also avoids the pitfalls of other AH fiction in that each event follows from the previous one and that there is no hand waving, ASBs, idiot ball or other obvious tropes. If you ever collect this as an ebook for sale or for free I will surely get it for my kindle.
Please keep up the great work.
Please keep up the great work.
I'm just wondering, what happened to Florida? Most of it was developed past the PoD, so what is it like? Is Miami still there? For that matter, is Tampa?
I've wondered about Florida in particular myself, having spent the largest portion of my childhood spent in any one particular place there, particularly in what is called OTL Panama City, halfway across the panhandle.
It's kind of a morbid fascination; the last time I was there was 30 years ago and the place seems politically and culturally toxic from my current vantage. (But I'd say the same thing about Nevada if I didn't live here now--living here, I can say some things to mitigate criticism.
)ITTL too, there are some dark clouds a-brewin'; after the Civil War Florida stood out in the alternate history as one of the most extreme Jim Crow states (as it did OTL). Georgia has the improving relationship between Rebecca Felton and Harriet Tubman to redeem it a bit; Florida, though, would seem more, um, unreconstructed.
But to be fair, the place could have been revolutionized several ways in the many generations since the early Jim Crow years. The whole USA, especially the South of course, was overturned by an even stronger than OTL civil rights movement, some decades earlier than OTL.
Meanwhile I suppose to some extent geography is destiny; the semitropical climate (rivaled only by the Bahamas ITTL in US possession, the US controlling neither Hawaii nor Puerto Rico and having little of the OTL dominance of the nominally independent Caribbean nations), unique to the contiguous states would no doubt still lure down various waves of tourists; with the invention of the air conditioner the settlement rush would begin--drawing as per OTL not just from the South but all over the US.
I don't think we have enough to guess on though; only Jonathan can enlighten us.
In the context of recent talk about rockets, any serious US government program is going to be very likely to settle on Cape Canaveral or somewhere very near and like it to become the major launch center--especially since this in this ATL the USA is lacking possessions much farther south. Considering that Canaveral is not at the southernmost point of the state, possibly Texas might be preferred, but I suspect the same factors that pointed to the Florida east coast OTL would prevail here too, especially if tourism creates infrastructure comparable to OTL--then Florida would also here have easier access to products of the nation's industrial heartlands, shorter coastal access to east coast ports, etc.
But I also expect that the USA will not lead in space exploration; I tried to lobby for some organizational infrastructure in lieu of a big military-industrial complex but that suggestion having fallen by the wayside, I don't think the US of this timeline has either incentive or capability; the only established governmental organization that could handle it would probably be the Navy and I expect it to be substantially smaller and leaner than OTL so even that service could only make marginal efforts.
A conceivable alternative might be a private venture, but that will never muster the concentrated funds NASA got OTL. A private venture might be located almost anywhere they can get away with the risks launches pose their neighbors to the east, if any--and need not be located on US soil at all.
So I'm not betting on a big spaceport--just that the biggest, most developed launch site in the US would probably be at or near Cape Canaveral.
Aram Sakalian, The Young Ottomans from Tanzimat to Democracy (Stamboul: Abdülhamid University Press, 2011)
… “Trading space for time” is most often used to describe a military tactic, in which an army allows the enemy to penetrate deep into its own territory to gain a chance to regroup. But the term could as easily describe the Ottoman Empire’s political strategy during its century of reform: shedding marginal and rebellious provinces to gain time to build a cohesive state at the core. Throughout that time, the empire was in a race with itself, to construct an effective and legitimate state supported by broad consensus before that consensus could be unraveled by pressure from the margins. It was a race that could easily have been lost, and at few times was the outcome more in doubt than in the empire’s last decade under that name.
