Mauritania

[Haggis]

The collapse of the Spanish Empire deeply affected the Americas, to the south resistance movements would seemingly evaporate overnight and only emerge again when the Liberators began to squabble with each other and the Viceroyalty of Peru clamped down on dissension, for the most part though the newly made republics would be ineffective at enforcing laws and piracy, tyranny, and slavery would reign supreme.

In the north of the former Spanish Empire the resistance movements would dissipate almost as rapidly and many Indian and Criollo ruled states would pop up in places like the Californias and Sonora.

However the Viceroyalty of New Spain had the right mix of men to hold on to Nueva Galicia which contained the vital ports of Veracruz and Acapulco. [1]

The men who would be so instrumental in shaping the future of what remained of Spanish power in North America did so not only as a form of patriotism but with the full knowledge that if they did not then them and their way of life would be overrun by what they saw as inferior beings.

So when the news came in 1815 that Spain was definitely no more and that her colonies would have to try and get along with the mother country the Viceroy of New Spain at the time, Felix Maria Calleja, decided to abandon the Philippines, the Californias, and anywhere where there was not already a large Spanish presence.

Almost overnight close to 3 million people were no longer Spanish citizens, Calleja kept going though and ruled that all Indians, criollos, blacks, and mestizos who did not take an oath of loyalty to the Viceroyalty were to be treated as hostile foreigners and turned over to the Mexican Inquisition.

As for those rebels who had been captured in the past Calleja listened to the advice of Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, the then acting Governor of Cuba, and offered amnesty to those who would pledge their loyalty to New Spain. The rest were summarily tortured until they admitted to any host of crimes, including consorting with the Devil, before being publicly executed by either hanging or beheading.

Calleja was a harsh man, known for his exceptional cruelty and would quickly jail and torture anyone who threatened the existence of his regime. Helping him in his endeavors were men like Juan O’Donoju O’Rian, the infamous gambler Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Agustin de Iturbide, and Anastasio Bustamante.

Felix Maria Calleja was not quick to assume that these men would be willing to do everything and anything to preserve the territorial integrity of New Spain’s power base in Nueva Galicia and had the Mexican Inquisition use its network of spies to alert him of the actions of these high ranking members in the government.

When it was discovered that Juan O’Donoju O’Rian was not only a staunch liberal but in contact with rebels Calleja signed his death warrant within the hour and the former general was strung up outside the gates of Mexico City.

Where did this new power base come from though? Thanks to the actions of the French under Napoleon in Spain itself many thousands of Spaniards would flood into the British pockets of control, primarily in the north of the country. These regions could not support so many and so in tandem with the Portuguese exile the British would simply load Spaniards on old coffin ships and point them towards Veracruz.

Of course Calleja would not simply abandon the larger colonies in those areas outside of Nueva Galicia. He sent boats from Veracruz and Acapulco to pick up the small communities of monks and rancheros that were willing to come back to the protection of New Spain.

He was also quick to recognize the American claims to the Falklands and Cape Horn, a move that would set him at odds with his counterpart in Peru, Joaquin de la Pezuela who had wanted to secure that vital passage for himself and then hopefully unite the remainder of each Viceroyalty into a Kingdom of Spain-in-Exile. The only problem was that that title had already been taken by Cuba which was actually sheltering Ferdinand VII. [2]

Calleja was careful and methodical in cementing his control over Nueva Galicia and establishing the Virreinato de Nueva España (Viceroyalty of New Spain) as the strongest Spanish successor state in the New World.

It of course helped that he was quickly recognized by the Braganza monarch of Brazil, Joao VI, Ferdinand VII, and Great Britain, and the United States as the rightful ruler of New Spain and only added to his international fame when in the name of Ferdinand VII he sent four thousand Mexican troops to go and take part in the Primera Reconquista in 1817.

[1] One of the many smaller administrative divisions in New Spain, it’s basically southern Mexico.

[2] Ferdinand does not and will not rule directly, Juan Ruiz de Apodaca will continue to rule Cuba in Ferdinand’s name.
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The Danish Colonial Empire, nobody saw it coming except Frederick VI. Frederick had begun as a decent enough ruler, rather liberal and given to reforms but the seven year Gunboat War had managed to not only wreck Denmark’s navy but it had stripped him and his people of Norway. [1]
Though Denmark was allowed to keep Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and would take over Schleswig-Holstein in all but name it just seemed like a rather horrible compensation for being humiliated on the world stage.

So Frederick VI got downright draconian, he suppressed basic freedoms across the board and outright seized the DOK (Danish East India Company) territories of Tranquebar and Serampore, as well as the total profits of the company. He would later exile those businessmen who objected to this practice to Greenland.

After repeating the procedure with the DVG (Danish West India-Guinea Company) Frederick VI personally owned territory in Africa, India, and the Caribbean. He quietly had the few Danish troops in the Danish Gold Coast move on Herman Daendels’ Dutch Gold Coast and presented them with the simple offer of join or die.

Theoretically the Dutch Gold Coast could rely on the French Empire for protection, seeing as France had kind of annexed the Netherlands three years ago, but the French were more focused on Spain and Napoleon really did not care about what happened in Africa, at all.

This move effectively gave control of nearly the entire Gold Coast to Denmark and they were quick to exploit it. After allying with the local Ashanti against the Fanti peoples the Governor of the Gold Coast, Christian Schiønning signed the Treaty of Fort Prinsensten which said that in return for supplying the Danish with indentured servants to serve for a period of time in the Jomfruøeme then they would be supplied with modern nation building equipment, like cannons and muskets and even horses to use against their Fanti foes. [2]

At the same time this was going on Frederick VI was sure to keep abreast of current events and realized that nobody was even going to try and exploit the new republics and city states and tribal nations that would be popping up all over what had once been the northernmost expanses of New Spain.

So in 1818 he sent a fleet out from the Gold Coast, it was staffed mostly with Ashanti mercenaries and the less desirable sort of people that tend to get sent to colonies as a form of punishment. This small fleet sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and established trade relations with the Mtetwa Empire and Mauritania before moving on to Tranquebar and Serampore where the fleet picked up Indian Eurasian mercenaries before moving on to the land of California.

In the Bay of San Francisco, which had been mostly abandoned by New Spain, they made contact with the Russian contingent from Fort Ross and claimed most of the bay for themselves. A brief struggle ensued but the superior arms of the Danes ensured that they would gain control of the bay, for now.

From there they contacted the natives and set up a trading outpost before sending a mission around Cape Horn to make contact with Jomfruøeme three months later. The Danish did not have a large colonial empire but they had definite concrete colonies and it would be a start.

[1] No Congress of Vienna in this timeline but there is still a separate peace in the Gunboat War and it is still called the Treaty of Kiel.

[2] Yeah the Danish are having the Ashanti supply them with even more slaves to work on sugar plantations in the Virgin Islands, Jomfruøeme means Virgin Islands in Danish.
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Suriname came to be in 1815 and almost from its inception the nation was different from other major colonies turned nations. Suriname attracted many, many members of the Haskalah Movement. [1]

Those Jews who were members of Haskalah movement, the maskilim, seemed to flock to the young nation and settle down to raise a healthy democracy. They would be helped in this by the most radical Dutch element within the colony, the Boers.

Almost immediately the maskilim and the Boers formed a sort of national alliance aimed at ensuring that their goals of a segregated representative democracy were fully met. The two greatest leaders of this early faction in Surinamese politics were Joseph Perl and Piet Retief.

Joseph was a scholarly Jew from Austria who was noted for writing parodies of Hasidism in the then almost dead language of Hebrew. Piet Retief was a French Huguenot descended Boer and noted winemaker from the Cape Colony of South Africa.

Together, with the help of a large number of immigrants, they would shape the future of the tiny South American nation.

In the early days of the Republic the burden for replenishing the slave stocks would fall rather heavily on the shoulders of the Cape Malay and Kleurlinge populations that traveled to Suriname with the Boers.

The Cape Malays were descendants of Javanese slaves, political dissidents, and religious leaders who were forcibly brought to the Dutch colonies in South Africa by the VOC (Dutch East India Company).

The Kleurlinge were descendants of Trekboers who had mixed with the local African population, mostly the Khoisan and Griekwa as well as groups from as far afield as Bengal, what would become Mauritania, and the interior of Mozambique.

Cape Malays and the Kleurlinge took a rather pragmatic view to slavery, rather them than us, and quickly began raiding the interior for those West African tribes that they felt had the heartiest “stock” as it were.

Usually these tribes supposed working ability was directly linked with their population size. Quinti were seen as lazy because there were so few of them while the Djuka group was prized as slaves because they were a much, much larger tribe and were suspected of being polygamists by the Boers.

The first big development was the election of an actual President of Suriname. In 1820 when the colonists had finally managed to organize a slipshod government and a Haskalah based constitution had been approved by most everyone it was decided that a Presidency would put too much power in the hands of a single person. [2]

So the Surinamese decided on a consulship, two politically powerful and important men would be elected, hopefully one from each of the two major factions that were expected to develop, these two consuls would be elected for life and could be removed from office at any time before their death by the unicameral parliament.

This consulship would be referred to almost from the beginning as the Premier-Stadhouder and it would end up carrying quite some weight. Of course the only two candidates for the titles of Premier-Stadhouder were of course Joseph Perl and Piet Retief, who were elected from the two largest European ethnic groups in Suriname. [3]

While Suriname’s political system was developing just fine a change in the early racial system would come about in 1820 when a twenty two year old Boer named Andries Pretorius spent a summer hunting Bosnegers with some Cape Malays and Kleurlinge and was moved by what he saw.

One would expect the young Boer to be moved by the plight of the slaves but he still saw them as subhuman, instead his paternal instincts would turn to the plight of the Kleurlinge and the Malay.

Andries would come to befriend many of these second class citizens and would end up reasoning that their sophistication of culture obviously meant that they had if not European then at the least Semite blood flowing in their veins, and not just in the sense that the Kleurlinge were mixed race but that both of the ‘seed cultures’ had to have developed from one of the many branches of the Ten Lost Tribes.

In the shortest sense Andries Pretorius was so convinced that the people he was interacting with were civilized that he considered them honorary whites. Andries would spend the rest of his life as a passionate defender of the Kleurlinge and work hard to make sure that the rights of the Muslim Cape Malays were recognized by what he eventually viewed as a government that was slow to change.

[1] Literally “The Intellect” in Hebrew, basically a separate Jewish Enlightenment.

[2] Note that simply because the constitution is based off of the Haskalah movement does not mean it’s exclusively Jewish. It just means it was written along the secular humanist ideals that were developing from the Haskalah movement and promised freedom galore, if you were white and had a penis.

[3] I used the Dutch spelling for Stadhouder instead of the other one, stadtholder. Also the Boers/Afrikaners don’t make up a major ethnic group on their own. The Dutch and their former subjects are kind of congealing to create a new Dutch based ethnic group. Sadly this will almost certainly mean the destruction of Afrikaans as a language (at least in Suriname, they’re still speaking it in the Cape) and something like Surinaams developing in its place from the different Dutch dialects.
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Haiti would prove to be the lynchpin of the Caribbean. By the early part of 1820 it was already contesting the rights of the Bosnegers in Suriname and both the Kingdom of Haiti and the Republic of Haiti seemed poised to strike at the young nation. [1]

At home though the Haitian peoples first had to deal with the new Spanish* influences in Santo Domingo and the fact that almost every single nation from the Viceroyalty of New Spain all the way to the United States and the British Empire wanted to destroy what was the only black republic in the world.

