Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
JE, I will email you the map and also a first draft of the obligatory munroist notes (not yet on the map itself), along with some questions for you later on this evening. Hopefully, the map will be ready by the end of this week or sometime next week.
Also, I want to see an Ottoman version of the Power Rangers. You could have a really ethnically diverse cast there.
I have had to get a tad creative wrestling the colour scheme, granted, but I am winning.
Also, I want to see an Ottoman version of the Power Rangers. You could have a really ethnically diverse cast there.
I have had to get a tad creative wrestling the colour scheme, granted, but I am winning.
There isn't really a single capital at this point: more a triumvirate of London, New York and Berlin, with Tokyo, Shanghai and Delhi moving up in the ranks. Stamboul too, to an extent, although it isn't really a bankers' city.
(EDIT: Or, as Dathi says, Frankfurt may be more likely than Berlin, and Paris would certainly be the banker for the former French colonies.)
It may have been mentioned, but not by me.
There is movement in that direction: France and Germany established a customs union in the 1930s, and he Zollverein covers much of eastern and central Europe. By the 50s, there are also river-basin management treaties and movements toward uniform commercial law, as well as calls to deepen the economic associations. I'll discuss that in more detail two updates from now: Europe will be the final one of the 1955-70 cycle.
Also, I want to see an Ottoman version of the Power Rangers. You could have a really ethnically diverse cast there.
Or maybe the 'Adl League of the Levant?
I have had to get a tad creative wrestling the colour scheme, granted, but I am winning.
Also, at least at this point, the post-Westphalian entities are overlays on top of states, so the "basic" borders won't look terribly different. As I mentioned before, a 1960s atlas would show state borders and autonomous administrative divisions in the main map, with an inset to show regional organization memberships. By the 2000s, things will be somewhat more complicated.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing the draft.
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Why would it have? Wasn't OTL's shift caused by WWI and the moving of Britain from being the World's creditor to being a net debtor? I don't think that sort of shock has happened here yet.
Many, many of the (ex)colonial nations are still going to naturally look to their homelands first for capital and development. I suspect that Paris and Frankfurt will be much more important than OTL, and London even more so.
Of course, I could be wrong, and the US DOES have the world's largest internal market, so New York is likely to overtake London eventually. But when, that's the question.
I'm not sure what Abacar would have done with the idea, but unless I profoundly misunderstand what Belloism is all about, I'd think Bello would have had quite a bit to say about it.
Of course Bello was more focused on communities, not far-flung enterprises for profit, but Hawala would surely be the more acceptable model for all the Islamic reformists.
I only ever really heard of the basic concepts of Hawala when it became a thing in "Minarets of Atlantis," but as far as I could suss out, in terms of high finance (not even the Belloist focus, let alone Abacarist!) it is a way of conceptualizing wealth as spread out in space rather than time. Rather than fetishizing a concept that wealth tends "naturally" to grow, a capitalist draws on existing wealth that happens to be spread out in space, among many owners, and offers these many owners the opportunity to realize profits in a joint enterprise where payment, in case the grand scheme falls through, is guaranteed by the reserves of wealthy people who have margin to spare--margin that already exists, not mystically assumed to be the inevitable and natural growth, that abstracts away from the labor processes that actually produce the increments.
I'd think Abacar would be critical of Hawala merchants--not in the sense of condemning them so much as demanding that close attention be paid to the exact means whereby the profits are realized, meaning that a big share of the returns should be distributed to the common workers. Bello, being less "Red" and more of a consensual moderate, would still demand that practices be constrained by what tends to nurture rather than disrupt the community. But these guys open up space for more, um, cosmopolitan, more hard-nosed wealth maximizers to focus on elaborating the institutions so that they offer scrupulous Muslim entrepreneurs who seriously want to avoid being accused of practicing "usury" opportunities for making sophisticated, complex transnational and/or highly elaborated industrial enterprise deals quite competitive with the wizardry of Western usury-based high finance. I think we met people like this in the development of Ottoman society.
For what it is worth, though I am no Muslim, I do suspect an elaborated Hawala would actually be a more rational foundation for high finance in general, and therefore it might find champions of many diverse kinds outside the Muslim world--devout Christians might recognize the importance that Western finances too avoid mere acceptance of actual usury for instance; the ferment of more or less half-baked financial fixes to the ills of capitalism characteristic of 19th Century USA (that OTL made "Single-Tax" on real estate profits Henry George a populist prophet who quite outshone Marx, for instance) might fasten on Hawala reforms as the cure to the various ills of American capitalism; even pragmatic, reformist Marxists of the Second International type (to borrow from OTL) might recommend it as more rational than the notions developed in early modern Christendom, much along the lines that tempt me.
