Map Thread XIX
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Our Fair Columbia
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I'm going to be turning this into a Maps & Graphics TL soon with a bigger and better writeup, but if you're interested, I encourage you to check out my insanely long, absurdly detailed alt-Wikipedia article on the Albionic Church.
Edit: There's a thread now. Check it out.
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max schulz
Banned
Welcome to the Old World. This timeline is something of a side project of mine (well, a side project of a side project), a universe where the old ways and ideals of the age of empires and wars of religion and politics never died. The focus of this TL is obviously the juggernaut of the United Empire of Columbia, a nuclear-armed imperialist hyperpower half-run by an American-exceptionalism-meets-Greek-mythos-meets-Shinto-meets-Catholicism theological titan, the Albionic Church, which venerates the Founding Fathers and deities among the likes of Lady Columbia, General George Washington the Liberator, and Uncle Sam the Destroyer of Worlds. After centuries of war and competition, the globe is currently led by the Franco-Columbian-Japanese axis, though relations between New York and Paris are being strained to the breaking point as the War on Terror rages in India.
Our Fair Columbia
Σύγχρονος Kόσμος
I'm going to be turning this into a Maps & Graphics TL soon with a bigger and better writeup, but if you're interested, I encourage you to check out my insanely long, absurdly detailed alt-Wikipedia article on the Albionic Church.
can you make a world map of earth from the 2006 film children of men please
This isn't the place to ask for that (check out the Map Request Thread), and I'm also just going to have to pass on that suggestion. Doesn't really interest me.
Very interesting internal borders! Any story behind the American colony in Australia?
Thanks! I've always thought the US had too many straight lines (even if they most of the time make sense), so I always try to sprinkle in more natural borders in alternate Americas. The United Empire might've gone a tad overboard, though, lol.
Australia was fought over by Britain, France, and the UEC ITTL. There was no French Revolution or Napoleonic Wars, so France was in a much better spot to take over half a continent, especially since Napoleon Bonaparte was at the forefront of the French Royal Army and boldly led many a colonial expedition for France. The UEC just kinda slipped through the cracks as the Brits and French actually fought, and the British couldn't afford to put resources toward stopping them.
The north island of New Zealand was taken by the UEC in the Second Ultimatum (alt-WWII).
Gian
Banned
WIP map questions:
I have some questions about a map that I'm working on. The POD is simply the French winning the 7 years war (wow shocker, how original, though to be fair, the only finished TL I know of with this premise is Disaster at Leuthen), to be specific, there are 3: British loss at the planes of Abraham and in the Carnatic wars as well as a longer lived empress Elizabeth of Russia (pretty standard stuff, I just want to make a few maps). This map is more or less North America in the modern day, though since I'm far from fully figuring out the earlier parts of the TL, if it can be called that, if I continue to add to it, the map might change. As for info pertinent to my questions, the Spanish empire survives longer, I was thinking up to the Carlist wars, though those may or may not happen so maybe some other major war in Spain or another big European war. The Russians, while during the war allied with the French grow increasingly dissatisfied with their ability to expand in Europe and drift towards the British over time, which is why they are allowed to go so deep into North America (though I intend to add some former British colony somewhere in there).
I have 2 major questions (finally, I get to the point):
The map's visual style borrows heavily from "Another America", which was an important inspiration for this, though I'm not going for a similar TL. I want to be at least a bit more realistic rather than focusing on the rule of cool and obviously have only 1 (or I guess 3) PODs as opposed to throwing in as many as are needed to make a super diverse America (not that I have anything against that style, I love Another America, I just don't want to copy it, that would be dumb).
