Big part of the alternate end to the Corsican Crisis is a more active British diplomacy abroad, spurring counter-diplomacy by France. Tipu Sultan's French-armed Mysore manages to dislodge Britain from Southern India, and it's all butterflies from there
Map Thread XXII
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Big part of the alternate end to the Corsican Crisis is a more active British diplomacy abroad, spurring counter-diplomacy by France. Tipu Sultan's French-armed Mysore manages to dislodge Britain from Southern India, and it's all butterflies from there
This is a map Zveiner and I made to showcase the independent global city of Katesh, located on the northwestern corner of the Sinai Peninsula. It is part of our ongoing project Atlas Altera. Atlas Altera is a syntopian fiction project that leverages the classroom cliché map to reimagine how diversity and co-existence can take shape, all the while building from real but buried geographies. To learn more about Atlas Altera, visist AtlasAltera.com. or check out Youtube.com/@AtlasAltera.
There are a two maps at different scales in this stylized infographic—one for its geopolitical context and another for its urban layout—plus an orthographic map to pinpoint Katesh in the world. Katesh is one of the two major independent cities built and controlled by the Society of Nations (SoN), analogous to our OTL United Nations, and having begun at around the time of OTL's League of Nations, only with less cynicism and more Cosmopolitan idealism baked into its institutions. Being headquarters to most of the SoN's major governmental bodies and agencies, Katesh functions as a de facto capital of the world.
Around the large scale map in the bottom are sketches of various high profile or famous buildings located in the city. These buildings showcase the Internationalist architectural tradition, rarely used in other parts of the world, though sharing similarities to the Brutalist/Modernistskaya traditions adopted by most countries in the socialist bloc.
Both Katesh and the other independent global city, Liberum, are located along the geopolitical hotspots of major canals—the former being on the Suez and the latter on the Marelago. For Katesh, this is a result of the Egyptian concession of the town of Casia and the Bardawil Lagoon to imperialist Britain, which then relinquished the territory to the SoN for guarantees that the Suez would be enforced as an international body of water. In the wake of the wars revolving around the Israeli-Palestini conflict and Egypt's transition to a constitutional monarchy under the socialist Tawo Party, the SoN is now the sole entity that oversees the canal's operation, though canal revenues are split evenly between the SoN and Egypt, while Israel receives none in return for perpetual access and recognition of its current borders by Egypt and Pheran.
I remember reading this like 2 years ago, and the remembering it and then rereading it like two months ago, very good story
"The Ides of March changed the world, but not as the men who held the daggers that day planned. If Caesar had lived, won at least a grain of success against Parthia, and then marched back to Rome in triumph, things would have been different. By their subservience, the Roman nobility would have proved themselves ready for tyranny. Like Alexander before him, Caesar would have sampled the trappings of eastern despotism, and it is hard to believe that he wouldn't have liked them. With his mistress Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, beside him, and with dozens of new noble Parthian clients in tow, no doubt bowing low to him as their ancestors did to Alexander, Caesar would have come back to Rome as king of Asia. In short order, Rome would have become an absolute monarchy. Of course, Rome did eventually become an autocracy, but not for another three hundred years until the reign of Diocletian (ruled A.D. 285-309). Not under Augustus." - The Death of Caesar: The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination by Barry Strauss, 2015
I was reading the aforementioned book and came across this remark. I may have given the Romans more than "a grain of success against Parthia", but I did want to ensure an adequate Romano-Persian Imperial retinue. Given the comparison to Diocletian, I'm tempted to try and follow it up with a proper map of a world where the Roman Empire collapsed as soon after Diocletian as it did after Caesar (or maybe that's not the right route to take with this comparison).
Yeah, but I forgot them, I admit it
But in this map, The countries dependent of the Commonwealth are in majority independent like IRL, so maybe I considered Dutch Caribbean like a dutch part of them.....
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Glad to see you continuing the series, Bruce!
Come to think of it, I might continue on with filling some of the gaps you left. Vanuatu, Qatar and the Soviet Union come to mind.
