Map Thread XVIII

[wolfhound817]

not my best work but I wanted to post it

 

[Fed]

So, long time no see. Haven't really been online in ages. Kinda wanted to celebrate this semester being over by drafting a quick map: I'm preparing something a bit more complex with this one but that's a long way away from being ready.

Welcome to the Benin-Oyo State: the best place to live in Africa!*

* terms and conditions** may apply, especially if you're Igbo, gay, white, poor, Muslim, or generally not Yoruba or Edo. Terms and conditions may also apply if you actually are Yoruba or Edo, since the best place to live in Africa is probably Spain-in-exile or South Africa, and not some crackpot dual dictatorship that still adheres to fascist ideals 100 years after Boulanger died and that is falling apart at the seams due to ethnic tensions and international pressure. Terms and conditions may start applying more and more as it becomes increasingly clear that the State is falling apart.

**For the purpose of this advertisement, "Terms and conditions" actually means "we're completely lying and Benin-Oyo is nowhere close to being the best place to live in Africa, please don't come here"

 

[Athos]

This is a remake of a work by Void Wolf. I didn't like borders too much, in my opinion too modern, so I decided to change them. I decided to change some things. https://www.deviantart.com/void-wolf/art/Draka-Demonica-527529923

 

[XFE]

A somewhat higher-effort work than last time. Also for @black_0's excellent Periodization game.

​

History of Germany after the Great War​

The PoD is in late 1918/early 1919 where the Spartakist Front's uprising in Berlin leads to large scale rebellion across the country. The forces of order coalesced under SPD leader Friedrich Erbert and Chief of Staff of the German army Wilhelm Groener, forming the German 1st Republic. The Republic withstood many rebellions, but the last straw was Bavaria's declaration of independence. With the regulars fighting Soviet invasion in Lithuania, a still disgruntled Ludendorff seized the moment and marched on the defacto capital of Kassel with an army of angry veterans.

Just as Germany seemed ready for a second Revolution, news came that Trotsky had defeated the German army in Lithuania. The civilian Government quickly whipped up the populace through good 'ol fearmongering and secured a compromise between all political factions. This created the grossly decentralized Weimar Republic. Germany defeated Trotsky at the gates of Warsaw--but even that did not bring about stability. Bickering German politicians saw 26 of their ilk rise and fall from an increasingly powerless Chancellorship. The one good thing the Weimar Republic did was negotiate a generous American loan--a reward for Germany's steadfast anti-Communism.

In 1933, Conservative forces in the Reichstag and Reichsrat won a smashing promise on the promise of monarchial restoration. This seeming return to normalcy appeased the public and a brief economic boom followed (one that in retrospect, actually began in the last years of the Second Republic).

The democratic world prospered for a time, but the rest of the world did not. France, Italy, Japan and Spain found themselves under right-wing regimes, and aligned themselves with Trotsky's Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire, launching the Second World War. Five years later, when all her allies lay defeated, it was the relatively unscathed Soviet Union that almost forced through a negotiated settlement for the War. Instead, the Allies pushed on, fuelled by sheer willpower and no small amount of anti-Semitic propaganda on Germany and America's part. The War ended only when Trotsky was killed by his own bodyguards whilst en route to Irkutsk.

Post-war Germany returned to the geopolitical scene with a vengeance. The new German superpower punched below its weight in comparison to its Anglophone allies, but compensated with sheer unpredictability. German forces were known to act without regard for overall allied command during the Indochina War against the forces of Chinese socialism. Prussian Conservatism, caricatured by anti-Semitism and the rash Kaiserin Marie-Cécile did not help Germany's international image either.

Things turned around in the '80s as conservative economic policy allowed for unhampered growth in the industrial sector; while Germany took up the role as the West's sledgehammer in Turkey and the Congo. Unfortunately, the world came crashing down in the '90s when anti-war protests and an inconveniently timed financial crisis led to the 52-year-old Kaiserin being dragged kicking and screaming by Communist deputies to sign her formal abdication and form the People's Republic of Germany.

The People's Republic lasted a scant 5 years before it came crashing down. This time, defeat came when a revanchist Russia launched a full scale invasion of Central Europe, sweeping aside the newly demoralized German Revolutionary Guard Corps. Britain and America were too mired by internal conflict to intervene--not to mention the stigma of a "War for Germany".