This would cause quite a bit of strain on both Henri Christophe, the king, and Alexandre Petion, the President for Life. In 1819 an unfortunate event rocked the Kingdom of Haiti when Henri was found dead, shot in the left eye. [2]

The Kingdom of Haiti was already in a dire place and the death of its first and only king plunged the country into anarchy. Of course Papa Bon-Couer (Good Hearted Daddy, as Petion was known amongst the black populace) would step in and assume the reigns of both nations.

His first big move was a purge to find the “conspirators” who had assassinated Henri. This purge actually found more than a small amount of “conspirators.” These conspirators were mostly in the Legislature which had been abolished by Alexandre’s orders in 1818 and amongst the restless mulattos who were almost to the man anti-Alexandre.

And they had good reason too. He had already seized most of the commercial plantations within the south and reduced the mulatto population to subsistence farming while redistributing all public land amongst the black population.

After the successful reuniting of the Republic of Haiti under Alexandre and the second redistribution of land to the majority black populace the Republic’s economy was in a bad place. Rapid inflation meant that most Haitians were basically penniless and poorly educated.

So Alexandre simply did away with money within the country. The move was radical, it was revolutionary, and it was surprisingly also successful. The Republic had already seized and redistributed almost all of the arable land in the nation and so long as the cult of Papa Bon-Couer was kept up and the Republic provided the most basic services to the people most Haitians were then happy to live hand to mouth.

It was by no means an early Marxist society as so many people have claimed, those that worked harder and managed to make themselves known were usually promoted on the communal plantations were they would receive added perks and were able to lord it over those that had not made it.

The system was almost voluntary slavery in many areas, the threats from without coupled with Alexandre’s deft political movements religious underpinnings made the average Haitian ecstatic to ‘serve the aims of worldwide black revolution.’

Alexandre was no fool however and realized that unless he accomplished something great relatively quickly then the people might start to wonder if maybe they should rebel again and place someone else in the seat of power.

Vodou and Catholicism would be established as the official religions in 1822, before every single priest within the nation was excommunicated of course. After the break with the Catholic Church within Haiti the Noir Catholic Church would be established in its place, a hairs breadth from Vodou it played to the fact that syncretism had always been strong in Haiti. The Noir Catholics were often Vodousaints themselves and priests would moonlight as houngans and vice versa.

This early Noir Catholic Church would come to reject some of the more hard line Catholic ideas and embrace the more open and accepting Vodou ways of looking at things. In modern eyes the Republic of Haiti would and should be commended for some of its earliest steps including the allowing of women to vote, banning of slavery, declaring all races and religions to be equal, and the acceptance of homosexuality as normal. [3]

The Vodou lwa, or spirits and ancestors, would come to be saints in this early church and the African, Native American, and even Asian influences of Vodou would result in the canonization of Ogoun, the lwa of war and politics, the Agua Dulce, the collective spirits of the Taino Indians, and even the Muslim prophet Muhammad, who would go by the name Maham.

So the combination of religion, ultra-nationalistic feelings, and the recognition of their status in the eyes of the surrounding nations, of course combined with strict government control over information and propaganda, led to the tiny black nation declaring war on Santo Domingo in early 1823.

Tens and later hundreds of thousands volunteered within the first days, so many in fact that the Haitians actually ran out of guns to give the volunteers and instead equipped them with machetes, bayonets, and spears.

The zeal of these troops would be extreme, their human wave tactics and selfless sacrifice were effective against the Spaniards in Santo Domingo and often Dominicans would simply flee before Los Cabrios, the goats, so named because the Haitians would almost literally eat anything in their path, reports of large Haitian armies making entire regions into near lifeless deserts were quite common and after the war’s conclusion it was found that the Haitians had consumed close to five hundred horses between them.

The Haitians won and they won quickly, the King of Spain-in-exile signed over Santo Domingo to the Republic and the world watched as the nation stripped those wealthy that had stayed of their land and quickly resettled crowded urban blacks into the hills and countryside of their new territory.

This would be the first in the Haitian Wars and their most successful campaign before the reorganizing of the military in 1843.

[1] In our time line the north and the south would become separated into a Kingdom and a Republic, I figured that this would stay the same.

*Remember a lot of Spaniards fled to the Caribbean and the Viceroyalty, Ferdinand VII has even taken up residence in Cuba.

[2] In OTL he killed himself and Alexandre died in 1818 of yellow fever, here Alexandre lives long enough to move on the Kingdom.

[3] Haitian Vodou officially believes in all four in our timeline and so will the Noir Catholic Church in this timeline.

 

[Haggis]

The same political moves that had been undertaken by the Ottomans in placing Phanariotes as the rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia would come back to haunt them when it was realized that because so much of the populace of Wallachia and Moldavia was illiterate and so much of the power was concentrated in a large Greek elite it had a rather Hellenizing effect on the peoples within both Moldavia and Wallachia and both principalities rose in open revolt as self proclaimed members of Vizantiya in 1816.

The Roman Revolt was actually a series of revolts, principally throughout Moldavia, which would quickly gather steam and join the larger Restoration. It was led almost from the beginning by the Phanariotes and the Greek clergy who had been stirring up both principalities for quite some time. [1]

The leaders of the Roman Revolt were nearly mythic in stature, as if a modern day interpretation of the founding of Rome two Moldavian brothers, Demetrius Ypsilanti and Alexander Ypsilanti, would join their forces and create a large Moldavian force that would march to join the Greco-Russians who were currently pushing further into Thrace.

Alexander would later become the Strategos of the Moldavian Thema and Demetrius would eventually be granted the title of Turmach of the Cypriot Meros. [2]

The Wallachians however were less enthused with the revolt, not to say that they did not participate, to be sure Ioannis Caratzas would lend his own personal fortune to supplying the Filiki Eteria, which had by this time become a massive recruiting tool for the Vizantiya armed forces.

In fact the formers hospodar’s charity was used primarily to establish Filiki Eteria bases in Bulgaria which like Moldavia and Wallachia had been undergoing a steady process of Hellenization.

The most accurate gauge of anti-Vizantiya sentiment in Wallachia came chiefly from Tudor Vladimirescu who issued more than a few proclamations stating that the Phanariot Greeks who led the Moldavian, Wallachian, and later Bulgarian rebellions were not to be trusted because they were, Greeks. This bias would not serve to make Tudor many friends but he was appreciated by the Ottoman Sultan who would do anything to sew discord and dissent amongst the forces that had been massing against him and his empire.

The Tsarina was more than happy to hear of these seemingly disparate peoples being united by their Hellenistic cultures and their Eastern Orthodox ways, it was widely reported that she was so overjoyed upon learning that the Macedonians had joined the rebellion in 1818 that she leapt unto a table and declared that no mortal man could stop the dream of Vizantiya.

She was right, after the Peace of Lisbon [3] France looked southwards and considered it its duty to help the valiant efforts of the Greki as they fought off the Ottoman hordes. [4] So, they got involved and sent 12,000 more men to help stabilized the young nation in 1819.

The Ottomans were at a loss for words, in a few shorts years they had been driven from most of their holdings in the Balkans and even now the Greki had a hold in Thrace and parts of central Anatolia.

So they sued for peace and Konstantin accepted, in 1820 the Congress of Bursa established the official domains of Vizantiya as the land from Thrace to Greece to Macedonia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, Moldavia, and in their haste to join something good Mateja Nenadovic even confirmed that the Kingdom of Serbia would be interested in being a Protectorate of Vizantiya.

The Congress also establish that the Ottomans still had the right to lands in Albania, seeing as the great majority of the populace within was Muslim, so Albania would be set up as the homeland of dispossessed Muslims throughout Vizantiya.

In 1820 an ancient empire was restored. A new nation also rose from the same ashes, a nation of people who thought of themselves as equally Greek and Russian, a nation of many peoples all united behind the common cause of the Orthodox Church and reviving their old grand past.

Vizantiya was back and back with a vengeance and only time would tell what would become of it.

[1] Remember that Romanians think of and even refers to themselves as Romans.

[2] Yeah they’re using traditional Byzantine administrative units in Vizantiya, wanna make something of it? Also a Meros is right under a Theme in size, so a Turmach is kind of like a lesser governor. Cyprus is part of the Kriti (Crete) Thema.

[3] A treaty signed by Napoleonic France, Britain, and Portugal which put an end to the first bout of the Peninsular Wars in about 1818.

[4] Greki is of course Russian for Greeks, it becomes a unifying identity and will be used by Greeks, Russians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, and even eventually Christian Turks in describing themselves as members of Vizantiya.
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In the Pacific events happened during the Time of Reckoning which would shape the whole of Australian, East Indies, and Indian history. [1]

Thanks to the need of warm bodies to fight Britain’s drawn out war with the Americans the number of convicts and armed troops being sent to Sydney and Batavia dwindled until it was almost nothing. [2]

This created a desperate need that made everyone from Lachlan Macquarie, the Governor of New South Wales, to Stamford Raffles, Governor of Java and the East Indies, and Lord Minto, Governor-General of India, realize that if they were to survive, prosper and eventually help Britain and the British East India Company spread her influence around the world then they would be forced to work together.

To be certain a more unsteady group of people had never assembled, Stamford was a passionate reformer who had already done away with slavery and the Opium trade inside of the East Indies while Macquarie was truly a hard unyielding man who had a passion for building roads and bridges and trying his damnedest to break the power of the New South Wales Corps. Lord Minto cared little for reform and sought mainly to enrich himself and his investors.

In the first few years only two of the men spoke often, Macquarie and Raffles, who though different in some of their basic opinions seemed to have a reasonable amount of respect for the other’s reforming efforts. Lord Minto on the other hand sent only letters detailing the troubles he was having in Calcutta and offering to send a few troops here and there to help them should they need anything.

That was until Lord Minto died in 1814 and the British East India Company contacted the already well tested administrator Stamford Raffles and offered him the chance of a lifetime. He could become the Governor-General of India.

To be certain he accepted almost immediately and found his newfound power rather fascinating, with his post in both the most powerful Company on the planet and his post in the most powerful Country on the planet he was essentially the Enlightened Despot of all British possessions in the Indian Ocean.

So he did the first thing that came naturally to him and began reforming. He set up schools, diplomatic offices, increased the staff of the Baraset College and actually demanded that they find people who could speak the local languages. [3]

In order for John Company to maintain its hold in India it was realized that a lot of men would have to be recruited from really anywhere. So Governor-General Raffles called upon his colleague Lachlan Macquarie and requested that any and all convicts with military experience be sent to Calcutta to be placed in service to the Company and the Crown.

Macquarie obliged and instead of releasing those Convicts simply altered their mandates and gave each Convict five years military servitude to the Company. The first place where these new reforms were carried out was on the island of Van Diemen’s Land. [4]

Still, this was not enough to hold onto, much less expand, the domains of the Company. Luckily for Raffles this was not his plan, he simply wished to hold Bengal at all costs and leave wanton imperialism to later generations.

To the ends of raising more troops he again looked towards the southern Continent, this time the Missionaries who he encouraged to step up their efforts with the Maori. Raffles wondered about the feasibility of enlisting Christianized and Civilized Maori into the running of India.

He had already made certain to import soldiers almost chiefly from Java and Sumatra and was hard at work setting up contacts within the Sultanate of Muscat and Mauritania, still in the hopes of importing officers and administrators from “well established nations.”

To this end Governor-General Raffles worked quickly and truly, establishing a healthy reform minded liberal government in Bengal and the East Indies which would be somewhat emulated in Australia, even if in later years the Australian government found it convenient to export Aboriginals to Bengal and the East Indies.


