This is a redo (hopefully improved) of an old map, showing the world of "Fate and the Firelance", a short story spin-off of Stephen Baxter's "Time's Tapestry" series.
In this world the Byzantines got ahold of gunpowder much earlier than any European nation OTL, and kicked much ass...
In the current year of 1914, the Roman Empire is the world's greatest power. Under a Serbian ruling dynasty, the Empire is an autocratic police state, conservative and religiously Orthodox, if a bit besotted with retro-Romanism (togas for politicians and pseudo-Centurion outfits for army men are the thing for ceremonial occasions, although in everyday life dress is more similar to western Europe). After several decades of off-again, on-again warfare, they have recently inflicted a crushing defeat on the Chinese, engineered the breakaway of Tibet, and annexed pretty much all of China not allready stuffed full of Han. In the later phases of the war, to overcome dug-in Chinese, they developed their own version of the circa 1918 OTL tank, which the other powers are now scrambling to duplicate. The Empire is generally a leader in gas-powered vehicles, being the world's largest producer of that magical fluid (the Empire of Mejico is number 2).
Allies include Abyssinia, modernizing with Roman help, Thibet, liberated from heavy-handed Chinese dominance, and Tunis-Tripoli, fearful of possible absorbtion by either the French or the Mamluks.
The Chinese are still struggling to put down the revolts that forced them to sue for peace, brought on by harsh wartime taxes, mass conscription, food shortages and a general sense that the Mandate of Heaven had been lost by the current leadership. The Romans had arrived on their northern frontiers more than a century before OTL Russians, and with a more powerful state behind them had been a worry from the start - China has in result worked rather harder to modernize its military, at least, than OTL over the last century and a half, and although rather backwards is strong enough that the Romans never seriously considered invading its heartlands.
With a rather different era of Mongol invasions and aftermath, the House of Osman never ended up in Anatolia, and that talented family instead ended up state-building in OTL Afghanistan and at one time ruled from Bangladesh to Iraq, although there has been some contraction and loss of outlying areas. Although they've lost some battles of their own in Central Asia, scorched earth tactics made the last Roman invasion of Iran a bit of a botch (there are no Safavids in this TL, and Iran is majority-Sunni), and their control remains strong in the core Punjab-Afghanistan (rather more urban and developed than OTL 1914) area. Currently they are allied with the French to contain any further Roman expansion, and stir up trouble for them in Mesopotamia when they can. It is also a not insignificant naval power, with a strong presence in East Africa.
Africa has been carved up into colonial territories in the last few decades, with the British getting some of the best bits and Swahili slavers and adventurers carving out some islamic statelets in the east with Osmanli support. European control remains patchy in some areas, and the Great Lakes area is still a bit politically "fluid", while the Dafuri Emirs retain a precarious independence based on the Mamluks and the British not wanting the other guy to have it.
France is rather different from OTL, centuries of off-and-on warfare against the Byzantines making France into a more militarized and brutally efficient state than OTL - a bit like Prussia, and about as democratic as that state before 1848. The French King has given up the title of Holy Roman Emperor as part of the negotiations which have maintained the peace with Rome for most of a human lifetime, but still dominates most of Germany and Italy, and with its powerful Slavic ally dominates the non-Roman parts of continental Europe. With OTL Belgium and the Rhinelands long ago annexed, France is an industrial power rivalling the British: however, the need to maintain massive forces in Europe has prevented France from winning the colonial contest big-time, although it still has managed to gain some territorial pelf. Louisiana is a bit of a headache, given those damn British ex-colonials and their attempts to nab French territory on three seperate occasions. They've never won, but there remains a great deal of bad feeling, and there are import bans on several US products, including tobacco (of which the US is the world's greatest producer). Making a virtue of the thing, the French proclaim smoking to be a filthy US habit, and few smoke in French-dominated Europe.
Denmak-Sweden is something of a British ally and a prosperous constitutional monarchy. The northern Russians managed to stay out of the Roman maw when Constantinople "liberated" southern Russia from Khans and Lithuanian kings, but remain to some extent in the Roman "sphere of influence" and acknowledge the Emperor as the leader of Orthodox Christendom. It's not like they'll fight for him, though.
Spain never came under Habsburg rule or picked up Habsburg commitments, and has done a bit better than OTL: although still losing control of Latin America in the 19th century, they did manage to leave a few royal family butts sitting on American (not call that this ATL) thrones, and holds some other colonial territory here and there. Still, they are no longer considered a truly first-rank power.
Neither is the US, but some think it may become one someday. With a small territorial base, and less immigration (no Wide-Open frontier like OTL, chances of war with France, and a more regimented society) it lacks the manpower and resources to compete on a truly global level: still, it is already a major industrial power and does attract immigrants, and the population grows healthily: many predict the US will become a major player in the 20th century, especially after the last war with France, in which they actually got back at the negotiation table the territory they had lost to France in the
previous war. Slavery, sans westward routes for expansion, went out with gradually with a wimper rather than a bang, the last slaves gaining their freedom in 1911.
The Brits are the most modern of nations. Largely shut out of a Europe dominated by France and the Romans, they have invested and developed their colonies more than OTL, and as the largest possessors of democratically run natives-cleansed colonial territory, they have attracted more settlers to their posessions than OTL after 1776. Parliamentary rule is as strongly in place as OTL 1914, although due to there never having been a period of unchallenged dominance comparable to OTL 1815-circa 1880s, the standing military is rather more formidable. The state is rather more interventionist, especially when it comes to investing in education and scientific research. Although they follow their own semi-Catholic "Anglicanism", the current royal house is that of Bourbon (the Valois run France and don't like their cousins much). Currently the leadership is worried about the implications of an increasingly oil-dependent military in a world where the Romans and the Osmanlis dominate some of the largest sources of supply (as yet it is not known just
how huge the Persian gulf reserves are), and some in the leadership think some real possibilities might arise out another major war...
Islam has a bit more respect in european eyes than OTL, what with the house of Osman being an ally against the Romans and and no important Islamic incursions into Europe since the 13th century in Spain. Muslims in French Africa generally have comparable (rather limited, in other words) rights to Christians. It's a generally somewhat less racist world than OTL at the time, although black Africans, alas, still remain beyond the pale. Romans have a somewhat undeserved reputation in the western states as backwards and corrupt, (well, they
are corrupt, but not cripplingly so) which perhaps leads to some underestimation of the stregnth of the Empire.
Bruce