Germany was eventually freed--at great cost--by China and the remainder of Europe. The Austrian representatives at the peace negotiations, led by Chancellor Edmund A. Hitler sought to rebuild Germany in its pre-war image. This meant a Germany that carried over it's pre-war divisions with the same political dysfunctionality as the previous century. Instead, Germany elected Angela Merkel, an expat economist who vowed to turn around the country's economic destitution. Though she was not without her critics, 10 years of Merkel undoubtedly gave Germany some solid ground to stand on, even attaining a GDP per capita half that of Austria and witnessing her first orderly election in a generation. The time for German hegemony has no doubt passed, but the country has found itself a comfortable spot as one amongst many.


Headcanon and notes follow. A note for readers: I've taken some creative choices regarding the '90s to explain why America and Britain didn't intervene in the Russian invasion of Europe.

Europe

• The right wing blowback that followed the German Revolution was much stronger than OTL. Most regional monarchies persisted throughout the first 2 Republics and restored Kaiserreich, but all feudal titles were abolished under the People's Republic, and only Bavaria's House of Wittelsbach has survived to the present day.
• Marie Cécile, the last of the Hohenzollerns and only Kaiserin in German history was...is an oddball. She was 6th in line to the throne, but somehow ascended to the throne in a series of honest coincidences and some amount of ambition. This and an exceptionally sheltered youth gave the Kaiserin a problematic god complex. Under her watch, Germany was seen as a power that ought to have been on the losing side of WW2 alongside Communism and Fascism, saved only by a fluke of geopolitics.
• France prospered off German reparations, but soon found that Germany was climbing back to parity with American aid. A feeling of betrayal swept across France, and a neo-Boulangist regime, the Croix-de-France came to power in the '30s. This was followed by copycat regimes in Italy and Spain.
• A series of French Republics dominated the latter half of the 20th Century, but no one of them could compete with Germany and Southern Europe. The French Commune arose on the heels of the pink wave that followed the Russian War of the 2000s. China was sure to take advantage of the pink wave, but found France too authoritarian and too high profile for membership in the Eurosocialist bloc. Today, the French have an odd partnership with Americans based on "fuck the Euros"
• The European Union is actually more centrist than the term "Eurosocialist Bloc" implies, and it is Europe's pro-China foreign policy that made sure the name stuck. The Union was founded in '70s as part of an international peace initiative designed to defuse the Cold War in the Balkans. It has come a long way since then, and is an odd marriage of Austrian!Blairism, centurial political dynasties (the Hitlers of Austria come to mind) and casual Anglophobia.

East Asia

• China came under the rule of Chen Jiongming's democratic socialist government following WW2. China was Asia's armory just as America was Europe's, which gave post-war leadership enough punching power to lead worldwide anti-colonialism.
• The Western allies saw this as a stab in the back and sought to stop the Chinese advance at Indochina. This sparked the Indochina War, a conflict the length of both World Wars combined. What China lacked in military prowess, it had in fifth columns, and the two blocs set half of Asia and Africa on fire throughout the '60s, '70s and '80s. In '78, China tried to make Cambodia it's right-hand man to finally win the Indochinese war. It didn't work out in the long term.
• The financial crises of the '90s handed China the position of global hegemon not by her own merit or desire; but by default. China was put in the undesirable position of propping up the USD by buying up dollars with the Yuan. But even China could not save the Dollar, and the Yuan eventually became the world currency.
• China believes that it won the cold war in the 2000s when the Atlantacist powers, still reeling from the shock of financial crisis failed to come to the aid of Europe. China was perceived to be the savior of the Continent, which sparked a pink wave of China-friendly, socialist Governments across Europe.

West Asia

• Half a century after independence from the Soviet Union, Turkestan fell apart upon Russian invasion. After liberation, Turkestan defaulted to the Uzbek-dominated state it had always been in self-denial about, and has seen several Turkic!Putins at the helm. Despite Chinese predictions, Turkestan 2.0 didn't fall apart within the decade, and Nanjing has had to contend with its long term existence.
• The Hashemite Kingdom of the Mashriq and (nominally) Hedjaz has been the hegemon of the Middle East for most of the 20th and 21st Centuries. This branch of the family originally had control of all of Arabia and a near-monopoly on the oil trade, but lost Hedjaz to an intra-house civil war in the '30s and (Atlantacist sponsored) Saudi opportunism. The 21st Century has seen the Mashriq leave behind oil as its sole source of income and give up swinging its fist at Anglo-American military bases just across the border. Despite being unabashedly capitalist and aristocratic, the Mashriq is closely aligned with Europe.
• Iran entered WW2 on Trotsky's side with the aim of expelling the British, only to be painted as a co-belligerent and split up between its neighbors. Azerbaijan was originally quite a bit bigger, but Iran has pushed back thanks to some healthy Eurasian investment and the war against Turkey.
• Turkey had some very bad years after WW1. The beatdown was brutal enough that the Turks kept a low enough profile to sit out WW2 on the sidelines. Reunified Turkey's first free elections in the '50s were won by one Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, an old-timey Ottoman statesman who proceeded to become one of China's less savory allies.
• The Atlanticist powers pissed off everybody in the neighborhood when they established the Republic of Kurdistan after the destruction of the Ataturk regime. German forces remained in Turkey until 1987, but when they were withdrawn, Mashriq, Iran and Turkey pounced on the Kurds. Thanks to a Polish-held supply chain from the Black Sea through Armenia into Kurdistan, the Kurds held their own and even pushed into Turkey.