A surprising source of immigration would come to reside in many parts of Mauritanian Mozambique. Since the outset of the European ventures into India there had been a fair amount of mixing with the local women on the part of British, French, and Portuguese soldiers and adventurers.

For the most part these women were later cast to the side by their colonial husbands and given a small stipend by whatever government had been in power in the region and left alone. Their offspring were usually in a worse position than themselves as they were outcasts of both European and Indian society.

So a few of these women, mostly the British ones, would come together and pool their resources and buy reasonably sized tracts of land in Mozambique, land that had been made certain to be cheap and available to future investors.

Of course these women would on occasion bring their extended families with them, it was not uncommon to have them grudgingly accept Untouchables on their voyages overseas, mainly because the Untouchables would work for almost nothing and they could legally enslave them once the group was in Mauritania.

Still, even with slaves and Untouchables and ryots these early trans-Pacific zamindaris would end up needing a lot more labor, labor that could be provided cheaply and easily by the simple purchase of the andevo. [5]

These andevo were encouraged almost from the beginning by their Bengali Mistresses to convert to Hinduism and many did. In fact Hinduism, and its many different branches, soon became the favored religion of most andevo on the mainland, quickly outdistancing Catholicism, Confucianism and Islam which were seen as the religions of the “whites” who were much harsher masters than the Bengalis. [6]

[1] The period from 1811-1827 is now thought of as an historical period because it insured the survival of Napoleon’s France, distracted Britain for quite some time, and forged a newer, stronger US.

[2] A good example of this phenomenon is that in this timeline the 96th Queen’s Own Germans would end up being replenished almost entirely with petty thieves and moonshiners from Scotland.

[3] The instructors at Baraset were notoriously bad at their jobs, IIRC they once hired a 19 year old who had never heard Hindustani spoken, just read it from a book, and made him their top language instructor.

[4] This of course means that the people on the island will not be as completely decimated as they later were during the Black War.

[5] Kudos to anyone who remembers the slave caste that I mentioned in passing several times, mostly made up of Malagasy andevo, Baluchis, and Bantu tribesmen.

[6] The Arabs, Persians and Formosans are considered white. Also thanks to a general freedom of religion a lot of people are experimenting, primarily with blending Confucian philosophy and Catholic thought.
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The Royal Marriages of the Reckoning Period were truly something to behold. Starting around 1819, when the last battle of the Iberian War was over and done with, the nations of Europe began to accept the French Empire and began breeding into the Bonapartist lines in order to gain some control of power for themselves.

Already a celebrated alliance had been formed between Russia and France, thanks almost entirely to the second Empress Consort Anna Pavlovna of Russia who had cemented the Romanovs into the House of Bonaparte.

So what other nations would be marrying into the Bonapartist Lines? [1]

The most radical would of course be the marriage of Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent to the seventeen year old Princess Marie Letizia Josephine Annonciade Murat in 1819. This dynastic tying of the House of Hanover to the House of Murat in effect was a masterful political stroke because one of the princes most likely to produce an heir to King George III had just married the niece of Napoleon I.

Elsewhere within the client states of the French Empire the eighteen year old Prince Achille Murat was being wedded to Maria Teresa, the daughter of the King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel I of the House of Stuart. [2]

According to Sardinian tradition the island nation operated under Salic Law and so when Victor Emmanuel would eventually die in 1823 Achille would be supported by his father, Joachim I King of Naples, and step-uncle Eugene de Beauharnais, King of Italy, in taking the throne of Sardinia.

This move meant that upon the death of Joachim in 1832 at the age of sixty-five that the thirty-one year old Achille I would rule both the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sardinia, as well as being the Heir Pretender of the House of Stuart. In order to better rule his country Achille merged the thrones of the two kingdoms and set up two rival capitals, one at Naples and the other at Casteddu. [3]

The only other major source of confusion was on what to do with Spain. The French had conquered it, divided it, starved it, put it the sword time and time again and now they were going to make what was left of it a client state.

Though they were not quite sure about who should rule it. The Tsarina Maria approached Napoleon with an offer. Her own brother Nikolai had recently found out that Russia had not really been invaded and was furious that his sister had snatched the throne from him.

If he really wanted to Nikolai could probably raise enough of a fuss to cause a major civil war within Russia itself and with the huge Russian involvement in the Restoration of the Imperiya Romeyev. This would not be good for Russia or the relative stability that was developing in the Balkans. [4]

It was decided that Nikolai would be made the King of Spain. As an outsider who spoke no Spanish it was a great way to avoid him inflaming the passions of the Spaniards and setting them to war. Plus with such a poor kingdom he would be forced to focus on rebuilding Spain.

It was agreed to by all parties and in 1820 Nikolai was drugged and transported by sea to the Kingdom of Spain where he was crowned at the most inexpensive coronation in history. Afterwards his duties to the Spanish nation were described to him in broken Russian and he was deemed Nicolas I of Spain, though a more common name for him in Spain itself would be El Ruso “The Russian.” [5]

[1] Bonapartist Lines include not only the Bonapartes but also the major rulers of Napoleon’s client states, the House of Murat, the Westphalia Branch of Bonaparte, and de Beauharnais.

[2] Yes, in effect the House of Murat is playing both sides of the British royal family here. I thought it would be cool.

[3] The Sardinian name for Cagliari.

[4] Empire of the Romans, the newer, crisper more official name of Vizantiya.

[5] If you consider that implausible then tell me how plausible it was that a full blooded German who spoke no English would come to be the king of England, George I, or how an Italian who spoke heavily accented French, as a second language, would come to rule France.
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Groznaya, the most commonly accepted name of Tsarina Maria I. She earned it through a steady campaign in the earliest days of her reign to rid Russia of any influences that she saw as contrary to her attempts at eventually making Russia the dominant power in Europe and the world, either through war or marriage.

The most shocking thing that the Tsarina did at first was reinstate the status of kholop. [1] While many nobles were at first ecstatic they soon found out that anyone who presented a threat to Maria would become a kholop. The serfs themselves were given ever expanding rights, including the right to freely move where they pleased so long as they registered with local census bureaus.

Maria had in effect recreated the horrors of Russia’s past for her enemies and given the people at large the chance to move up in social class and not be tied exclusively to a lord that may or may not mistreat them.

The creation of this new semi-nomadic landed peasantry had some definite effects on Russian society and no noble would dare speak against Maria for fear of her impressive intelligence gathering services. [2]

Secondly she ordered the Russification of “all the lands of Russia”. While this seemed like a standard move the process in which it was to take place was brutal to say the least. In 1822 parts of the Russian Army were being funneled from the Imperiya Romeyev and marched eastward towards Central Asia where in 1823 a force of 20,000 men was given the orders to wipe out the Kazakh, Tajik, and Uzbek languages.

They proved most effective not when battling the eventual rebel forces that would rise up in response but when shooting any woman they found that could not communicate effectively in Russian. Survivors of the Purge were forced into Russian Persia where they were reduced to the status of kholops and treated as slaves.

The next great hammer blow would come not in Asia but in North America when the Tlingit of Alyeska were ordered to swear fealty to Tsarina Maria or face the wrath of Russia.

The Tlingit responded as well as anyone should have expected them to. Some communities had already been hit by plague and vodka and accepted and were armed with the expectation that they would capture slaves to be trained as soldiers for the Russian forces in North America.

The inland tribes for the most part scoffed at the idea and promptly enslaved, killed, or chased the messenger out of their territory. By 1850 few of them would be left in the interior, the coastal tribes were effective huntsmen and were well rewarded with fishing rights and eventually cannon.

The 1820s saw a great amount of ethnic shuffling within the European domains of Russia. Those Jews still left within the Vale were either forcibly deported to Austria where they would later travel to Suriname or they were forced into the newest Host lands in Persia. [3]

As a girl Maria had been fascinated with the Old Testament tales of Jewish combat skills and their bravery in battle and so sought to, in her words, “make them as fierce as Joshua and as obedient as Abraham.”

She was also thoroughly impressed with Ancient Egypt and understood that its people had done amazing things. So she cast her eye about and found that the Ursari, the Boyash and Qaraci, the Tsyhany, and Tigani, the Roma, the Domari, Rusurja, and Machvaya, the Lyuli, in a word the Gypsies were the closest living relatives of the once mighty Egyptian Empire. [4]

So she simply ordered that they be released from bondage in the various communities in which they were enslaved and given great incentives to most to the wildest frontier in all of Russia.

The Romani would join the exile Kazakhs and Uzbeks and Tajiks and Jews in the Zagros Mountains and in the Kavir Desert, they would ride hard upon the rebels in Masshad and Kerman and Birjand and they would sail the Sea of Oman, and they would do all of this for the Russian Empire.

A new Host was being born on the wild frontier of the half conquered steppes and deserts of Persia. In time the unwanted of many Hosts, from the Don to the Black Sea would join these disparate groups in Persia to form the Kavir Cossack Host.

[1]Little Russian lesson! Groznaya is the feminine form of Terrible and kholop was a peasant that had rights pretty much the exact same as a slaves. You paid a small fine for killing one.

[2] She hired Tuscans to coordinate her spy network/secret police/death squads, who surprisingly had the absolute best secret police at this time.

[3] I am referring to the Vale of Settlement, the amount of territory that Jews were allowed to settle in Imperial Russia. Also Host land is exactly what it sounds like.

[4] Of course this is markedly untrue, the Romani people are from northern India and modern day Pakistan and parts of Central Asia but nobody knew that back in the day. Besides northern India accomplished more than the Ancient Egyptians, who needs pyramids?

 

[Haggis]

Haiti was a land possessed. By 1830 most of the population had already been brainwashed into essentially joining the “cult of black revolution” as contemporary commentators had described it.

Soldiers were kept awake for days on end, given little food, forced to dance and sing songs about the greatness of Haiti and her destiny of uniting all peoples of the world against hatred and fear.

Farmers were rewarded with more land if they managed to squeeze even the tiniest drop out of the soil and were publicly praised for having many sons and many daughters. Wives were held in the highest esteem for making the next generation of Haitian soldiers.

Boys and girls alike were taught from an early age that they were entirely equal and rewards, usually in the form of praise and love, were given for being good at anything.

By the time the average Haitian child had finished the four years of public schooling required they had already been sorted into the path they would most likely take in life and they were expected to excel at whatever had been chosen for them.

Those who dissented, those who did not sing the songs and do the work, they were exiled and never allowed to return. Haitians were beginning to think of themselves as slaves, not to any mortal master but to the land of Haiti itself.

On February 12th, 1828 this would be tested. The United States was turning over control of Jamaica to Great Britain and in short order the opportunity would be lost. Wiry, unkempt, and hungry thousands of Haitian soldiers converged on Navassa Island where they received word of their mission. [1]

They were going to inspire a revolt. They floated over in rafts and hid in the mountains of foothills of central Jamaica, others used commandeered Spanish vessels and began to attack small scale British shipping around the Caribbean, the last wave brought over guns and ammunition and close to four ships loads worth of arsenic and cyanide.

The Haitians would run rampant in Jamaica, burning down plantations and filling boatloads with slaves that had fled from their plantations before their colonial masters returned.

The Haitians stole everything they could. They looted the island and took to the hills, most of all though they poisoned the wells. Every major well that they could reach was filled with poison. The local blacks were instructed not to drink from the poisonous wells and to flee into the mountains to receive shelter from the insurgents within.

By March the British troops were arriving to find an island that had been burned out, fields of sugar cane torn up and manor houses ripped apart for brick and wood to be used back in Port-au-Prince.

Within weeks most of the British troops on the island were either dead or fast approaching it. Nobody was certain what the cause was but it was generally found that those men who were alcoholics lived longer than those who did not partake so often of the drink.