After the turbulent 1920s [1] and the two years of open war with Persia over the Caucasus [2], the politics of the 1930s and early 40s were relatively calm, but they gave some hints of what was to come. The Caucasian war had cost 80,000 lives and uncounted millions of lira for an outcome that not even the Porte could portray as a victory: the Persian-supported khan of Shirvan had been forced to yield to the Ottoman-backed republic, but Stamboul acknowledged Persian interests in the region and agreed that the Caucasus would be an overlapping sphere of influence. The peace treaty was widely seen as a loss of prestige in a region that had been painfully reclaimed in the War of the Balkan Alliance and the Great War, and gave rise to widespread distrust of the government’s judgment in military affairs – a distrust that would manifest itself most dramatically in the failed “Lions of Crimea” coup of 1936. [3]
Another scandal that would have enduring effect was the discovery, in 1929 and 1930, that conservative religious leaders who opposed the secularist Arab People’s Party of Mesopotamia had accepted support from Persia. [4] Although none of them committed provable treason – they all repudiated the Shah once the Caucasian war became hot – the affair, which implicated Christian and Jewish as well as Muslim figures – ignited anti-clericalism in the Mesopotamian cities and frayed the edges of an empire that was held together partly by religious law. The APP-M, which had historically drawn its strength from the polyglot cities and oil fields, became increasingly dominant in the countryside as well, taking unchallenged political hegemony in the Mesopotamian sanjaks and transforming the region even more into a state within the state.
The success of Mesopotamian regionalism, and the clout that this newfound unity gave the oil provinces in the Meclis, inspired other regions to attempt the same feat. Between 1933 and 1940, regionalist parties were formed in the Levant, the Anatolian heartland and Albania, and the Ottoman Socialist Party adopted a regionalist program for the industrial sanjaks of western Anatolia and the eastern Balkans. Few of these parties were as successful as the APP-M: the economic factors that had jump-started Mesopotamian regionalism weren’t as strong elsewhere, and attempts at unity foundered on personality clashes and disputes between the liberal cities and the more conservative countryside. But failure led to recrimination: liberal Albanian nationalists and hill chiefs blamed each other for not achieving autonomy, and in the Levant, blame fell along provincial and sectarian lines.
Almost worse, from Stamboul’s point of view, were the instances in which regionalism succeeded. In the 1937 election, the Ottoman Socialists won power in all but two of the industrial sanjaks, and entered a unity pact much like that of Mesopotamia. Now, these provinces too were a state within the state – but one that surrounded the capital and had the potential to strangle it both physically and economically. And the following year, a regional party did well in local elections in Libya – an area that had long felt like a stepchild and that was under the increasing influence of Bornu and of the pan-Maghrebi movements in Algeria and Tunisia.
All the same, few realized at the time how dire the situation might become. The compromise brokered by the APP-M, in which oil-producing provinces would keep a share of the oil revenues, had tamped down outright separatism, and enough oil money reached the poorer provinces for rising standards of living to mute discontent. The conflicts between regions and ideologies played out in the political arena rather than on the streets. There were also instances in which regional and ideological differences were successfully put aside in favor of shared management and jurisdiction. Mecca was incorporated as a Legatum to be managed by the Sultan on behalf of all Muslims, and no less than two were established in Jerusalem: a religious board that governed the holy sites in the Old City, and an elected council, in which the Chayat Haaretz movement played a key part, to oversee development, pilgrimage and historical preservation in the city as a whole.
But as the 1940s progressed, this would change. In the underdeveloped provinces, rising prosperity was accompanied by rising inequality, and much of the development funding from Stamboul was lost to corruption and self-dealing. Village headmen, landlords and clan chiefs, who made up most of the new monied class, used the stolen funds to buy influence in the police and courts and to control the sanjak governments. They were aided in this by the fact that, under the 1911 constitution, sanjaks had broad leeway in determining their form of government [5], and many of the poor rural provinces had little internal democracy. This had been tolerable as long as everyone was poor and feudal bonds went both ways, but now that feudalism was being replaced by more one-sidedly exploitative relationships, the people rose in revolt. By the mid-1940s, many sanjaks were in a state of low-grade conflict similar to southern Italy: peasant self-defense groups fought the police and the landlords’ hired thugs for land reform and democracy, with Abacarism and secular populism making the situation all the more volatile. Rural Albania, Anatolia and the Hejaz were all aflame.
The spark that lit the tinder, though, would happen in Libya rather than any of those regions. In 1943, oil was discovered south of Ajdabiya, and within two years, more than twenty other fields were found in western Cyrenaica and the Fezzan. While these fields’ output was nowhere near that of eastern Arabia or Mesopotamia, it was clear that Libya would soon become a major oil-producing region. Under other circumstances, this might have led to rejoicing, but as things were, it would result in war.