Africa

• Kwame Nkrumah lived long enough to see himself become the villain. Starting out in the '50s as a Ghanan Revolutionary with great ambitions and greater Chinese paychecks, he evolved into a crypto-Trotskyist who was overthrown by moderate military strongmen (also on China's payroll).
• Zaire suffered much the same fate Turkey did. America originally intended to send in coalition troops, but Germany ended up having to do most of the dirty work. A half-hearted attempt was made at establishing a pro-Atlantacist regime, but Zaire quickly descended into tribal infighting, with the central Government only controlling Brazzaville-Kinsasha and it's surroundings. East Africa has been hard at work cleaning up after Germany some 40 years on.

Atlanticist Powers

• America was hit hard by the '90s crash, not helped by a series of leaders that held true to the Government's peacetime non-intervention in the economy. After a disastrous war against rebel Zapatistas in Mexico, America fell into depression and stagnation. An angry veteran was elected on the promise of destroying the two-party system, and the crazy train sped on for 20 years.
• The kinder, gentler side of the Atlantacist Alliance is Britain and the Anglophonic Union. In order to counteract Chinese-sponsored anti-colonialism in the '60s, Britain let it's empire fell apart with more civility than bloodshed. This gave London more friends across the globe. The Anglophonic Union was conceived as a front for American interests to be projected via Britain, but when things went awry in Washington, Britain's more moderate leadership took up more responsibilities in the Atlanticist Alliance.
• Britain has a divide and conquers policy towards Union members, as evidenced by Tony Blair allying with the entirety of the AU to strongarm the Canadians into occupying Alaska when it seemed like the Americans were crazy enough to ally with Russia against the world. The Canadian economy has suffered greatly ever since.
• America's crazy train ground to an abrupt halt once Russia lay defeated. President Romney of the Democratic-Republican Party took up the difficult job of guiding America back to the light, though there is a reason why Washington's most powerful refer to him by the delightfully cheesy nickname "Washington Puppetmaster".

 

[The Plainsman]

not my best work but I wanted to post it

Any context as to how this country came into existence?

 

[Betelgeuse]

So, long time no see. Haven't really been online in ages. Kinda wanted to celebrate this semester being over by drafting a quick map: I'm preparing something a bit more complex with this one but that's a long way away from being ready.

Welcome to the Benin-Oyo State: the best place to live in Africa!*

* terms and conditions** may apply, especially if you're Igbo, gay, white, poor, Muslim, or generally not Yoruba or Edo. Terms and conditions may also apply if you actually are Yoruba or Edo, since the best place to live in Africa is probably Spain-in-exile or South Africa, and not some crackpot dual dictatorship that still adheres to fascist ideals 100 years after Boulanger died and that is falling apart at the seams due to ethnic tensions and international pressure. Terms and conditions may start applying more and more as it becomes increasingly clear that the State is falling apart.

**For the purpose of this advertisement, "Terms and conditions" actually means "we're completely lying and Benin-Oyo is nowhere close to being the best place to live in Africa, please don't come here"

So the POD involves Boulanger actually attempting a coup? If so, that's very interesting! Have you ever read Fight And Be Right by EdT? It actually involves Boulanger taking power. You might like it.

 

[wolfhound817]

Any context as to how this country came into existence?

It’s a bit out there but the West is much more decentralized and when Gov starts to crack down theres protests from people enjoying their anarchy so they set up Fronteir Republics closely associated with the US in Buffalo and then one in Arizona, also just to spice things up Texas never joins union, Deseret is independent, and CSA wins civil war with British help. It’s ASB but I thought the frontier republic idea was interesting

 

[Fed]

So the POD involves Boulanger actually attempting a coup? If so, that's very interesting! Have you ever read Fight And Be Right by EdT? It actually involves Boulanger taking power. You might like it.