So naturally more rum was shipped into the colony and was mixed with water from the wells to make it last longer. Men were dying less frequently but near Kingston they were still dropping like flies.

It was commonly believed that some African spell had been put on the island by the locals and that they were manipulating the very forces of nature to try and force white men out.

The situation only got worse with an outbreak of cholera that forced men to drink more and more fluid unless they become so dehydrated that they die. Eventually an observant English captain figured out that the wells were tainted.

It had taken three months and over four hundred British lives to figure this out. British force in the Caribbean was spread thin and was easily overcome when the Haitians and Maroons surged out of the hills, screaming their freedom in July of 1828.

Jamaica was rebelling and suddenly the hopes and dreams of the slave majority on many islands, everywhere in the Caribbean, were awakened. Trinidad, Barbados, Cozumel, Dominica, and Grenada all joined in the Slave Wars of 1828.

Most were put down, rather bloodily too. Still, more than enough slaves tasted freedom to try and find it wherever they could and most of them ended up, either through luck or their own ingenuity somewhere near the island fortress of Haiti.

[1] Navassa is halfway between Haiti and Jamaica, just in case you didn’t know.
***************
The Forced Hand began on November 9, 1831 as the last troops shuffled home from Canada and putting down the still simmering Slave Revolt on Jamaica. Britain seemed to be in the best of spirits, they had just gotten out of a sixteen year war, insured their dominance of a strategic Caribbean asset and most of the hundreds of thousands of men who had been drafted during the war with the Americans were either home or pulling in at the docks.

George IV was in good spirits, the nation’s economy was expected to turn up at any moment, the people were incredibly happy with Prime Minister Canning and all seemed well. [1]

All was well until Canning, who was a member of the House of Commons was ousted and replaced by Sir Robert Peel. The average worker on the street had grown to like the fact that a commoner, somewhat like themselves, was the Prime Minister and they took to the streets and protested. [2]

This was perfect for Prime Minister Peel who decided to react with overwhelming force, as was the standard policy of the day. Peel’s callous attitude towards the lower classes and his willingness to send in well trained battle hardened troops smacked more of tyranny than liberty and within short time the lower orders came to use his name as a curse.

Peel dismissed the criticisms of what he deemed “whores, beggars, slum dwellers and a surplus of children who seem rather deft of getting their hands caught in machinery.” Instead of focusing on the internal threat Peel was quick to steer the Tory Party, which was in power at the time, and the eyes of the high placed officials in Great Britain into the problem of Galicia.

Great Britain had lost Hanover to the Confederation of the Rhine when it had been devoured by the Kingdom of Westphalia and at the moment Britain’s only real tie to the continent was the British administered region of northern Spain known as Galicia.

Nicolas I wanted it back and he was willing to contend the point that his kingdom did not in fact only consist of those areas that had been conquered by the French during the Iberian War and that historically Spanish territories should in fact be returned.

Great Britain was quick to point out the status of who exactly was sovereign over the sprawling independence minded territory of Valencia. Either way it seemed as if Spain might come to blows with Britain over the right of either conquering force to the conquest.

Combine Peel’s outward looking mindset with his loud and abrasive calls for a police force and the stage was set for another series of riots across the country.

These however could not be contained. Most of the rioters were either the poor or returning British troops who guffawed at the idea that their rights should be stripped away after fighting sixteen years to protect the rights of Canadians.

The rights that many Londoners rioted and fought to defend would soon expand to include more than just the right to avoid what they saw as an invasive and unnecessary police force.

It all came to a head on November Nine when mill workers attacked East India Company ships along the Port of London, fires started by the workers led to the destruction of three miles worth of port and seventeen ships.

The fire spread and burned many, many houses in the poorer sections of London, which of course led to more rioting. The riots this time were more organized, less looting and more revolution.

The poor pilfered butcher shops for meat, they blocked off roads and forced farmers entering the city to pay a heavy tax, “So as to preserve a balance on their gouged prices.” Prostitutes attacked allegedly gay men, believing that they were stealing their clientele, everyone attacked Catholics and Jews. All cotton and wool from India was burned on sight and lumber from the Americas was erected in slapdash monuments to just how pissed everyone in Britain was. [3]

It lasted three days before the Peel government realized that the majority of the troops and the nascent police force were taking part in the riots as well. It was when the mob gained access to the majority of the arsenals in London that Peel realized that all was lost.

Especially after the news that the same thing was happening in Birmingham and Newcastle upon Tyne and Bristol and Leeds and Manchester and Liverpool and York and Glasgow and Edinburgh, Great Britain was quickly falling into a state of total anarchy.

People who did not have a job rioted, people who had jobs rioted from the low pay, the sick rioted because they could not afford treatment, soldiers rioted because they were out of work, the people of Haddington rioted because their entire city had been burned to the ground in a riot.

The Thames had caught on fire twice by Christmas, the second fire lasting from November 30 to December 24 and neither side seemed much in a giving spirit. By now the masses were tired of rioting and were angry that neither Crown nor Parliament had done anything to stop the violence.

So they naturally created more violence. Those Members of Parliament, who had not already fled, especially those from the rotten boroughs, were hunted down and beaten to death. The MP of Callington in Cornwall was burnt alive in the streets and only silenced by an axe blow to the head after it was decided that he had suffered enough.

By now most of the royals had fled and a good thing too for The Queen’s House was targeted by cannon fire until it was utterly demolished and most of the royal and ducal townhouses were looted, probably for the third or fourth time, and then burnt. [4]

By the new year of 1832 it dawned on the people of Great Britain that they had nobody trying to oppose them anymore. All authority had been thrown rather unceremoniously out the window.

So they did the natural thing and declared at least a dozen competing republics and states at the same time. There was a Republic of London, two different Republics of England, and the Pennine Republic with its capital at Sunderland seeing as Newcastle had been the site of a smallpox outbreak, there was a Clyde River Republic, the short lived Stornoway Kingdom which was absorbed into the larger Crown of the Hebrides, and Dover petitioned to join the French Empire.

Where did all of these republics come from? Mainly from the many, many, many British soldiers who while wary of all things American had come to respect the fact that white American males enjoyed full voting rights and were treated with respect and constantly courted by politicians.

To say that they had a twinge of envy would be an understatement. They saw their opportunity and they took it and never looked back.

The majority of the Peel government had retreated to Belfast where they planned the eventual conquest of their own land. The Irish saw the same opportunity that the huddled British masses saw and rebellion after rebellion led to the largely loyal Canadian forces stationed in Ireland forcibly evicting thousands of Catholic revolutionaries from their homes and land.

Where would these evicted Irish go? As the saying of the time went “There’s always land in Texas.”

[1] George IV began his regency in 1811, the same year that the Reckoning War began. Royal physicians forced him to lose weight and cut back on his obsessive frivolities as he was a future British monarch and therefore an institution to be looked up to and respected. As a result he lives longer. Also, George Canning doesn’t pull a Harrison and die after only a few months in office.

[2] i.e. rioted

[3] Also happened in OTL in the 1750s. The hookers attacked the gays and everyone attacked the Catholics and Jews. Not sure about the lumber thing, I just thought it was cool.

[4] The Queen’s House would become Buckingham Palace in our timeline, in this timeline it becomes a hulking mound of rubble.
**************
The early Irish presence in Texas would be tumultuous to say the least. After all, the first city that many of them docked at was Campeche, a fortress town built by the Jewish Pirate Kings Jean Lafitte and Pierre Lafitte. [1]

It was in Campeche that they received jobs, either in the employ of the Lafitte brothers or across the metaphorical border in the city of New Orleans. Most however settled in under the command of Jean Lafitte and quickly acquired slaves from Lafitte’s extensive network of contacts, like his wife who having been born in the Danish Virgin Islands had more than a few connections to the resurgent Danish Empire and its vast slave system based out of the Gold Coast.

The Irish settled into life in Texas quite well, those who had been peasants back in Ireland received land, often staffed with decently friendly natives who had already been pacified by the fortress of Lafitte, the infamous Maison Rouge.

They were quick to find a niche in the almost legal underworld that the Lafitte brothers and their hangers on enjoyed. One Rory Bannon captained some of the first ships to bypass the Viceroyalty’s ports and avoid the ever present American patrols to land tea from Suriname, another major player in the underground economy of the Caribbean, in Acapulco.

In fact Texas soon became not only the premier destination for the hordes of Irishmen leaving or being forced out of their homeland by the continual British occupation in their quest to re-conquer Great Britain, many Surinamers soon found their way north and set up large absentee plantations, run by the new merchant class of Irishmen.

Jean Lafitte’s own son, an octoroon, would come to marry Yvonne Bishop, the daughter of one of the first Irish cattle kings. In Texas a whole generation of Irish, Spanish, and French, Surinamese, and American children were being raised to be rather accommodating towards one another.

Texas may have officially been a British colony but it quickly became an Irish country led by a Franco-Jewish Pirate King, supported by a Dutch Hebrew republic, and an Afro-Danish Alliance.

It was a unique place to say the least.

[1] Roughly Galveston, Texas and yes they existed
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A few of the especially important events in the development of post-Mauritania southern Africa were downright surprising.

The Khumalo War lasted about seven months and was devastating for both sides. The people of the Khumalo Kingdom were destroyed on all sides by the rampaging armies of the Ndwandwe and the Mtetwa as each side fought fiercely to keep the tiny Khumalo Kingdom under its sphere of influence.

It eventually came down to who had the most guns. The answer was without a doubt the Ndwandwe who consumed guns and horses and new ideas from the British on almost a daily basis.

The Mtetwa on the other hand were still fielding armies designed around melee tactics and considered their newer lighter steel spears to give them a great advantage. And it did in close combat when the Ndwandwe would prove most ineffective with the bayonets and Mtetwa troops would make short work of their ribs and lungs.

This of course required the Mtetwa to come close, which required them to run through blistering hails of gunfire and to turn and face the new Ndwandwe cavalry that caused havoc in their ranks.

To all outsiders it seemed as if the technologically superior and more massive army of the Ndwandwe would win. That was until the Son of the She-Elephant himself, Zwide, died on campaign.

The one thing that had united the Ndwandwe was gone and Dingiswayo, Emperor of the Mtetwa, stepped forward and claimed the title of Nkosi of All the Lands. The shattered Ndwandwe who were already quickly falling into civil war supported him and their former enemy became their own king. [1]

The Mtetwa immediately set about trying to incorporate their former enemies into the large confederacy cum empire that had developed in the short expansionist campaigns of both empires. Soon the Ndwandwe knowledge of gun smithing would become highly prized and the vast factories established in the new capital of Ukunqoba would churn out at least three hundred modern guns a month. [2]

In other parts of Africa deals were being made that would affect the center of the continent for ages to come. The ever expanding Kingdom of Rwanda under Mwami Yuhi III Gahindiro had only recently found that by exporting ivory and slaves that they could make obscenely large amounts of money.

The main sources of ivory though were found on the coasts and in the hinterlands of the lands around Nalubaale and the kingdoms that controlled the coasts and the hinterland were in no mood to share. [3]

Well, except for the people of Buganda who had long been the most liberal and accepting of the Three Kingdoms, while Bunyoro and Ankole jostled for the best land and the best pasture the Kabakas of Buganda were content with their marshy swampland and did not bother with concerning themselves about patronage systems, like the Bunyoro or consolidating absolute rule like in Ankole. [4]

Instead they simply prospered by taking in escaped slaves, religious heretics, political dissidents, bandits, thieves, the stubborn, the unwanted, the blind, the crippled, the diseased, the insane, and the oppressed who were second class citizens everywhere else.