The Libyans knew that untold wealth had just been found, but that only a tenth of it would be theirs, and that even most of this would be siphoned off by corrupt officials and magnates. Most of the coastal Libyan sanjaks were of the less democratic variety, and there was little recourse to force a more equitable distribution of these funds. And they had little faith that much of Stamboul’s share of the oil revenue would return to them. They looked south to Bornu, where oil had also been discovered during the early 1940s and where Belloist ethics and consensus government structures had directed nearly all the revenue to public-benefit projects, and compared it with their own situation. Bornu had joined the Nile Authority and was working with it to tap the Nubian fossil aquifer, bringing fresh water to the towns and making the desert bloom: where was the hope that Libya would do the same?
The matter might have been resolved by conciliation, and indeed, Stamboul tried to mediate once it realized how serious the discontent was. But by then, repressive local authorities had pushed things past the point of no return. On February 11, 1947, revolutionaries seized control of Benghazi and declared the Republic of Barqa; a few days later, like-minded citizens in the west proclaimed the State of Tripoli. By the end of the month, provisional governments existed in most of the coastal towns, while the desert tribes simply withdrew their allegiance from local governors.
Stamboul, which was then controlled by a weak minority government, reacted with panic, and determined to put down the rebellion before it could ignite separatism elsewhere. Thousands of troops landed on Libyan soil, and although the provisional governments fought bitterly, they quickly seized control of most of the major towns. By May, the Ottoman government had proclaimed victory – but this was only the beginning.
As the army soon learned, it was one thing to control the towns, but a different thing entirely to rule the desert. In Libya, tribal allegiances were strong even in the cities, so the rebels found sanctuary with their fellow tribesmen and carried on the fight. They fought a fluid, mobile battle as the Ottoman and Bornu armies had done in the Great War, but with the benefit of the succeeding half-century’s technical advances: they used fast motor wagons as transports and gun platforms, and armed themselves with antiaircraft weapons and surplus Anastasias from the Nile War. The Ottoman army found itself at a loss, tied down by the need to protect towns and oil fields, and stretched too thin to stop the Libyans’ raids and ambushes.
Nor could the army rely on neighboring countries to contain the rebellion, because regional politics had changed. No longer was Tunisia a compliant Italian protectorate: the alliance of indigenous leftists and anarchist Italian settlers that had formed in the 1930s [6] had been driven to the wall by the Bey and had risen in rebellion. The Bey had gambled that Italy would have no choice but to intervene, and he lost spectacularly: Rome declined to send troops, and by the end of 1943, the ruling family had been forced into exile and the victorious rebels had declared a republic. They negotiated terms of independence under which Italy kept the port of Bizerte, a defensive pact was concluded and Italian interests in Tunisia were protected, but they were otherwise free agents, and their revolutionary ideology led them to support rather than oppose the Libyans. And Bornu, too, had developed religious, political and even family bonds with the Libyan tribes that were stronger than its nominal vassalage to the Sultan, and gave them sanctuary when they were forced to flee across the border.
Stamboul did the only thing it could, and reinforced its troops, but this was not enough to end the rebellion. And as the war lengthened and its costs increased, it led to exactly what the government feared. The distrust of the Porte’s military competence that had emerged after the Caucasian war now came back redoubled, and so did questions about why the empire was fighting in Libya rather than reforming the abuses that had led to the rebellion. The war had never been popular, and as it dragged on, it seemed more and more a pointless sacrifice of blood and treasure. In early 1950, the APP-M adopted a resolution threatening to take Mesopotamia out of the empire unless it made peace, and while the industrial sanjaks didn’t call for secession, they closed their roads and ports to war traffic and called on munitions workers to strike. And to top things off, Bulgaria, which had been quiescent up to now as an autonomous principality, seized the moment to once again demand full independence. The government, which had been tottering for months, finally fell, and the only question was whether the empire would fall with it.