- Should the British colonize roughly what was the OTL Oregon Country and how would it make the most sense for that to go?:
- They colonize it but only up to about the 53rd parallel, that is to say they do not connect it to Rupert's Land
- They colonize it and connect it to Rupert's Land (then I think they would end up being one country, centered in Oregon/BC
- They don't colonize it at all and the west coast stays as it is currently on the map (in my opinion the most unlikely)
- How does New Spain break up? Particularly, I'm concerned about the north of what is currently labelled as Mexico. It's important to note that the north of Mexico (what the US ended up getting along with areas along the current OTL border was generally more opposed to centralization. This may still happen ITTL simply due to the area's harshness and lack of government investment creating an independent, free, and self-sustaining spirit among the local population, though it may be easier to maintain control due to decreased Anglophone settlement (While I don't doubt some Anglo farmers would settle northern Mexico, getting there through largely hostile land is very hard. I would imagine more settlement just east of the Appalachians in Louisiana resulting in Anglophone rebellions and British attempts to seize these areas in some wars) resulting in an overall more cohesive mexico.
- Northern Mexico is divided between a number of smaller states. I'd imagine there would be a Texas (much smaller and more Hispanic than OTL Texas) and a state around the Rio Grande. Possibly also an independent California and/or an independent Sonora. Maybe Yucatan would take this opportunity to split off.
- A sort of "Antifederal League" that eventually develops into a "Confederation of Colorado" or Aztlan or whatever. Basically all of the same Northern Mexican breakaway states coalesce into a less centralized *Mexican country. Something like what southern apologists like to frame the confederacy as, just Hispanophone.
- Big Mex Big Mex.
- Should there be that many *American countries? I was thinking that when unrest begins, the British, not wanting to lose their land, grant the colonies limited local parliaments and allow each to send a representative to the parliament in Britain. The desire to split off would generally be weaker anyway ITTL, because the French remain a threat, so the majority of Americans continue to see British protection as necessary. Within this framework, I see the British coalescing the colonies into "Commonwealths" (collections of many colonies, more federal) and "Free states" (more unitary, typically smaller states). What do you think?
- Is what I have ok?
- Should there be more big states with a North-South-Middle divide? IE. New Wales and New York unite. (I'm afraid that this is visually too similar to "Another America")
- Should there just be a North-South divide? (I worry that this would be too much like "Disaster at Leuthen")
- Should they all just be one country?
Congratulations, you made it to the end! Thanks in advance to anyone who answers these questions.
[edit: not all of the flags are OC. IIRC, NY and Alyeska are someone else's, and New England is an edit of someone else's flag. The others are either mine or based off OTL flags]
Let me guess. . . the existence of Louisiana precludes the Acadian Expulsion somehow being butterflied away
WHy? Louisiana still existed before the expulsion, and it’s not like France/SPain couldn’t find another source of settlers other than the Acadian, Louisiana for exemple had a certain number of german settlers before the the acadian came
PLus the creole elite who ruled the place was separated from the acadian
Gian
Banned
But there weren't a lot of Louisiana Creoles and Isleños to begin prior to the Expulsion, which enabled a Francophone culture in the South prior to the Civil War
Meh arguably what saved french before the turn of the century (civil war as a cut off date for french influence Is too often said but kinda wrong, English became definitely and irremediably dominant during and after ww1) was just that the creole administration was first, that it got renforced by carribean french in the late 18th and early 19th century and that American government was willing to accommodate them because of how important New Orleans was.
ANd as i said, the colonials administration could just find another source of migrant, look a bit into various small settlement programs under Spanish Louisiana, it was mostly catholic Germans. No need to bring acadian to strengthen the white, rural Francophone culture, germans, maybe Spaniards are as good
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The expulsion happens early on in the war, before the North American and European PODs (victory in Quebec is in 1759, Elizabeth of Russia dies in 1762, the deportation period lasts from 1682 to 1755, so even if there are differences in French success before the plains of Abraham most of the Acadians would already be expelled), so it would still happen, however either way Louisiana could be settled by other people (yes, the French didn't settle it much, but the populations of both New France and Louisiana were growing prior to the war, France is the most populated colonial power, and ITTL cares more about Louisiana. IOTL it was more of a burden apart from the very southern end and didn't consistently own the region after the war, whereas it does ITTL). It wasn't settled much IOTL, true, but apart from the reasons I mentioned Canada isn't going to attract everyone and Sainte-Domingue can't hold every other French settler. I was thinking a France that is more active in the region develops Louisiana more. Slowly, sure, but it does develop the region. The upper country would grow at a snail's pace, but I expect that the area around the southern Mississippi (approximately the departments in line with or south of Carolina) would be used to grow sugar, cotton, and also serve as a sort of breadbasket for the much more cash crop exclusive Caribbean (as it did IOTL), so the French would try to settle the region, and having more control over North America would make this substantially more successful than IOTL. The northwest would largely be controlled by France's indigenous allies for a lot of its history with only a few forts being manned there to keep the British out, while the north as a whole would be slowly settled by coureurs de bois and in the northeast illegally by Anglophone farmers (who I'd expect to cause some conflict, and maybe pick off some land and give it to Virginia or form another British state there, though I'll correct this map once I figure out how much they take. If the Anglo region doesn't manage to split off and I end up not having to retcon that border, then expect a sort of "reverse Quebec".'