The Buganda were growing in power and this is reflected in the deal made between Kabaka Kamaya of Buganda and the Mwami Yuhi III Gahindiro of Rwanda. They would attacked the weakening Bunyoro together, Rwanda would receive the rights to all elephants within the nation and Buganda would take over the Indian Ocean trade that Bunyoro had been engaging in, as well as removing their chief rival in the area from power.

The Rwandans exploded north and hit Nyamugasani Nyanza within a few days, the Baganda armed over 300 war canoes and came from their bases around the Kyoga Nyanza and rode it all the way to Rwanda Nyanza where they laid waste to many Bunyoro settlements. Though the combined efforts of Rwanda and Buganda did not completely destroy the Bunyoro it reduced the kingdom to a shell of its former self, forced to pay tribute to both powers and to give up its Indian Ocean trade to Buganda, which would soon become a major player in central and eastern Africa. [5]

[1] This reflected the quite fluid nature of southern African politics at the time when people would unite more behind men and not behind nations, nationalism being a foreign concept until the rise of the Zulu Kingdom under Chaka.

[2] Ukunqoba means Victory in Zulu.

[3] Nalubaale is Lake Victoria

[4] These traditional kingdoms and the Kingdom of Toro are what form the basis of Uganda in our timeline

[5] Nyamugasani is one of the rivers that feeds into Lake Edward, so I just added the Swahili word for lake onto it and in this timeline Lake Edward will be Nyamugasani Nyanza, Lake Albert will be Rwanda Nyanza

 

[Haggis]

In the Viceroyalty of New Spain people felt only fear when Felix Calleja died in 1818. They knew that whoever was appointed by the king, Fernando VII, would not only be challenged but probably defeated by the Los Vagabundos, the allied network of former bureaucrats and officials led by Santa Anna, Iturbide, and Bustamante, all of which were infamous for their abilities to corrupt anything.

What was not expected was the response that Ferdinand sent regarding Calleja’s successor.

Kratistos. [1]

What followed was a spate of assassination and riots that would not be matched until the Forced Hand of 1831. Santa Anna was poisoned by thirty or so rattlesnakes before being hung twice, beaten to death, shot, bayoneted, and finally burnt in the streets of Veracruz. Many historians believe that he was not killed by rival partisans so much as people he owed money to; after all he was an infamous gambler.

Iturbide drowned while swimming with over three hundred pounds of chains on him and just as Bustamante was set to claim the title of Viceroy and force the nation to bow to his whim he slipped on a kitchen knife fourteen times.

What had been a move designed to break up Los Vagabundos only served to create a massive power vacuum, mainly because they either murdered each other or someone murdered them.

So the powers that be in Cuba, also known as the Kingdom of Spain-in-exile, nominated an outsider to the role. Marcos Maceo had been a rather successful farmer and plantation owner in Venezuela before leaving the country for the more stable ground of Cuba. He still drew enough revenue from his absenteeism to have set himself up as a high class man who soon entered the world of politics.

Apodaca and Ferdinand appreciated the liberal tendencies of Maceo and realized that as he was an inexperienced ruler that he could probably be manipulated. So after close to two years without an official Viceroy in 1820 Marcos Maceo took the hardest job of his life.

The Maceo years were uneventful and a great reversal from the rule of Calleja and Los Vagabundos, most of Maceo’s time was taken up in dealing with the unruly Mayans in the Yucatan and the aggressive policies of both the Danish Empire, the Liga Federal under Jose Artigas which was quite fond of sending corsairs under Hippolyte de Bouchard north to raid Mexican towns, and of course the Federacion de los Estados Mexicanos or FEM.

The FEM formed primarily from the very people that Felix Calleja had cast aside, maligned and ignored Indian tribes found common ground with many Mexican peasants and newly freed slaves outside of Nueva Galicia and so the tribes reclaimed their land, the peasants created early republics and the former slaves acted as interpreters between the two.

For the most part though the early FEM was more fractious and united and more of a Confederation of dozens of loosely knit states, republics, and tribal lands. It acted as a massive no man’s land and border zone between the United States, the Danes in Alto California, and of course the Viceroyalty.

The dissolution of Great Britain’s control in the Caribbean meant one major thing. Jamaica was free to rebel again and this time it stayed independent and echoed many of the “reforms” that it’s neighbor, mentor, and comrade to the north had undertaken. Notably the expulsion of whites and distribution of land amongst the poor black majority, the lack of a major naval power patrolling the waters of the Caribbean also meant something else.

The Second Age of Piracy rose so quickly that nobody was really around to stop it. Veterans of the many different conflicts mixed with slaves that decided to free themselves, desperate and poor fishermen, the bored sons of wealthy men, and every thief who could aim a gun.

In the early years most of the new buccaneers were indiscriminant about who they raided, Mexican and American ships fell by the way side, Jamaican cruisers were co-opted, the large poorly built Haitian fleet was mostly left alone because people were just plain afraid of them.

Eventually though a system emerged, two kings stood at the ready to control the Caribbean. The first was of course the impeccable Jean Lafitte. The second was also a Frenchman who instead of setting up a base in Texas had moved a little further south, to the well protected and sheltered lands of Jose Artigas and his Liga Federal.

Hippolyte de Bouchard would return from raiding Mexican waters to find out that he had been exiled by General Artigas for endangering the delicate peace that the Orientales enjoyed.

So de Bouchard would move north and set up bases in Suriname and later Jamaica where he would attract a large following from amongst the maligned and mistreated blacks. So it eventually ended up with Jean Lafitte in control of Texas, the waters around the eastern coast of Mexico, Louisiana, and Florida while de Bouchard formed a massive pirate kingdom allied closely with the Dual Black Republics of Haiti and Jamaica and controlling the ever important entrance to the Atlantic Ocean.

Tensions and attacks would remain high until one of the pirate kings buckled and gave in to the other. The only question would be, Who would control the Caribbean?

[1] To the strongest, said to have been the last words of Alexander the Great on how to divide his empire. Also Vagabundos means tramps.
************
1813 saw the first troops leave India. 1818 came and went without a single dime entering the East India Company’s coffers. 1828 brought with it a flood of British soldiers and administrators who thought that they could find work on the Subcontinent. [1]

On December 3rd, 1832 a few ragged ships that had sailed from the Peel government’s outposts in Ireland entered Calcutta to tell the tale. They told of total chaos in the Isles at home, of constant rebellion in both Britain and Ireland.

They spoke of the Cape Colony collapsing without support from home, of thousands of British citizens who had been forced by feuding African tribes all the way back to Cape Town. Highlanders still deployed in India wept openly when it was revealed that Sweden had already sent troops to secure their homeland.

Stamford Raffles was stunned to learn that almost every major investor in the British East India Company had been either robbed or murdered by the mob. No help was coming from Britain, quite the contrary Britain was begging for help from anyone who might be willing to restore order to the isles, to drive out the Swedes, to restore the British Empire.

Nobody had listened, not yet at least. Canada was starting to dictate terms to Britain. Texas was a colony in name only; the British had already been driven out of their West African possessions by hungry Danes and French troops had already secured a toehold in Dover, to supposedly protect the English Channel from lawlessness.

The most that Raffles could offer was a safe haven for those fleeing the violence at home and in South Africa. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the few thousand European soldiers in Bengal and the settlers in Australia would not fight unless they were properly paid.

The Company and the Crown were almost completely bankrupt in India, there was almost nothing left.

It was at this same moment that Druk Yul to the north saw its chance and took it. [2]

Druk Yul had been quick to ally itself with the Gorkha Kingdom based out of Kathmandu and Nepal. The allied kingdoms turned their attention not on the weakened Company Domains but on those who they viewed as having done them wrong in the past. This meant Sikkim, Tibet, and Kochbihar.

The first round of conquests began in 1815 with the conquest of Kochbihar by Druk Yul and the lightning raids of the Gorkha warriors into Sikkim. The Company stood by as its closest allies in northern India were ravaged and their combined wealth removed to the capitals at Thimphu and Kathmandu.

Girvan Yuddha Bikram Shah Deva, the then King of Nepal would lead the first charge into Tibet in 1817 when he wheeled his armies around in Nepal and Sikkim and quickly marched to take control of the Brahmaputra River.

The newest Dalai Lama, Tsultrim Gyatso, was quick to act and reinforced Lhasa against the inevitable attack by what he had deemed pagans and mongrels. The primarily Hindu Gorkhas tended to respect local shrines and bypassed large monasteries on their way to take the main city in Tibet.

Girvan would not be able to see his dream realized. He died en route to Lhasa from wounds that had been earned in previous actions. The Gorkhas were halted in their tracks. That was until the now legendary Dzongkha soldier Deu Gu Chey rallied what was left of the Gorkhas and lay heavy siege to Lhasa. [3]

While the siege was still ongoing Deu Gu Chey led a small force back to Nepal and declared himself king. Seeing as he had the support of the military the transition went rather smoothly for such a massive regime change.

Still, it was almost nothing compared to what would come next. Druk Yul was traditionally ruled from the countryside by the Druk Desi, local nobles who essentially did whatever they pleased most of the time, these same Druk Desi were more than willing to disobey and rebel against the king if it would serve them well.

When Deu Gu Chey paid them to do exactly that, they did. It was unexpected and it was quick. Sonam Drugyal, the king of Druk Yul at the time, was killed while sleeping in his bed by a guard turned assassin. Deu Gu Chey moved in during the resulting crisis, his army with high spirits after hearing of the fall of Lhasa, and proceeded to take Druk Yul by force.

This included the slaughter of the rebellious Druk Desi who he had paid to rebel, the moves towards merging Dzongkha Buddhism with Gorkha Hinduism, the culmination of which resulted in the construction of Dzong Mahakali or “Fortress and Monastery of the Great Kali” which served as a third capital, and of course the adoption of the name Druk Malla by the former Deu Gu Chey. [4]

There was some controversy in Nepal as to why the name Druk Yul should be adopted instead of keeping the old name. Their fears were however assuaged when Druk Malla moved the main center of power from his home in the Dzongkha countryside to the busting metropolis of Kathmandu.

So in 1833 Druk Yul had been swelled by several recent victories, it had a massive and rapidly modernizing army, it was experiencing domestic tranquility as the equally flexible religions of Hinduism and Buddhism continued to mix in the kingdom and it had a traditional enemy to the south.

Druk Malla had not realized that the British had rebelled. He did not know that the Company was on its last legs. All he knew was that they were big and powerful and given to wars of conquest against native states that got too big.

So he offered some small amount of tribute and began urging his counterpart in the Maratha Empire to do the same. Baji Rao II was reluctant to take advice from a Buddhist and was even more reluctant to give money to the Company but he conceded and after confiscating the large tax producing lands of some of his rivals decided to set those lands aside to simply produce taxes to keep the Company at bay.

What neither of these native states realized was that the British East India Company could not have conquered them even if it had wanted to. It was weak and getting weaker, very quickly. The tribute sent by Baji Rao II was seen as a godsend and prompted the Governor-General Raffles to consider wars not of conquest but of tribute to finance the reforms within what seemed to be a slowly forming country of former British colonies that stretched from Bengal to Batavia to Birmingham. [5]

[1] Thanks to the quick centralization of power in this timeline India refers not only to the Subcontinent but to Bengal, Madras, Mysore, the East Indies excluding Borneo, and Australia.

[2] The traditional Bhutanese name for Bhutan. It means “Land of the Thunder Dragon”

[3] Because I don’t feel like using Druk Yulese I’m going to use the traditional name of the Bhutanese language Dzongkha as the adjective form. Also Deu Guy Chey means “Easy Tongue,” he’s a talkative one.