That it didn’t was due to several factors. One was that, after the failed coup of 1936, the military had been tamed; it was now fully under civilian control, and another coup – which would surely have triggered civil war – was by now unthinkable. Another was that the incoming emergency government, which ran the gamut from conservative to radical and for the first time included Lev Pasha as a minister rather than as speaker of the Meclis – was genuinely committed to finding a consensus and restructuring the state. And a third was that, by this time, few people really wanted the empire to collapse. There were discontented territories on the margins, but everyone else had become used to being part of a single polity and economy, and to the unique cultural blend that a century of reform had created. Not to mention that the empire as a whole was a great power, but that individual parts of it wouldn’t be, and it was important to most citizens that the only Muslim world power stay together and that the Sultan retain his place of religious and cultural leadership.
So it was that the Ottoman Empire became the Ottoman Union. The story of the ceasefire in Libya, brokered by Bornu and the emerging democratic government of Egypt, and the 1951-52 constitutional convention with its myriad shouting matches and walkouts and even fistfights, could fill a book in itself. But in the end, a consensus was found, Bulgaria’s full independence was recognized, and in the rest of the Sultan’s dominions, a three-tiered union was formed.
The outermost tier – Bornu, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Aceh and central Arabia – recognized the Sultan as religious overlord, pledged to defend the Ottoman state from attack in exchange for a reciprocal promise by Stamboul, and agreed to pay a religious tithe, but otherwise had complete autonomy. They might be satisfied with autonomous vassalage as the Arabian tribes were, or might become (or stay) politically independent as Tripolitania did under informal Italian patronage, or they might even join another state, as Cyrenaica and the Fezzan joined Bornu or the Yemeni sheikdoms did with Ethiopia, but Ottoman moral and cultural power remained significant, and a “four freedoms” provision similar to that under discussion in India [7] ensured that people, money and ideas would move freely between these regions and the heartland.
The middle tier consisted of autonomous vilayets: regions formed from a number of sanjaks that agreed to unite. These would be political subdivisions of the Ottoman Union rather than independent states, and the Union would be responsible for defense, infrastructure, currency and revenue collection, but their internal self-government would be broader than before, and their existence was legally recognized, as were procedures by which sanjaks could form, join or secede from them. And the innermost tier was made up of the sanjaks that had no wish to join an autonomous region, which would retain the degree of self-government they had under the 1911 charter and rely on Stamboul for many functions and services.
Two other provisions were written into the Union’s constitution. All sanjaks and vilayets were required to have governments responsible to elected legislatures, and to grant universal adult suffrage. And the distribution of oil revenues was set in stone: a quarter to the sanjak or vilayet where the oil was extracted, a quarter earmarked for the development of poor regions (with half of that going for subsidized land reform until the Meclis judged that task complete), a quarter for industrial development and the remainder at the government’s discretion.
The internal conflicts of the Ottoman state were far from over. But with the constitution of 1952, all of them were now subject to political resolution, and the integral provinces that remained to the state had consented to a framework for resolving them. The state had won its race against time, and although there have been adjustments and amendments, the Union Charter defines the Ottoman world even today…
*******
Shahrzad Esfahani, The Twilight of the Qajars (Tehran: Azadi, 2010)
… The Caucasian war was in many ways a Persian victory, but it was far too subtle a triumph for Mirza Shah’s purposes. Yes, the Caucasus had been opened to Persian influence, and many Persian companies would invest there during the 1930s and 40s. Yes, the Ottoman army, through a combination of military and political pressure, had been forced to back down and give up its exclusive claim to the region. But Persia had won no decisive battles against the Ottoman forces – in fact, it had lost most of the stand-up fights – and it had been forced to abandon its client khan in Shirvan and come to terms with that state’s socialist government. To the rank-and-file Persians, this seemed a small return for a war in which 75,000 of their sons had died.
The outcome in the Caucasus also spelled the end for the Shah’s program of territorial expansion. Having eked out just slightly more than a tie in a limited war, he had no desire to challenge the Ottomans again in what might become a much broader conflict. The Royal Navy stood in the way of any move on the Trucial States or Oman, and Persia had expanded its influence as far as possible in Baluchistan without angering India. The Shah could and did take part in the cockpit of Turkestani politics, and had clients in many of its member states and political parties, but any overt attack would bring down the wrath not only of Turkestan but Russia, and might even lead Stamboul and St. Petersburg to combine against him. Afghanistan was a possibility, and one that Mirza Shah attempted in 1934, but his army was cut to pieces in the mountain passes, and India and Russia, concerned for their overland trade route, soon forced him to withdraw. Persia’s position was that of a regional power surrounded by great powers (or, in India’s case, aspiring great powers), and further attempts at expansion – an idea that, in any event, was regarded as outmoded by an increasing part of the world – were likely to have unpleasant results.