I haven't read the TL, but I'll put it in my reading list!

Basically, in the TL a weaker Third French Republic (weak and more nationalistic in part due to more hostile relations with Britain, that approached the Germans after Frederick III succeeded the throne in 1878) falls due to anti-Semitic tensions and conflict with the forming Anglo-German alliance, leading to the rise of a "Boulangist" dictatorship in France (that decays into a jingoistic-monarchist regime led by Edouard Drumont and, in theory, the Carlist/Bourbon Kings of France and Spain) which is the cause for TTL's WW1.

 

[Zauberfloete]

So, long time no see. Haven't really been online in ages. Kinda wanted to celebrate this semester being over by drafting a quick map: I'm preparing something a bit more complex with this one but that's a long way away from being ready.

Welcome to the Benin-Oyo State: the best place to live in Africa!*

* terms and conditions** may apply, especially if you're Igbo, gay, white, poor, Muslim, or generally not Yoruba or Edo. Terms and conditions may also apply if you actually are Yoruba or Edo, since the best place to live in Africa is probably Spain-in-exile or South Africa, and not some crackpot dual dictatorship that still adheres to fascist ideals 100 years after Boulanger died and that is falling apart at the seams due to ethnic tensions and international pressure. Terms and conditions may start applying more and more as it becomes increasingly clear that the State is falling apart.

**For the purpose of this advertisement, "Terms and conditions" actually means "we're completely lying and Benin-Oyo is nowhere close to being the best place to live in Africa, please don't come here"

Nice! Please tell us more about Benin-Oyo!

 

[B_Munro]

A somewhat higher-effort work than last time

Very good indeed.

This was followed by copycat regimes in Italy and Spain.

Mussolini was butterflied?

Minor quibble: it's a touch confusing how the colors in the key are rather lighter and pastel-y than those on the actual map.

 

[Oxander]

Very good indeed.

Mussolini was butterflied?

Minor quibble: it's a touch confusing how the colors in the key are rather lighter and pastel-y than those on the actual map.

I resorted to some copypasta transparencies to see which colors went where. It was mildly annoying, but an interesting concept.

 

[Kento Kei Hyama]

Finally got Photoshop! Heres a New map for Y'all

 

[Selvetrica]

Here is an Austria-Hungary ISOT gif I made set between the years of 1914-2014. This idea has been floating around in my head since my CSA ISOT.
I am a bit unsure about the level of expansion the various countries make but at least I had fun making it.

 

[AP246]

Another map for Thousand Week Reich, the Polish Revolution:

Full thread - https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ich-a-realistic-nazi-victory-scenario.444582/

 

[TheDetailer]

Here is an Austria-Hungary ISOT gif I made set between the years of 1914-2014. This idea has been floating around in my head since my CSA ISOT.
I am a bit unsure about the level of expansion the various countries make but at least I had fun making it.

epic

 

[Capuleten]

Another map for Thousand Week Reich, the Polish Revolution:

Full thread - https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ich-a-realistic-nazi-victory-scenario.444582/

God I love this timeline, really a genre-setter for Axis victory stuff. Much better than Man in the High Castle timeline-wise. (Fantastic map, as well, very realistic, almost like it came from an AH online atlas!)

 

[Sirion]

A somewhat higher-effort work than last time. Also for @black_0's excellent Periodization game.

View attachment 461962
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Greater Arizona.

 

[Zauberfloete]

Here is an Austria-Hungary ISOT gif I made set between the years of 1914-2014. This idea has been floating around in my head since my CSA ISOT.
I am a bit unsure about the level of expansion the various countries make but at least I had fun making it.

Love it!

 

[Ephraim Ben Raphael]

Here is an Austria-Hungary ISOT gif I made set between the years of 1914-2014. This idea has been floating around in my head since my CSA ISOT.
I am a bit unsure about the level of expansion the various countries make but at least I had fun making it.

This is amazing. I love the Serbian/Bulgarian Slavic union that colonizes Greece and a bunch of the Middle East before collapsing. Would it be possible to see this in non-gif format?

 

[Petros >Peter Fergus<]

Here is an Austria-Hungary ISOT gif I made set between the years of 1914-2014. This idea has been floating around in my head since my CSA ISOT.
I am a bit unsure about the level of expansion the various countries make but at least I had fun making it.

This is a good map and you should feel good for making it.

Is this the future of the ISOT genre? I hope so.