[4] Druk of course means Thunder Dragon and Malla is the name of a 12th Century Nepalese dynasty, it is Sanskrit for Wrestler

[5] The name of the only major outpost on Van Diemen’s Land in this timeline, it’s called Birmingham not because of iron produced there but because of just the general level of productiveness. The natives of Van Diemen’s Land have already been put to work producing cloth in large factories. I honestly just needed a city name that started with a B and Brisbane wouldn't exist in this timeline.
****************
The World in 1835:

Mauritania is doing rather well for itself considering how very young it is. Mikael the First is continuing to promote his grandfather’s stances on immigration and assimilation of those groups that can help Mauritania become incredibly prosperous. No major slave revolts have resulted and Hinduism is the fastest growing religion, particularly amongst the andevo.

Some agitators have been calling for a Diet to be established with elected officials who represent the wills of the people. One of the most prominent nobles in the country is still Andrew Jackson who has married twice: first to Lakshmi Guhathakurta Jackson who is a prominent landowner in Mozambique, together they have had four sons Maurice Benovsky Jackson, Andrew Khan Jackson, Bahadur Rahul Jackson and Ali Guhathakurta Jackson. Andrew Jackson’s second wife is the infamous Chinese pirate Ching Shih. They have one adopted daughter named Rachel Xue Jackson, usually referred to as Xiao Shih.

The Mtetwa Empire is prospering, Dingiswayo is growing rather old and all bets are on the general Chaka to become Nkosi once Dingiswayo does die. A form of standard Nguni has already been adopted and adapted to the Latin alphabet used in nearby Mauritania. Already Mtetwa leaders are looking northwards to the kaNgwane.

KaNgwane is in the midst of a decline in power. After being one of the first major gun producing powers in the region it has already found itself out down by the forges and smiths of its expansionist neighbor to the south. Unless the Mtetwa Empire collapses or the gods smile on kaNgwane then they will be swallowed in the coming wars.

The Sultanate of Muscat is still riding the wave from its colonies in Baluchistan which have served to make the Sultan Salim incredibly rich. Nikolai Zubov has found a niche at court as the official ambassador to Egypt under Mehmet Ali Pasha. Recent tensions with the Company in India over the states of Gujarat could result in some form of conflict. The Sultan has decided to back Baji Rao II as a possible buffer state and potential ally against the British East India Company.

Mehmet Ali Pasha’s Egypt is a thriving center of trade. Cairo and Alexandria are both boomtowns that attract people from all over the Mediterranean and North Africa. The Dunqulah Mamluks have been driven further and further south and his sons have destroyed most of the Saudi power in Arabia. The Wali is on good terms with his neighbors and has favorable trade agreements with the Kingdom of Naples and Sardinia, the Imperiya Romeyev and the Ottoman Empire.

The Marathas are still stagnating in 1835 and there are near constant rebellions in the south against Baji Rao II and his unenlightened despotism. Recent arms shipments from the Sultanate of Muscat have emboldened the Marathas who are in the process of modernizing the more elite parts of their military. Recent expeditions into Mysore, Travancore, and Madras have been met with little to no outrage from the British.

The British East India Company Lands or simply India have centered on Bengal and Calcutta since the Battle of Panipat in 1760. Recent influxes of British refugees from the failed Cape Colony and the contact with the exiled British forces in Ireland have only strengthened the resolve of the few Brits left in Bengal, the British East Indies, and Australia to soldier on lest their whole way of life collapse and the British Empire will officially come to an end.

Druk Yul is in a position of great power at this very moment. The Himalayan Kingdom has managed to successfully bring together the disparate lands of Druk Yul (Bhutan), Nepal, Sikkim, Kochbihar, and parts of southern Tibet. Dzongkha Tantric Buddhism is quite popular and is finding a ready audience amongst the war minded Nepalese while Nepali Hinduism has been adopted by the warrior class in all parts of Druk Yul. Already Druk Yul has sent many emissaries west to the Sikh Empire to speak with Ranjit Singh about possible alliances between the two nations.

Most of eastern Asia is similar to our own timeline. The Daoguang Emperor is freaking out over the loss of much of southern Tibet but is forced to focus on the possibility of an invasion from the north and the ever increasing problems of the massive amounts of opium originating from Mauritania and the Mtetwa Empire being distributed in Guangdong by Mauritanian pirates and traders under Ching Shih.

Russia is happy, plain and simple. It is also one major war away from total bankruptcy and the Tsarina Maria Groznaya has expressed an interest in increasing taxation of Russia’s western territories to fund her expansionist wars in Central Asia and the propping up of the Imperiya Romeyev.

Much of Central Asia has been depopulated creating an almost total power vacuum that has been quickly filled by what remains of Siberian tribes, Russian prison camps, and Russified Persians from the Kavir Cossack Host.

The Imperiya Romeyev, Vizantiya, is a debt ridden state that is already experiencing turmoil in Wallachia and Serbia. Konstantin also has his eyes on the Ottoman administrated regions in Albania and the few border raids in Thrace could lead to a second war with the Ottomans.

The Ottoman Empire has managed to modernize most of its armed forces in the wake of the massive beating administered by the Greco-Russian forces. Bursa has become a second city to Damascus which has received an ever increasing amount of attention and all signs point to Syria becoming the new base of power within the Empire.

France basically controls Europe and the new emperor Napoleon II aims to keep Prussia and Austria from coming out of self imposed isolation in the wake of numerous French victories.

The Kingdom of Naples and Sardinia is the most independent of the Napoleonic Kingdoms and is looking south to northern Africa to make its fortune. Achille I has even claimed the title of Bey of Tunis in hopes of sparking a war that will allow him to control a larger chunk of the Mediterranean.

Britain is still in shambles with a token French force in Dover, Swedish peace keeping forces in Scotland and a small Canadian toehold in Cornwall it seems as if the Peel Government will have to resign itself to being a Kingdom-in-exile.

Sweden is powerful, probably able to take on Russia in the Baltic. Karl XIV Johan has overseen the largest and fastest growth of the Swedish state, ever. Coupled with Sweden’s building of not one but two separate fleets, one Baltic and one Atlantic and it seemed that no one nation could stop Sweden’s rise to power. Swedish power is being particularly felt in Scotland where a Swedish force patrols the coast to cut down on the freebooting and piracy that has arisen in the area since the collapse of Britain.

Denmark has become increasingly tied up in its African affairs. King Christian even went so far as to visit the Asanteman (Ashanti Empire) and assume the role of Asantehene (King of the Ashanti) and had a replica of the sika’dwa (Golden Stool) incorporated into his throne back in Denmark. The Ashanti and the Danish are at present members of the same kingdom and technically equals.

Canada has become increasingly powerful as the main source of troops for keeping order in Ireland. The economies of Upper and Lower Canada have been wrecked by 16 years of war and now supporting the Mother Country in its attempts to establish itself again as the proper government of Great Britain.

The United States is in quite the bind, like its neighbor to the north it too has a failing economy and a need to find a bunch of back pay for its troops and quick. However the US has an enormously popular leader and is essentially a One Party State with the Democratic Republicans controlling the Execute, Legislative and most of the Judicial branches of government.

Haiti and Jamaica continue to preach their doctrine of Black Revolution and are edging closer and closer to a war with Suriname. Both countries are being supported through the raiding of Hippolyte de Bouchard and the piracy of their own small naval fleets. Haitian warships recently targeted Mexican ports and large Jamaican thieving operations have been uncovered in Cuba.

Texas is doing just fine under the guidance of Jean Lafitte and the continuing Irish immigration from their homeland, especially since the Munster Famine of 1834 pushed almost half a million southern Irish to find a home elsewhere and the New World was the only viable opportunity since Britain was well and truly fucked.

Suriname is expanding where it pleases. The low population density and regional instability of Brazil means that many Judeo-Dutch farmers and freeholders have made large plantations for themselves in northern Brazil.

 

[Haggis]

The 1840s would come to be a time of great change in Texas. The death of Jean Lafitte on March 17, 1842 led to a period of mass mourning all over Texas as the two and a half million inhabitants, eighty percent of them Irish, celebrated his life for close to a month. It spoke well of the man that four separate funerals were needed to properly send him into the afterlife.

The death of Jean Lafitte meant that the natural progression of power was passed to his brother, Pierre, his son Louis and his granddaughter Brigitte, all three of which were hard headed and highly capable administrators. It was the forward thinking mindset of Louis and Brigitte which would pull Texas out of agriculturally induced poverty and give the urban poor around Campeche the chance at a job.

So in 1844 Brigitte spoke with the brewing consortium in Campeche, headed by Sligo Morrison, and convinced Sligo that Morrison Beers needed to sink some of its investment into a new national railway that would travel a route from Campeche to Ansord. In return for helping to fund this national railway all Morrison Beer products would be shipped for a lesser price or for free, all over Texas. [1]

Brigitte Lafitte made the same offer to many other major businesses, in short she was shopping around to see who would be willing to bid the most towards construction and she was incredibly successful. Brigitte started a massive bidding war over who could donate the most to the railway and in short buy the best deal from the Lafitte family.

The winners of the contract were Morrison Beer, Augustus Bannon’s Nasloo Opiates, and Rezin Bowie, and a several large cattle ranchers. [2]

The hiring of men began almost immediately. Some forty thousand poor Irish tenet farmers would leave their small allotments of land and began a steady job with the new Campeche-Ansord Line. Near eight thousand slaves were used as cheap labor and the price of a good mule, donkey, draft horse, or ox rose so steadily that some cattle kings who were in a rush to cash in contacted Asian merchants based out of Campeche and had some early camel populations imported.

So in a stroke Texas began to industrialize. Mills popped up in Campeche, Ansord, Nasloo, Nacogdoches, and near White Oak Bayou where the factory town of Barjona was established by Alois Hinkle, a devout Bavarian Protestant tailor. [3]

Barjona would serve as landing place for dispossessed Rhiners, as people from the Confederation of the Rhine are called, who would flock to Texas during the 1850s after the first in a wave of famines would grip the Confederation. Other large Rhiner population centers would be focused around towns like Stinkkatze, Korf, Garten, and Fesch all of which would be founded within fifty miles of Barjona.

The new mills and the large and successful Campeche-Ansord railroad made Texas increasingly attractive to more and more Irish settlers and eventually even Canadians who were tired of the increasingly dark economic troubles at home.

The streets of most major towns in Texas were filled with the sounds of English, Irish, Spanish, the peculiar dialect of German that was developing in the new land, and increasingly the random roar of camels who soon became prized possessions by the poorer ranchers who found keeping horses and donkeys expensive.

Indeed it was the camel that carried the cameleer on the first of many Punitive Columns against the Mescalero Nation in 1847 in response to their raids on the precious Texan copper mines which technically fell in their territory. This Punitive Column, under General Rezin Bowie, would spark much controversy in the Federation of Mexican States and nearly led to a war with the massive loosely allied group that stretched from Baja California all the way to Oregon Country.

What it did lead to was a definite state of hostilities between Texans and the well funded and Spanish backed Mescalero Nation which eventually called upon contacts in the Lipan Nation and the Chiricahua Nation to continue the Mescalero war on all things Texan.

Out of this First Mescalero War a formidable Chokonen Chiricahua warrior would emerge. Cochise would come to the bane of the Lafitte family and lead to a protracted state of war with almost all Indian Nations in the copper rich regions in the west.

Texas was being carried towards a bright future on the back of camels and on the rails of the Iron Horse. The only dark cloud on the horizon was the increasing animosity from the Viceroyalty of New Spain to the south, the Mescalero and their allies to the west and the Haitian threat at sea.