This, in turn, meant that the Shah’s strategy of justifying his rule through victory was also at a dead end. He was left with his predecessor’s arguments of prosperity and the divine right of kings, but the latter was falling out of favor even among conservative officials and clergymen, and the former was increasingly seen as something an elected government could deliver as well as, or even better than, an absolute monarchy. Cultural concessions did help among the urban liberals, but as in previous decades, the same concessions inspired opposition among the holy men and rural conservatives. [8] More and more, the Qajar monarchy was kept in place solely through fear, and the already-ruthless political repression became still more so.
This was the state of affairs in 1943, when Mirza Shah died. His son and successor, Mohammed Ahmad Shah, had chafed under his father’s domination, and his ideas of how to run a state were considerably more liberal and modern. During the period from 1944 to 1950, which is often known as “the False Dawn,” he curtailed the court extravagance that had characterized his predecessors’ reigns and de-emphasized the royal personality cult. He made a series of decrees relaxing censorship, cutting back the powers of the secret police, and inaugurating a pilot program of elected local governments.
But these reforms proved to be too little and too late. They weren’t enough for the liberals, who still remembered the brief period of constitutional government after the Great War and who wanted real democracy. Nor did they satisfy the conservatives, who sought a rollback of the top-down cultural reforms that Nasir al-Din and Mirza Shah had enacted. In the local elections of 1948, the first and only ones to be held under Mohammed Ahmad’s rule, the royalist parties won almost no seats despite receiving generous funding from the state; instead, the large cities were dominated by liberal councilmen, and the villages by conservative clergymen and feudal landlords. By the end of the year, the Shah had dissolved the Tehran council, and by mid-1949 he pulled the plug on the local councils altogether after many of them had become centers of opposition.
As Mohammed Ahmad retreated from liberalization, he returned to his father’s repressive policies: by 1950, the nascent political parties were outlawed, and an unsuccessful assassination attempt later that year marked the end of all restraint. The secret police were let loose again, and those who had shown themselves to be opposition figures during the False Dawn became marked men: by 1952, more than 5000 had been dragged from their homes and killed, and thousands more had been driven into hiding.
But it was impossible by then to turn back the clock. The opposition had used the False Dawn period to get its feet under it, and even with the purges of the early 1950s, it had a far stronger organization than in Mirza Shah’s time. And in Shirvan and Turkestan, where many of the Shah’s opponents had fled, the liberal and conservative factions held meetings that would have fateful consequences…
*******
Grand Duchess, Nigist and Kandake Anastasia Romanova, My Four Kingdoms (New Moscow: Icon Press, 1961)
… The war was over, the peace was signed and the time of rebuilding had come, and so had the question of what my part in it would be. I was still Nigist, a monarch of Ethiopia in my own right, but I felt my time had passed. I was sixty, and the old should not stand in the way of the young: Menelik deserved to lead the nation forward without being in my shadow. And my responsibilities as Nigist had caused me to neglect my other duties as Kandake of Kush, and given what the Nile provinces had suffered during the war, it was time for that neglect to be remedied.
So, in the summer of 1940, I left Gondar, never to live there again, and took up residence in Juba, where my daughter Maryam had acted as regent in my absence. There was much work to do, and much to oversee. The Kingdom of Kush had been a battleground throughout the war, and its cities and villages were devastated. There were homeless families and returning refugees to house, water and power grids to restore to function, roads to repair, records to set in order – to say nothing of the many disputes that the displacement and destruction had engendered. These tasks had begun, but they would all be labors of years.
My position required me to work closely with the kingdom’s parliament, and for the first time in many years, I felt like a stranger. Even in my first days in Eritrea, Russians were already considered native, and by the time I married Tewodros, the same was true in Gondar and the cities of Ethiopia. But there were never many Russians on the Nile, and although Kush was no longer the ancient and timeless land I had seen on my first visit, it was a place where language, religion and the patterns of daily life were different from those with which I was familiar. I knew something of this land’s peoples and customs, of course – as Nigist, it was only my duty – but book-learning and royal visits taught only the mind, not the heart.