OTL it is tainted with associations with Islamic fundamentalism and one also wonders how consistently it is developed; here lots of populist movements in the Islamic world would keep it grounded in humane and communalist priorities that probably flavor it with a distinctly leftist tang, despite the existence of quite hard-nosed Muslim entrepreneurs who also strongly influence its machinery. One imagines quite a lot of creativity and scholarly criticism in places like Turkestan as well as Abacar/Bello influenced West Africa. The American versions might have an early start in South Carolina, only to be "whitened" by the Populists of prairies and urban precinct alike. In Carolina there is a whole state government whose banking regulations are liable to be reformed along Hawala lines, though of course that would tend to run askew of US common law as enforced by Federal courts--unless the Hawalists make very compelling arguments before the judges, in which case infusions of Hawalist reasoning might be dispersed via Federal circuit court rulings across entire sectors of the nation with very little Islamic culture--perhaps rising to the Supreme Court and the law of the land from sea to sea. As I say, people with no Islamic background or sympathies might wind up championing it, in secular terms, all across the country. (They'd be opposed of course).
Jonathan is a lawyer before US benches--in criminal law, not civil to be sure, but I think he's better placed than I am to judge how it might infuse American thinking about the nature and proper functioning of finance. Bearing in mind that the people who hold most of the finances will have a strong say in the matter!
They said it couldn't be done, but I have done it. They called me mad. MAD I say. I have finished the map of the world for 1970.
I will show them, I will show them all!
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Wait, is this thing on?
I will show them, I will show them all!
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Wait, is this thing on?
Africa, the Pacific and South Asia do really quite look like the HRE writ large.
And no doubt will be getting even more complicated in the next round of updates.
And no doubt will be getting even more complicated in the next round of updates.
I look forward to it.
Africa, the Pacific and South Asia do really quite look like the HRE writ large.
Actually, the only continent that hasn't been HRE-ized in some way is America...
If not for the space-filling customs unions and EU analogues, there's no way in hell the Malêverse's neo-feudalism would work, in a world that, at the start of the 1970s, is probably closer to the start of the 1980s as far as development and technology go.Actually, the only continent that hasn't been HRE-ized in some way is America...
Yeah. The point is that there are more states around (and those states are often far-flung and odd-shaped affairs) but states do less things ITTL.
I love the map!
Unfortunately, there has to be a little bit of correction for Philippine Islands. There's also an absence of the Maguindanao Sultanate, another part of the Nusantara, I'm sure.
The Zamboanga Republic most likely occupies the Zamboanga Peninsula and Northern Mindanao in the CARAGA region down to Davao del Norte province OTL. The Sulu Sultanate would cover the rest of Mindanao, Palawan and Sabah except Maguindanao Province of OTL, which we can identify with the Maguindanao Sultanate. Maguindanao is too backward and I'm sure that Sulu just captured most of Muslim dominated Mindanao in the process.
Unfortunately, there has to be a little bit of correction for Philippine Islands. There's also an absence of the Maguindanao Sultanate, another part of the Nusantara, I'm sure.
The Zamboanga Republic most likely occupies the Zamboanga Peninsula and Northern Mindanao in the CARAGA region down to Davao del Norte province OTL. The Sulu Sultanate would cover the rest of Mindanao, Palawan and Sabah except Maguindanao Province of OTL, which we can identify with the Maguindanao Sultanate. Maguindanao is too backward and I'm sure that Sulu just captured most of Muslim dominated Mindanao in the process.
I love the map!
Unfortunately, there has to be a little bit of correction for Philippine Islands. There's also an absence of the Maguindanao Sultanate, another part of the Nusantara, I'm sure.
The Zamboanga Republic most likely occupies the Zamboanga Peninsula and Northern Mindanao in the CARAGA region down to Davao del Norte province OTL. The Sulu Sultanate would cover the rest of Mindanao, Palawan and Sabah except Maguindanao Province of OTL, which we can identify with the Maguindanao Sultanate. Maguindanao is too backward and I'm sure that Sulu just captured most of Muslim dominated Mindanao in the process.
Actually that's how it has been ITTL since the end of Spanish rule there and that white state is the Maguindanao Sultanate, that white single pixel on the western peninsular is Zamboanga. So yeah, don't attempt to "correct" it, okay?
Also AE, I too like the map! But Nauru isn't part of Nauru and the Gilbert Islands, so you'd better fix that.
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You know what? at some point in the future Jonathan should post a full list of Legatums and members of the league-of-nations-equivalent , so we can truly see how unique this world has become!
Sulemain
Banned
It would take forever to write...
I project much hair loss amongst the catographers ITTL's present.
He did also forget the Republic of the Amur in northern Manchuria.
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