[1] Ansord is deeper inland. It comes from the Irish An Sord which means the pure or the place of water. It’s located near OTL Dallas.

[2] Nasloo is from Na Slua which is again Irish for “Of the Hosts” and Rezin was the brother of Jim Bowie who was killed in New York during the Reckoning War. As in our timeline Rezin made his fortune in slave smuggling and minor piracy.

[3] The city of Houston would be near Barjona in our timeline so instead it’ll be a German haven.
******************
Napoleon II was born in 1811 and the many people of the French Empire greeted him warmly. He was educated by the most learned men of Europe. He visited every part of the Continent and even traveled overseas to witness battles between the British and the Americans in 1826.

Napoleon II was commonly thought of not simply as a Frenchman but a citizen of Western Civilization. He visited with his aging uncle in Constantinople, debated religions and politics with the advisors and scholars of the Sublime Porte, raced with Theodoros Kolokotronis, and kept up a good relationship with his cousins, uncles, aunts and friends of the family in Italy, Naples and Sardinia, Spain, Westphalia, Russia, Warsaw and Sweden.

So when the aging Napoleon abdicated on behalf of his first and only son and heir in 1830 the nineteen year old became the most powerful and the most eligible bachelor in Europe.

He immediately pulled French troops from their positions in Italy and gave the southeastern arm of the French Empire to Gregory XVI as new Papal States. Many argue as to why the young Napoleon would seek to reestablish the Catholic Church as a dominant force in Europe but it was most likely a move to silence Gregory’s dogged and ever growing opposition to the Code Napoleon which he viewed as an endorsement of homosexuality.

With the nominal restoration of the Papal States Napoleon II was able to twist Gregory’s arm into recognizing the peculiar brand of Haitian Catholicism, this was then coupled with the passage of a quick series of laws which made anti-black discrimination incredibly illegal.

With a few short moves Napoleon was able to ensure that the Haitians would favor the French as an ally, protecting French shipping interests in the Caribbean.

It was his next move that made headlines though. Napoleon II had been keeping up with the events in Asia and was well aware of the rise of Druk Yul, the Sikh Empire, India, and the Sultanate of Brunei.

So he sent emissaries to deal with these polities as if they were European powers, with respect and without pre-conceived notions of the people therein. These emissaries served to cement the early alliances between the three powers of the Subcontinent, Druk Yul and the Sikhs and British East India, while also negotiating with the Sultanate of Brunei to allow the French access to the northern islands of the Philippine Archipelago.

This first Asian overseas colony would be the springboard of a much wider French interest in Asia.

Of course it goes without saying that Napoleon II was willing to make several massive loans to India and in return French ships would get premier status in Indian ports from Calcutta to Sydney and India would be opened up to French immigrants within the year.

By 1847 the French Empire and its vassal states had a rather amiable relationship with the major players in southern Asia. Of course 1847 was also the year that Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Sher-e-Punjab (Lion of the Punjab) and the Defiler of Multan died.

This left the Khalsa, the army that ruled the Sikh Empire, without a leader and completely in shambles. Without a leader the relatively modern Khalsa entered a protracted state of civil war.

A state which was broken when in 1850 Druk Malla had collected enough tax from his own personal lands in Tibet and amassed enough treasure from the vassal state of Oudh to hire General Zorowar Singh to put down the rebellions in the Khalsa and to recognize Druk Malla as King of the Gorkhas, Emissary of the Thunder Dragon, Maharaja of the Punjab, Sher-e-hima, and Ruler of All the Himalayas. [1]

Zorowar Singh did just this and it worked perfectly. In a short time Druk Malla, the former Dzongkha peasant and warrior, had risen the ranks to rule Nepal, Druk Yul, Tibet, and now the Khalsa, the most modern fighting force in all of northern India, pledged its allegiance to him.

[1] Sher-e-hima means Lion of Snow. The Snow Lion is usually considered the symbol of Tibet and is incredibly important in Tibetan Buddhism, Druk Malla will continue to adopt the symbols of his Four Kingdoms to try and create some form of unity.
******************
Mehmet Ali Pasha soon became the best friend of Russia, Vizantiya, and France. Thanks to his ability to stop Ottoman growth in North Africa and the fact that his influence kept the region relatively stable, which kept cotton prices low, he was able to keep the poor masses of Europe in comfortable clothes.

After his expansion into the northern parts of Libya, Tunis and al-Jazair he was able to keep the poor masses of Europe well fed with wheat and grains. For becoming the breadbasket and textile factory of Europe Mehmet’s Egypt was supported by the powers that be.

Napoleon II made him a Marshal of France, Gregory XVI declared him a friend of the Holy Roman Church, Tsarina Maria used her power as the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller to declare Mehmet Ali Pasha a member of the Russian tradition within the order and Frederick VI, largely in deference to Mehmet’s protection of Danish shipping from pirates, made him a Knight of the Elephant Order, Ridder af Elefantordenem in Danish.

All of this influence and his ties to the European continent would be more than needed when the young al-Jazairi scholar, cleric, and holy warrior named Sharif Abd al-Qadir allied himself to the remaining Mamluks in southern Sudan and with blessing and support of the King of Morocco, Abderrahmane I, sought to force Egypt to give up its trappings of Empire and leave al-Jazair forever.

Al-Qadir had some odd allies in his struggle.

While his forces were concentrated in the north they had a working relationship with the small Mamluk ruled kingdom in the south of Sudan. Al-Qadir would visit counterpart in Dunqulah, Yazid al-Aswad, a massive native of the Sudan who had managed to unite the fractious Albanian Mamluks and had even enticed many of the Qajar nobles who had fled Russian Persia for the court of Mehmet Ali Pasha many years before.

After Mehmet’s conquest of Mecca in 1831 and Tusun Pasha’s continued military presence in the inland tribal areas of Arabia the Wahhabi fanatics only intensified their attempts to push out the “heretics” and to establish dominance over all of Arabia once more.

The Sultan of Muscat, Ali I, saw the continued expansion of Egypt as a threat to his own kingdom and began to supply the Wahhabi with rifles and training that they might use against the Egyptian forces.

This conflict in North Africa and the Middle East would pit Egypt, The Kingdom of Naples and Sardinia, and the Papal States against the Mamluks in southern Sudan, Morocco, the Sultanate of Muscat, and the most dangerous splinter sect in Asia’s history.

The war would start with a single plum. Mehmet Ali Pasha died after a long sickness in 1848, his sons Ibrahim Pasha and Tusun Pasha accused Mehmet’s enemies of poisoning his food, this was “confirmed” when physicians determined that Mehmet’s plums had been laced with arsenic.

Yazid al-Aswad responded quickly enough and claimed that his agents had poisoned the Wali. He used this to great effect in stirring up local tribesmen to join his revolt. The Baggara of Kurdufan quickly joined the Mamluks, as did local merchants who helped raise the money needed to pay for mercenaries.

Mehmet’s son-in-law, Defturdar, had become lax in governing the country and so it was not too surprising when his small ill-trained force was overrun and the head of Defturdar was put on a stake and marched before the armies of Yazid.

Next the Ja’Alin, squatters in Arabic, rose up and sent close to five thousand men to serve under the bloody headed banner of Yazid. The Pazande, the Zaghawa, the Fur, almost every major western or southern Sudanese tribe joined Yazid as he marched to Malakal, Kusti, and later Wad Madani.

Ibrahim Pasha, who had assumed the title of Wali after his brother had gone west to fight al-Qadir, realized that Yazid now controlled the entirety of the Bahr al-Jabal, the White Nile, a vital trade route to the almost inaccessible central African kingdoms of Rwanda and Buganda.

Ibrahim worried that if Yazid was able to push into these regions then his expert marksmen and swelling ranks could easily overpower the less trigger happy natives and establish a thriving economic center that could be used to finance wars against Egypt.

If Ibrahim was to keep his father’s kingdom then he would have to act quickly so in 1849 he pulled most of the troops from Arabia, leaving just enough to protect the holy city of Mecca, and began the Southern Campaign against Yazid.

Then Morocco entered the fray, many historians note that it was only after al-Qadir recognized Abderrahmane as the rightful king of al-Jazair that he interceded with actual troops, Moroccan and Jazairi forces established a provincial forward base at the Roman ruins in Sitifis.

Their first actual battle against Tusun Pasha would come just a few days later at the oasis in Tibeskert. The Moroccan-Jazairi force won the engagement against overwhelming odds, namely three well placed and formerly Russian artillery batteries, because of their undying refusal to give up the oasis. The Egyptians were forced to withdraw, but not before Jazairi snipers inflicted so much carnage to the artillery operators that they were forced to abandon their guns and flee.

Achille I of Naples and Sardinia surveyed the changing political landscape and come down on the side of Ibrahim Pasha and declared war on Morocco in November of 1849. The Papal States and the rump mostly Neapolitan controlled Kingdom of Italy were quick to follow.

(One will of course notice the numerous Arabic names, al-Jazair is simply Algeria and al-Aswad means “the black” for you see Yazid is a very, very dark man)
***********
Hinduism in Mauritania grew in leaps and bounds. Though originally confined to the ports of Benovesis in the south and Sofia on the mainland, the thriving areas of Maratha-Mauritania trade, it would be adopted by the andevo caste as their own form of faith, one that they could make distinctly African.

Andevo forms of Hinduism shared one particular aspect, they looked to already well established religions to fill in the missing blanks. One of the heroes of the Ramayana, Hanuman, was adopted as the patron god of the andevo and was often associated with the fierce and uniquely African Chacma Baboon. Thanks to the relatively multicultural atmosphere in Mauritania the stories of Hanuman were soon merged with the tales of Shin Yun Hung. [1]

Traders from Lahore brought tales of the dualistic Ashoura of northern India, where Shia Muslims and Hindus would both march in honor of Imam Husain and his death at Karbala. Shortly after trade with Lahore and the Sikh Empire increased then the andevo had adopted Imam Husain as the son of Mahakali and Michael. [2]

The andevo even adopted Vamana, the dwarf, as a secondary patron saint and was used by the early andevo as an example of how even the smallest and weakest could defeat demons. Vamana was insanely popular, as were the other avatars of Vishnu, like Narasimha who protects devotees from harm. [3]

While the influence of this particularly syncretic brand of Hinduism flourished other matters were of great concern in Mauritania, chief amongst them a fly. The tsetse had been quickly killing off Europeans that moved to the northern part of the mainland and only small scattered African tribes remained in the area.

If Mauritania was to expand it would have to move north and the tsetse barred the way. Until this point large brush burning operations coupled with extermination drives had worked in some areas, at the cost of potentially thousands of cattle and even more bushmeat.

Something would have to be done about the tsetse. In 1840 a Chinese cattle rancher named Ma Si noticed that the blue cloth that he used to mark off his grazing pasture from his neighbor’s attracted hundreds of tsetse.

At first Mr. Ma thought that it was just some dumb flies that had gotten caught in their search for cow’s blood but his younger son Guang did some experiments and found that the tsetse were attracted to the color blue.

Ma Guang sent his findings to the university in Benovesis and after a round of tests they came to the same conclusion.
A new system of tsetse control was born. Miles and miles of blue cloth were raised in particularly badly infested areas and scented with cow urine and blood. Large buckets of blood, mixed with arsenic, rested nearby and would be replaced every few days by the most unlucky of slaves.

The system worked wonders and soon the first test sites, along the Zambezi River and in northern mainland Mauritania, revealed millions of dead tsetse. Within weeks many parts in the north of the country were fit to inhabit and inhabited they would be.