Thanks for bringing it up though, always good to have feedback. If what I said doesn't make sense to you, feel free to explain why, I'd rather know to fix a mistake now than look stupid later on.
"If they serious about sending back people for true, they bound to split me in two" - The Mighty Dougla, Split me in Two
Map of the Fortnight: 210
Trinidad's labor organization remains strong, and a shorter and more violent Windrush keep many Trini workers on the island who would've otherwise left. Butterflies batter the UK even harder during WWII. To combat the USSR, the US pressures the UK into letting it's colonies earlier than OTL go in exchange for financial benefits. T&T gets a very protectionist Labor gov't, which the US is not in favor of. The US attempts a coup, which falters enough troops get involved. The US reorganizes Trinidad to exacerbate strife between Indo-Trinibagans and Afro-Trinibagans, while the legitimate gov't is allowed to carry on in Tobago. By 1975, the Republic of Trinidad is a corrupt petroleum republic, and facing more and more dissent as the Bretton Woods system hiccups and contracts, the United States begins fueling the drug trade, and a multiracial labor party begins developing on Trinidad worrying many that the US will bring it's hammer back down on the poor island nation.
Wait....is that an Irish-scottish-welsh union? A United Kingdom if you will?Welcome to the Old World. This timeline is something of a side project of mine (well, a side project of a side project), a universe where the old ways and ideals of the age of empires and wars of religion and politics never died. The focus of this TL is obviously the juggernaut of the United Empire of Columbia, a nuclear-armed imperialist hyperpower half-run by an American-exceptionalism-meets-Greek-mythos-meets-Shinto-meets-Catholicism theological titan, the Albionic Church, which venerates the Founding Fathers and deities among the likes of Lady Columbia, General George Washington the Liberator, and Uncle Sam the Destroyer of Worlds. After centuries of war and competition, the globe is currently led by the Franco-Columbian-Japanese axis, though relations between New York and Paris are being strained to the breaking point as the War on Terror rages in India.
Our Fair Columbia
Σύγχρονος Kόσμος
I'm going to be turning this into a Maps & Graphics TL soon with a bigger and better writeup, but if you're interested, I encourage you to check out my insanely long, absurdly detailed alt-Wikipedia article on the Albionic Church.
Technically that's the Imperial Republic of the Celts, led by the Archdruid of Dubhlinn and his council...Wait....is that an Irish-scottish-welsh union? A United Kingdom if you will?
This is based on Plan B of the Woodhead Commission, which was in turn based on the Peel Commission, which called for the Mandate of Palestine to be partitioned into a Jewish state along the coast and in the lower Galilee, an Arab state to be united with Transjordan in the rest of Palestine, and for the upper Galilee (Arab majority, but surrounded by areas with a Jewish majority) and the area around Jerusalem (to avoid the question of which new country gets the greatest prize) to be kept under British mandate indefinitely. Alien space bats work their magic, a miracle occurs, and the proposal is accepted by both Jewish and Arab leadership.