I actually expected you to do an ancient China and a PRC (and if you didn't, I would have done the one you didn't!). Global Chinese hegemony sounds fun. Maybe throw in some lunar and Martian bases? All Under Heaven, now including Heaven.
Come to think of it, I might continue on with filling some of the gaps you left. Vanuatu, Qatar and the Soviet Union come to mind.
You need to add the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia under Antoine de Tounens for a fun Latin American addition.
Germany east of the Rhine and south of Saxony: what's there ATL? Independent Christian German states?
I'd assume that TTL's Germany is probably composed of various independent Christian states. Most of them are Germanic but I also see a few small holdings of Christianised Slavs existing in the area, as those peoples continue pushing west in the absence of a strong imperial state protecting what we would know as Old Saxony and the Marca Geronis.
In my draw, the Bourbons of Mexico came from the Bourbon pf Two-Sicilies, after Murat with Napoleon successfully invadeed Sicilia, and for Brasil, theEmpire survived after 1888, even with revolts about slavery....
Very good points all around (especially that 1) Anatolian farmers themselves were a mixed population, and 2) they continued to mix with other people living in Europe) but the scale of population turnover still seems suggestive to me of at least some regional linguistics groups in Neolithic Europe larger than what you see in the Americas or Papua New Guinea. Over a time period of roughly 7000 B.C. to 4000 B.C. (merely three thousand years, less time than Indo-European has been a thing) agriculture and farmers spread from Anatolia all the way to Britain[1]; Harvard Geneticist David Reich talks of a 90% population turnover as agriculture was introduced in Britain.
Perhaps an analogy with Africa is warranted; although there is a massive continent-wide language family (Niger-Congo) going back to the earliest agriculture in West Africa, within this family we find one branch (Bantu) has more recently spread further over a similarly large area by farmers who were able to successfully repurpose their initial agriculture package for a new climate (and thereby outnumber the hunter-gatherers already living there and causing remaining hunter-gatherer-derived populations to adopt the farmers' languages).
I agree that the odds of us have a very clear idea of language distribution at time are slim, but I too would love to see your take on this!
[1] The archeological record suggests two waves; one traveling across the Mediterranean and the other down the Danube and into Germany. Both waves seem to have merged into each other in France before crossing the English channel.
Also interesting historical notes, but I think a disproportionate amount of the examples of languages adopting other languages' numbers are found in East Asia. This might be an areal feature, and might have something to do with number words originally being adopted as words to describe Chinese Characters, rather than be used for counting; Japanese speakers still can use the non-Sinic number series ('hitotsu, futatsu,..') for counting objects up to ten, while the Sinic numbers ('ichi, ni,...') are used for referring to numbers in the abstract (as in math or place names), or 'fancy words' (like how we say 'biennial' in English, instead of 'two-yearly').
My own take on the Alphabetical Nationwanks series, having a start from A with Afghanistan.
Nationwanks is a bit of a flexible term here - just countries that are significantly larger, more prosperous, more influential and more successful than they are OTL. I won't be doing every country as some are just too hard for me come up with an interesting or creative way to wank which isn't just a carbon copy of the another neighbouring country's.
Azerbaijan is basically cribbed from Wiz's AzeriLP on Something Awful, in which the Ildeguzid Sultanate of Azerbaijan goes through many tribulations and changes until the modern day.
Nationwanks is a bit of a flexible term here - just countries that are significantly larger, more prosperous, more influential and more successful than they are OTL. I won't be doing every country as some are just too hard for me come up with an interesting or creative way to wank which isn't just a carbon copy of the another neighbouring country's.
Azerbaijan is basically cribbed from Wiz's AzeriLP on Something Awful, in which the Ildeguzid Sultanate of Azerbaijan goes through many tribulations and changes until the modern day.
Don't think the Slavs would push into Saxony, they didn't before the Franks conquered them.
Saxony was too big for the individual Slavic tribes. They only conquered Holstein and what would become the Lunenburg Heath after the local Slavs helped the Franks.
