- That's fair, I figured it had to do with the fact that Essàfaleia was developed as essentially a federation of Imperially-sponsored corporatocracies, rather than a true settler colony in the OTL sense.
- Oh yeah, I forgot in
@HatKirby's map that the *Römisch owned the Amazon. Strange that they didn't take the rest of *Brazil (since that's where the best farming and mining land is), but then again that's looking at it from a settler's point of view. In any case, I figured at least one major island would belong to Röm in that instance. As for Skotland, if you're not opposed to OTL parallelism there's always Montserrat (Jamaica at the utmost, but that's probably a stretch TBH).
That is in fact a much more succinct way of phrasing up the process of colonisation then I seemed capable of mustering. Yes, Imperially-sponsored corporatocracies.
Well there were myriad reasons for that. More active trade prior to colonization, as mentioned in the map, had allowed native states to gain some resistance to Old World diseases and grow in number and so there was quite some stiff resistance to colonialism particularly in those denser and more temperate coastal regions. They also had active competition from other powers like Mauretania, Haraf and Cheganny*.
But more importantly the Amazon has several key resources which are much more sought after than IOTL in the same time period: timber, phosphorus and natural latex. The timber is for obvious reasons, but herein specifically to be used in stratolaminate, an early form of plywood that was initially developed in the
Kingdom of Angelcynn. Phosphorus is used to make special glass for sodium-vapor lamps, which saw widespread application throughout Röm in this period and in smaller amounts for fertilizer and some interesting culinary applications. Natural latex is used for rubber which has hundreds of uses in and of itself, as well as medicine and glue, and perhaps most uniquely for armour. Rubber is a very effective distributor of force, and so actually works quite well against blunt force trauma and even gunfire, to a point. Rubber plating, usually within a steel shell, is quite common in this period on infantry and some heavy cavalry and would remain so up until the present day as the development of anti-ballistic rubber essentially kept in lockstep with ballistics themselves**.
In any event I think they might control one of the Virgin Islands, but I need to broach it properly with Hatkirby. I'm really not comfortable giving any solid implications about the state of the Caribbean given we don't even acutely know what Western Europe looks like (outside of Iberia, anyhow).
*Corresponding, roughly, with OTL Mauritania, northern Morocco, and Germany + Denmark, respectively.
**I've clearly thought an awful lot about the Amazon. 'Tis a fascinating place.