[1] The Cantonese name of the Monkey King.

[2] Michael as in the Archangel, the andevo style of Hinduism has so far mixed Hinduism (duh), Catholicism, Shia Islam and traditional Chinese religion. Yay for syncretism

[3] In the story Vamana literally defeats a demon because the demon king, Bali, promises the dwarf three steps of land. Vamana/Vishnu then grows so large that he cannot take three steps just from the surface of the Earth so the demon king offers his own head. Vamana/Vishnu grants him immortality for his benevolence.

The andevo however choose to think of it as an allegory for the small and the weak, like slaves, overcoming great and terrible things, like slavery.

 

[Haggis]

The Confederation of the Rhine, after the Kingdom of Naples and Sardinia, was the most independence minded of the French Vassals. This independent streak came not from a charismatic and strong monarch, like Achille I of Naples, but from the sheer stubborn and bloody minded desire for power that so many Princes of the Confederation had.

This stubbornness would get Napoleon II in trouble when in 1850 he reorganized the Rhine states. This reorganization was done primarily to streamline the exact number of men and resources that were to be provided by the Confederation to the French Empire but it was also to simplify the still overly complicated German political system.

Smaller states were quickly carved up and given to their larger neighbors. The Principality of Waldeck, Principality of Isenburg and the Duchy of Nassau were added to the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt.

The Kingdom of Saxony received Anhalt-Bernburg, Anhalt-Dessau, and Anhalt-Kothen.

Frankfurt was raised to the status of a Kingdom, with the new capital at Aschaffenburg, and it was given Wurzburg, Saxe-Coburg, Saxe-Gotha, Saxe-Hildburgausen, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Saxe-Weimar, and Saxe-Meiningen.

Mecklenburg-Strelitz was forcibly added to Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the Swedes gave up Pomerania, at the threat of trade embargoes from France and possible war. What had been Swedish Pomerania was promptly added to the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

All of this rearranging of the Confederation caused some definite strife. Those who opposed the seemingly random carving up of territories were led by Leopold I, former Grand Duke of Wurzburg. There was the threat of civil war but the continual presence of almost a million French troops and the 1.2 million soldiers of the Grand Army of the Rhine, French backed and Westphalian financed operation, dissuaded any dissenters from trying to take up arms.

So the maligned nobles moved, they moved their houses, loyal subjects, all of their retainers, their horses, their cattle, and in some cases their castles. The great majority of them joined the small German presence in Texas, where a few were able to regain their noble status.

In Ireland events were still boiling over from the much heavier British presence. The Peel Government had been forced to engage in more and more brutal crackdowns on the Irish dissenters. This only served to make the Irish angrier and in 1846 all out guerilla war was declared when a young Irish Catholic chemist named Greg Kingston mixed stolen nitroglycerin with sawdust and sodium carbonate.

He left thirty pounds of the potent mixture in a wagon that was supposed to be filled with hay for bedding and horse feed outside of a garrison in Dublin. Kingston then lit the fuse and ran.

Between fifty and seventy British soldiers were killed in the blast, along with exactly twenty three horses. The fire swept through the homes of many British loyalists in Dublin and when Kingston printed his now famous pamphlet on asymmetrical warfare “How Shall We Fight?” his name became synonymous with the new art of wagon-bombs.

Soon the formula for crafting a wagon-bomb was widely known and British soldiers and British buildings began exploding left and right. Seventeen men were ambushed by youths with rifles and “Kingston Powder” in Dublin. Columns that marched during military parades were broken up by powerful blasts that tore men’s legs off at the knee and sent many more to their maker. [1]

The power of this new style of asymmetrical warfare was felt the hardest when Robert Peel, his secretary and his driver were killed in a blast while riding in Peel’s carriage to a meeting. Investigators later deduced that the horse’s saddlebags and parts of the coach were inlaid with a more volatile mix of Kingston Powder which had ignited as soon as Peel had struck a match to light his pipe.

The British government was effectively left without a head, until chosen by Parliament of course. The hardliner Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland was chosen by the Tory Parliament to replace Peel. Northumberland would crack down on Irish terrorism, not with Canadian troops but with those still loyal in Galicia.

The first of the King’s Spaniards would arrive in 1848, armed and ready for battle.

[1] Kingston Powder is indeed dynamite, just in case you didn’t know.

 

[Epimethius]

Sweet Merciful Mother, this is chaos incarnate.....!!!!!

 

[David bar Elias]

Excellent work!

 

[Haggis]

Hey, thanks y'all. So, what do you mean Epimethius?

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

Hey, thanks y'all. So, what do you mean Epimethius?

He means the World's Been Turned Upside-Down, ten times over.

 

[von kressenstein]

MAP!

i think its time for a map of this world wide calamity

 

[Epimethius]

He means the World's Been Turned Upside-Down, ten times over.

Exactly its not bad, its just WOOW!!! I don't know of any other way you could reasonably flip the world of the Napoleonic era into such craziness, then you have already done. That being said, i can't wait to see what you come up with.

 

[Haggis]

That is a map of the world in 1835, I'll be making one for 1850 rather soon.

1 Druk Yul
2 Sikh Confederacy
3 Sultanate of Brunei
4 Texas
5 Maratha Empire
6 Confederation of the Rhine
7 Haiti and Jamaica
8 Imperiya Romeyev

 

[Haggis]

Jack Woley would quickly become an important man in India. Born in Birmingham to Johnston and Anna Woley in 1828 at the age of four his family fled the violence in England itself and Jack’s family lived for a short time in the British exile in Ireland.

His father, Johnston Woley, was a Royal Marine and Jack traveled with him on many occasions, one startling occasion being the short lived expedition to evacuate most of the British settlers from the Cape Colony. [1]

While Jack may have been four at the time he and his mother had still followed his father to the Evacuation. After the Evacuation Jack’s family accompanied the refugees to India, they landed in Calcutta where Jack’s father was then assigned to help keep the peace in Madras.

Anna Woley took the young Jack to live in the relatively abandoned areas around Birmingham-in-Van Diemen’s Land. His mother ran a cloth business and Jack got along well with the natives before being sent to school on the North Island at Britannia College. [2]

There he met with British and Maori students, low level princes from India Proper and a few monks from Druk Yul that had come to Britannia to teach Dzongkha history, language and culture.

After studying at Britannia College he joined the Cook Strait Merchant Fleet, where he spent the years of 1843-1846 hunting pirates and securing the safe passage of fishermen. He left when he was 18 and went to India Proper where he would secure his fame.

After signing up in Calcutta Jack secured a position in the new Fourth Madras Police, a new battalion of the 53rd Regiment of Foot. Jack was said to have gotten along famously with the Native Infantry and quickly learned Bengali and Balinese.

During a battle against the ever pervasive Maratha backed bandits most of Woley’s regiment fled. Jack on the other hand charged the enemy with nothing but a spear that a bandit had thrown earlier in the engagement.

The retreating troops were said to balk at the sight. Through the ever pervasive smoke of the cannons that both sides had used to great effect they could just make out Jack fighting off what rough estimates put at about twenty men.

Though most fled after he killed the first five. Either way it is known that his capture of three enemy guns and his rousing of the Native and British troops turned the tide of battle.

It was not mere heroics that would secure Jack’s place in the history books however. During the combat the blade of his spear had broken into three sections, which looked to the Hindu troops like a trident, add to this fact that during his time in the Cook Strait Merchant Marine he had gotten several large tattoos of snakes on his back and in the excitement of the battle he had been covered in ash and his hair had become matted, the Hindu troops thought he looked rather like an Avatar of Shiva.

The government in Calcutta was quick to play this fact up and appealed to Hindu holy men to recognize him as such. They used Jack to cut down on Indian resentment of British settlers by saying that the British presence was a holy one. Why else would an Englishman be an Avatar of Shiva?

Jack took it all in stride and used this notion of him as a divine being to continue his rise to great heights in India.

[1] The careful reader will remember my mention of the Cape Colony being overrun in passing a few updates ago.

[2] The original name for Wellington.

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

Will the Avatar of Shiva be able to defeat Superpower Bhutan?

 

[Marius]

I'm confused, you are calling the island of Madagascar, Mauritania, which is a country in North-West Africa, or was Madagascar called Mauritania before? Is there some sort of historical precedent?

 

[Haggis]

Baldie First:

Well seeing as Druk Yul has a pretty large Hindu minority I imagine that any war that Indo-Dzongkha War would have the British using Woley to try and rally Hindus from Druk Yul into fighting for India.

And Marius:
So the POD is that Moric Benovsky's short lived kingdom on what we call Madagascar doesn't have its ass handed to it by the French in 1785.

It is my understanding that Benovsky's kingdom was called Mauritania, before the country in the north-west of Africa ever existed.

 

[Marius]

Thanks for clearing that up Haggis.

 

[Haggis]

Not a problem, so have you read the timeline?

 

[Haggis]

On the Pacific Coast of America a man named George Simpson had ruled the lands of the Hudson Bay Company as his own personal fiefdom since at least 1820. For eight years he was the absolute king and had the final word over his domains.

Just so long as he could enforce it.

The official name of the Hudson Bay Company domains in the Pacific Northwest was New Caledonia and George Simpson was its nominal king. Local tribes like the Skagit, Wuikinuxv, Nisga’a, and the Kitasoo Band of the Tsimshian all gave heavy resistance to Simpson and his control over the New Caledonia District.

Simpson would enforce his will through Russo-Tlingit mercenaries hired from Alyeska and the surplus of Asante warriors further south in Danish California. American deserters from the Reckoning War would add to the mix as well as Mexican peasants and migrating native groups that had left land further south thanks to famine, drought, war, and disease.

All of these groups were counted on in the early days to build New Caledonia from the ground up. Then in 1828 the first Canadian troops visited this wayward section of British North America and were interested as to exactly why so little help had been given to them during the sixteen year conflict with the Americans.

George Simpson was hanged as a traitor and for “sheltering the enemy” even though the war had been over for almost a year. More Canadian settlements would grow throughout New Caledonia, mostly staffed by fur traders from the east and small farmers that heard land was a hell of a lot cheaper in New Caledonia.

The next great blow to Canadian settlement in New Caledonia would come in late 1832 when many more Canadian regiments were raised and the population trickled back to the cities to try and support the retaking of Britain from the rebel elements therein.

By the late 1830s the status quo was almost exactly the same as in 1827. Tlingit mercenaries were once again being paid by Canadian officials to keep the peace in New Caledonia. These mercenaries began forming a form of landed nobility and kept the conquered natives as slaves.

By 1848 the Tlingit mercenary Ahex’ada Tlein and his mercenary corps the Ch’aak’k were the nearly undisputed rulers of most of New Caledonia. [1]

Ahex’ada had grown up in Alyeska speaking both Russian and Tlingit and had a great level of fondness for the Russian Empire and was known to think of himself as Russian and Tlingit instead of just Tlingit. So it was not surprising when in 1850 he declared himself Knyaz Ahex’ada and formerly annexed his domains to Russian Alyeska.

The elderly Tsarina Maria was pleased and confirmed Ahex’ada as both a prince of the Russian Empire and as ruler of Talaayan. [2]

[1] Tlingit lesson! Tlein means big and after a name, like Ahex’ada, it denotes a level of importance. Ahex’ada Tlein is “Big Alexander” or “Important Alexander” and Ch’aak’k comes from the Tlingit word ch’aak which means eagle. I simply added the diminutive plural ‘k. So it means “Little Eagles”

[2] Tlingit Lesson part two: Talaayan is from the Tlingit word tleiyán which means mainland.