I had made the strange into the familiar before, and I could do so again, but I’d likely have taken longer if I hadn’t had my daughter to guide me. In her long years there – she had taken up the regency at twenty, in 1926, and had stayed even during the war – Maryam had made herself a woman of Kush, and she had married a prince of the Nuer and had two strong children. She was my lodestar at festivals, in the rituals of conversation and living, and in the churches that were Orthodox but yet had carvings of snakes and cattle, priests who carried fishing spears, and praise-songs to the saints that evoked the wind and rain. As the months passed, and then the years, Kush became my country in truth as it had been in title.
These were rewarding years, making the land whole and healing the scars of war, rebuilding cities and villages and families. We built the Peace Road in those years – the highway and railroad from Cairo to Kampala, which was later built out to Mzizima and connected with the tracks to Cape Town. We sent out jajis to educate the children until the schools could be restored. We worked with our delegates to the Nile Authority to bring clean water to fields and homes and to improve navigation. The ancient Kush that had existed before the war started to become the modern one risen from the ashes.
In some ways, my world was smaller than it had once been. I still heard about all that was happening elsewhere in Ethiopia, but it wasn’t the same as when I’d been in the center of it. I heard secondhand of Djugashvili’s election as prime minister of Eritrea, the ways he pushed through measures to ease collective ownership of villages and factories, how he bullied his government into nationalizing the ports and expanding social insurance. From my brother – who had a hand in it – I also heard of his fall after he bullied the opposition and his own party one too many times, and his return to being union boss in New Moscow. I heard of the ways that Belloists and narodniks combined in Oromo and among the Somali herders. I heard of Yemen frequently, and about how its princes finally joined together to become our seventh kingdom. I heard that Italian Eritrea voted not to join us, and to become an Italian province instead; with almost as many Afars in Italy as in Eritrea, and with the other choice that of being a small minority in a large empire, we weren’t very surprised.
There were other things I saw more directly. Sometimes Menelik still called on me to represent Ethiopia abroad, when there were diplomatic meetings in Cairo or Stamboul or Zanzibar. I gave a deposition before the Court of Arbitration in the Venetian case, and wrote articles in their support in African and European journals. I had a part in organizing the East African peace conference and brokering the settlement that brought a close to the Bloody Forties, and Menelik named me to the Ethiopian delegation in Washington. He’d have made me the first ambassador to the Consistory, too, if I hadn’t refused.
It was the journey to Washington that brought home how tired I’d become. I was no longer thirty or even sixty, and again, it was time for the old to step aside for the young. There was an island in Lake Tana, an uninhabited one, that Tewodros had given me in the fourth year of our marriage, and we had spent days at a time there together in a cabin on the hillside. The cabin had fallen into disrepair, but I could rebuild it, and there, in a place that carried my husband’s sacred memory, I could live in contemplation.
In May 1955, I resigned the throne of Kush. The ceremony took place in front of the Juba cathedral with four hundred thousand people come to say farewell. They chanted “Tinsae,” the Amharic translation of my name – Amharic had become the lingua franca in this kingdom, where more than sixty languages were spoken – and also the name that Menelik had given to the postwar rebuilding program. In the sight of the people, Maryam became Kandake in my place and her daughter Alitash was named her heir.
I left Juba a few days later, as I had left Gondar fifteen years before: my world would become smaller more time, even as it expanded. I still had enough of a child in me to travel around Ethiopia one more time and marvel at all that had changed in the fifty-eight years since my arrival: the factories of Eritrea and Amhara, the yeoman farmsteads and narodnik villages where once there had been feudal estates, the cities that had grown from villages, the monument to peace on the fields where Ras Valentin had fought. But all roads ended in Lake Tana, and in the house that Tewodros and I had shared.
The other day, in one of the histories, I read that my marriage to Tewodros was the last dynastic marriage that ever mattered. Whether it was the last, and whether it mattered, and what “mattered” even means, are points that the historians can debate. But at the beginning of my seventy-sixth year, that marriage had put Romanovs on three thrones: my brother in Eritrea, my daughter in Kush, and my son as Negus of all Ethiopia. And as I left my own throne behind, as I waded through the last few meters of water to my island, I couldn’t help taking pride in that.