A three-way civil war ensues when it comes time for the plan to be implemented, between the pro-partition forces of the British, the Haganah, and Transjordan, the anti-partition Jewish forces of the Irgun and Lehi, and the anti-partition Arab forces of the Holy War Army. The center holds, the Haganah and Hashemites win, and Palestine is partitioned. Israel becomes independent and, with the right wing of the Zionist movement defeated in and decimated by the civil war, tacks in an even more left-wing direction than its early years in OTL, soon becoming an officially socialist state. Meanwhile the Emirate of Transjordan becomes the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine and moves its capital to Jericho, chosen for its strategic proximity to the main bridge over the Jordan river (and to their desired future capital of Jerusalem).
The war reprised itself on a smaller scale two decades later in the Galilee Mandate, where the British had been hard at work trying to instill a separate national identity from the rest of Palestine, which worked quite well among the Druze and Christians but not among the Muslims. When Britain granted the Galilee its independence, Muslim Palestinian nationalists rose up against the new state, attempting instead to convert it into a base for the all-Palestine Arab republic they had tried unsuccessfully to create twenty years earlier, causing unrest throughout the reason. Israel and Palestine invaded the Galilee at the invitation of its new government, suppressing the rebellion and forcing out much of the Muslim population to Lebanon and Syria--who in turn forced much of their Druze population out into Galilee, hastening its conversion into an essentially Druze (and to a lesser extent Christian) state.
The biggest remaining flashpoint is Jerusalem, still under British control to this day for lack of a better option--with nearly even Arab and Jewish populations, it would be too unstable to grant independence in itself; Israel and Palestine agree in principle that it should be partitioned between them but the communities are so jumbled that there are no obvious borders to draw (and of course each wants the lion’s share, including the holy city, for itself). It’s the only place where extremism on either side continues to hold much purpose, and the only place where terrorism and ethnoreligious violence continue to be major issues. Still, the volatile security situation hasn’t prevented Jerusalem from becoming something of a Hong Kong of the Middle East, a laissez faire financial center for the region and a cultural center for both the Arabic world and world Jewry, if not on quite the same scale as its Far East counterpart. And so vested economic interests join security concerns and sheer inertia in propping up the British-ruled status quo...
Relations between Israel and Palestine, and indeed between Israel and most of the Arab world, are mostly normal by today, if at times somewhat tense; for the most part they’ve been allies in defending the status quo against their own and each other’s extremists rather than enemies. Calling for either state to take over the whole land between the river and the sea is a fringe position on both sides. The main tension between them has been Israel’s left-wing alignment with the Eastern Bloc and Palestine’s right-wing alignment with the Western Bloc, and even that has mostly diminished as a factor in relations as the Cold War has wound down and both countries have liberalized their political and economic systems - Palestine is now a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy, albeit one where the king continues to play an outsize role in politics, and Israel now allows multi-party elections, if only between rival socialist parties so far.
In other ways, however, Israel continues to look much as it did in its early days--majority Ashkenazi (the immigration of the Russian Jews occurred much earlier as the USSR “encouraged” them to leave once it became apparent that Israel was an ally, while with a much lesser Israeli-Arab conflict many Arab and Muslim countries did not expel their native Jews as in OTL; Yiddish is much more widespread), aggressively secular (in contrast to Jerusalem which has a much higher proportion of Orthodox Jews), and still prizing the kibbutz as the cornerstone of the national identity. Many Arabs were forced to leave their homes when Israel was established, but far fewer than in OTL, and they were quickly integrated into Hashemite Palestine rather than becoming a permanent refugee population--just one of any number of mid-century population exchanges rather than a disastrous scar on the Palestinian national psyche. More scarring is the legacy of the intra-Arab Hashemite-republican civil war, and even that conflict has largely been replaced by one between secularism and Islamism, with the large Christian minority caught uneasily in between.
Gian
Banned
Meh, having an OTL result for the Maritimes is too overdone to death in my book. If you REALLY want to have a better alternative, have both Acadians and Gaelic Scots live side-by-side in a Franco-Gaelic Nova Scotia
Sounds much more interesting. It would require another earlier POD, but it shouldn't be too big of a problem.
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