Hooray! I was hoping for more detail on this world. Of course, now I have questions:
Oh boy
What’s the ethnicity of the Lakes Communes peoples?
Mixed, Burgondians and some Salians who migrated up to the lakeshore during the colonial years.
Does this world have equivalents to the OTL “first world” and “third world”, or is wealth more evenly distributed in this world?
It does, sort of. The broad regions from wealthiest/most stable to poorest/least stable are, in some vague sort of order, Europe, South America, the Pacific, North and East Africa, North America, South Asia, East Asia, Southern Africa, and Central Africa. Not exactly strict First and Third worlds, more like a sliding grade. Overall the world has a little less poverty than OTL. So that's nice.
Where did you get the name “Mandara” for the west African chaps?
I seem to remember it being a portmanteau of two of the peoples in its borders, but I named the African nations so long ago that I can't really recall.
“Felicienn” doesn’t sound very African: is it still someone’s colony?
It was Tolosan until recently.
How Turkish and how Chinese are the Seres by 2013?
Not very. The steppes and East Turkestan are mostly Turkic, but Han Chinese have the most demographic weight. The ruling caste aren't enjoying the growing pains.
Are the Wu what we’d call more “traditional” Chinese?
What religions do Seres and Wu follow?
Yes, specifically Wu speakers. Wu is predominantly Confucian and the emperors of Seres are Buddhists.
Is Yunnan inhabited by a Thai people?
Yep, the Dai, or at least their ATL cousins.
Have the Vietnamese entirely assimilated the Cambodians in Annam?
Sort of, they're mostly pushed into the west of the country, with some across the border in Yinghithai.
Is the Persian-Luri split a recent thing, or of long standing, and if the second, why?
I figure it happened at some point during the break-up of the Abbasid caliphate, though I'm a little fuzzy on the details.
I suppose the UFCC and the Union of the South are both considered sorta-superpowers: how about the Litoanians? Any of the Asian states?
The Union of the South is definite. The UFCC is the big fish in South Africa but it's having serious cohesion problems that are making it look sort of paper-tigerish these days. The Three Caliphates are doing great (the drying of the Maghreb went a little differently ITTL) and Litoania is strong but rarely active on the world stage. Binin, Aden, and Delhi round out the rest of the "great powers" club and could each make it big in the next century.
And why did the areas of France and Germany remain so fragmented through the “gunpowder empires” era of state-building?
In the case of the Germanies, it's mostly owed to Salian interests and some pretty distinct national identities in Saxony and Bavaria. The Rhine Republic confederated out of a bunch of smaller principalities and considers its great project done, since it doesn't see the Saxons and Bavarians as the same kind of "German" as they.
As for France, Bretonia thinks itself pretty Celtic and Tolosa speaks those
langues d'Oc. Much as it tried, Burgondia never managed to press them into something greater. As for the mess in the middle of it, errm...
Thanks for the questions.
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