_______
[1] See post 4509.
[2] See post 4806.
[3] See post 4866.
[4] See post 4509.
[5] See post 3402.
[6] See post 4770.
[7] See post 5247.
[8] See post 4509.
Beautiful.
So, is the Ottoman Union the formal name of the Empire? The one nation still defined by its ruling dynasty? Or will it evolve to a different name?
How is Persia going to evolve? Are we looking at a very real devolving of power to the provinces? What does that mean for Baluchistan- independence?
I feel like Ethiopia could turn into a very real mess if any of the individual rulers becomes too ambitious as well. And if Ethiopia becomes a mess, then East Africa would be once again launched into turmoil.
So, is the Ottoman Union the formal name of the Empire? The one nation still defined by its ruling dynasty? Or will it evolve to a different name?
How is Persia going to evolve? Are we looking at a very real devolving of power to the provinces? What does that mean for Baluchistan- independence?
I feel like Ethiopia could turn into a very real mess if any of the individual rulers becomes too ambitious as well. And if Ethiopia becomes a mess, then East Africa would be once again launched into turmoil.
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Yes an update!
So is the Ottoman Union more a kin to say the Commonwealth of Nations? It's really cool development, and not something usually done with a surviving Ottoman state, or at least from what I've seen.
Persia's going to have a revolution, just hope it doesn't end up like OTL.
And I love how Ethiopia has developed. At least to me it didn't seem like it become a regional power toward the earlier parts of the TL, but it's been nice journey to see it grow.
!So is the Ottoman Union more a kin to say the Commonwealth of Nations? It's really cool development, and not something usually done with a surviving Ottoman state, or at least from what I've seen.
Persia's going to have a revolution, just hope it doesn't end up like OTL.
And I love how Ethiopia has developed. At least to me it didn't seem like it become a regional power toward the earlier parts of the TL, but it's been nice journey to see it grow.
Thus passes Anastasia.
Interesting developments w/regards to the Ottomans- how long is Lev Pasha going to be around?
Interesting developments w/regards to the Ottomans- how long is Lev Pasha going to be around?
Sulemain
Banned
An Ottoman Empire that evolves into a cross between the OTL EU mixed with a larger UK? Inspired. Might "Ottoman Imperial Union" sound better?
Persia seems to be doing a '79. Hope it turns out better ITTL.
So passes Anastasia. A far better end then OTL if I do say myself.
I guess the Ottomans are working on the bomb also? I wonder who's going to be next?
Persia seems to be doing a '79. Hope it turns out better ITTL.
So passes Anastasia. A far better end then OTL if I do say myself.
I guess the Ottomans are working on the bomb also? I wonder who's going to be next?
No doubt you covered it earlier, but there wasn't a specific footnote, and I don't remember.
What is "Chayat Haaretz". The second word I get, "the Land", but I can't place the first one. (My Hebrew is next to non-existent.)
What is "Chayat Haaretz". The second word I get, "the Land", but I can't place the first one. (My Hebrew is next to non-existent.)
To some extent, as Shevek23 says, geography is destiny. The patterns of development should be roughly the same as OTL: settlement mostly in the north up to the early 20th century, and then the citrus industry, the Muck and tourism drawing people south. There will still be settlements around old forts, and harbors will be important, so there should be cities where Miami, Tampa and Fort Myers are, although they might have different names.
Other things, though, are very contingent. If Julia Tuttle isn't born or has a different life, *Miami might be settled later, only growing to importance as an agricultural port in the 1920s or 30s, and the first tourist resorts might be on the Gulf coast. Also, Cuba has a very different history in TTL, and a different relationship with the United States: Vicente Martinez Ybor would stay in Havana rather than moving to Key West and then Tampa, and Cuban communities might never get started in Floridian cities. *Tampa, and even coastal southern Florida, might have a more "Southern" feel than the same places in OTL, which may mean that they get fewer northern tourists and retirees, or at least different ones. There's a lot more Floribama and less West Palm.
ITTL too, there are some dark clouds a-brewin'; after the Civil War Florida stood out in the alternate history as one of the most extreme Jim Crow states (as it did OTL). Georgia has the improving relationship between Rebecca Felton and Harriet Tubman to redeem it a bit; Florida, though, would seem more, um, unreconstructed.
But to be fair, the place could have been revolutionized several ways in the many generations since the early Jim Crow years.
It has been, to some extent. African-Americans have political rights and legal equality there now, as they do everywhere in the country. But it's a rural state with a deeply conservative ruling class, and there's less of a black middle class than Georgia or even Alabama, so it's bringing up the rear in terms of social progress. Private discrimination is still legal, African-Americans who break the unwritten rules draw a lot of heat, and the self-defense organizations that formed in the 1920s are still needed. Florida in 1940 is still a state with battle lines drawn.
For the future, though - well, why don't we just leave it to Laurel Wilson:
Things grow in black soil.
Turn it over and they grow.
It nurtures the fruit where no one can see
Cradles the onion, the citrus tree
Plant the seed and the soil will know.
You can bury the grass of last year’s promise
Deep in the soil. You can plow it deep.
You can rest on your hoe, say the soil is broken
But still the words of life are spoken
In the secret places, where they keep.
‘Cause in black soil, things grow.
– “The Muck: Pahokee,” 1935
Turn it over and they grow.
It nurtures the fruit where no one can see
Cradles the onion, the citrus tree
Plant the seed and the soil will know.
You can bury the grass of last year’s promise
Deep in the soil. You can plow it deep.
You can rest on your hoe, say the soil is broken
But still the words of life are spoken
In the secret places, where they keep.
‘Cause in black soil, things grow.
– “The Muck: Pahokee,” 1935
If I may ask, what advantages does Canaveral have over a location in southern Florida or even the Bahamas? Why Canaveral and not, say, somewhere near *Miami?
The Ottoman name stayed, because the Sultan as Caliph is the institution that keeps the outermost tier in the system. On the other hand, everyone's trying to emphasize that it's not an empire anymore, and plain "Union" sounds much more egalitarian.
The outermost tier of the Union is part Commonwealth, part NATO and part European Union. The inner two tiers are an asymmetric federal state.
And I'm also not aware of any timeline in which the Ottomans have developed this way; however, it seemed to be where things were going in TTL, given the last eighty years of Ottoman constitutional history, the general trend toward neo-feudalism and layered sovereignty, and the fact that the Ottoman state would eventually run out of room to keep kicking its internal conflicts down the road. Multiethnic empires can survive in modern times, but they have to adapt, and the Ottoman Union is the result of three generations of adaptation.
Right now, Persia is a centralized state - Nasir-al-Din Shah brought the nobles to heel very firmly, and the shahs since then have created an officialdom that answers only to them. The Baloch provinces of Persia are no different in this regard, although the Baloch kingdoms that were formerly Indian princely states have more independence.
When the Qajars fall, though (I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying "when" rather than "if"), all bets are off - nearly everything about the structure of the state will be up in the air, and the provinces' status will be no less so than anything else.
The rulers are a fairly collegial lot at this point, and they also have to answer to their parliaments: the time is long past when a prince could raise a feudal rebellion. You're entirely correct, though, that issues of autonomy versus centralism will be (and already are) among Ethiopia's internal conflicts.
This has been one of the most surprising parts of the story for me as well - Ethiopia could have gone either way, and when I introduced it to the timeline, I wasn't sure how it would develop. Once the synergy with the Russians happened, though, and once Menelik II played the Great War like a chessmaster, the path to regional power status became much clearer.
Oh, we may see Anastasia one more time. She's retired, but she's still around.
Lev Pasha is in much the same position: he's in his early seventies at the time of the 1951-52 convention, so the creation of the Union is probably the capstone of his political career, but he may be around for a while as an elder statesman.
It's a safe bet that all the major powers are working on it - no one wants to use nuclear weapons, but nobody wants to be the only one without them either. Nearly any of them could be next: the most likely candidates are probably France and Russia, but there are others close behind.
I'm pretty sure I mentioned it before, but I'm also sure it was someplace obscure. Chayat Haaretz - life of the land - is TTL's quasi-Zionist movement, but its goal is cultural autonomy and management of Jewish heritage sites rather than statehood.
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If there is less Cuban immigration to Florida, will we see any other Caribbeans moving to Florida? Maybe refugees from all the conflict and oligarchy in the British West Indies?