Excerpt: The Breath of the World: Steam, Industry and Climate Catastrophe - Mahmud Mbakari, Red Hill Libropress, AD 2015
The changes that took place in the Andalusian world in the late 1500s were rapid and dramatic, no less so because they came amidst a period of chaos. Indeed, the political and social turmoil of the time was vital: It set the table for change to happen.
On paper, the Mahdi Army rampaging across the Maghreb was unlikely to mount a serious bid to overthrow the government in Isbili: The advent of firearms made the days of nomadic Berbers riding out of the Atlas Mountains and toppling the local ruler a thing of the past. They did, however, prove a constant irritant to farmers and tradesmen in Maghrebi coastal cities, requiring annual campaigns in the mountains to try and bring the stubborn Fakhreddin to heel. The highly mobile Mahdists had a tendency to fade into the desert and engage only on their own terms, resulting in years of frustration for
Hajib Uthman and the newly-constituted Majlis.
Compounding problems in the Maghreb were the emergence of brushfire rebellions in the Christian-predominated north. As with the earliest years of Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula, the Cantabrian Mountains remained stubbornly difficult to police. It's little surprise that rebellion flourished there.
While so-called Hidden King pretenders were common, the rebellion of the so-called King Diego proved to be one of the most prominent. Declaring himself the rightful king of the north, the so-called Diego - his real origins are obscure - emerged in the city of Oviedo and began delivering speeches calling for a Reconquista in the south. He soon amassed an army, killing most of the Oviedo garrison and pushing out into villages in the countryside. The rebels held out against smaller-scale police actions before managing a deadly raid on Leon, failing to take the city but capturing and murdering several prominent Asmarid officials, including the city's chief imam. The rebels made a point of targeting Mozarabic Christians as well, viewing them as traitors to the Catholic Church and adopters of Andalusian culture and language.
Uthman endeavoured to respond in force, dispatching the Black Guard north to root out Diego and his men. Sympathizers in northern towns and villages were rounded up - some of them indiscriminately - and troops marched into the mountains to try and catch up to the wily rebels. Terrain worked against Asmarid control: Diego managed to hold out until 1556 before being shot at the Battle of the Iguanzo, where the Black Guard managed to catch Diego and his most elite men in a valley town southeast of Oviedo and bring them to battle in earnest. Without the so-called Hidden King to provide a figurehead, the rebellion's leadership broke down, and much of the rebel army melted back into the mountains, allowing Uthman to restore control in the north - albeit not without protests and agitation from the more radical Catholics in the region.
The onset of the Wars of the Red Comet in the Holy Roman Empire didn't help matters. Officially, Uthman viewed the civil war over the Holy Roman Empire's succession as a matter for the Christians to deal with. Unofficially, the Asmarids supported the Papal line, even encouraging groups of mercenaries to sell their services to pro-Papal forces. Asmarid trade ships delivered weapons into the hands of Romanian and Italian forces via their trading post in Amalfi, while Navarrese mercenaries fought for the Swabian League, the pro-Papal faction that coalesced around a reluctant Gerhard von Geroldseck-Zurich. Uthman insisted that he washed his hands of these conflicts from the standpoint of the Asmarid crown. This didn't forestall French and Anglish privateers from periodically attacking Asmarid merchantmen at sea during this period, requiring new investment in ships.
These conflicts came against a backdrop of movement of men to the Gharb al-Aqsa. Large numbers of young men and their families moved overseas in the mid-to-late 1500s, many of them seeking to take advantage of the discovery of gold in Tirunah. As the Iberian peninsula filled up and the population of the Maghreb grew, sons further down the inheritance ladder often sought to take their chances on adventurism in the west rather than settling for their slice of an increasingly subdivided land holding. While these trends boded well for colonial affairs on the western continent, they came together with everything else to generate periodic manpower shortages in the core Asmarid realm - at a time when the realm needed both weapons and ships.
In some areas, local landholders filled their labour needs by buying in slaves from the Sudan. But outside of the labour-intensive plantation economy in places like the Mufajias, hiring slaves to do grunt work was rarely popular, and Asmarid slaveowners remained far more likely to purchase female slaves or eunuchs for more domestic duties.
The Asmarid realm, in other words, was primed for an external factor to put a dent in its labour woes. But it was not the first country outside of China to adopt the steam engine wholesale.
Aside from the brief dalliance of the Lavo Kingdom in steam technology, the first non-Chinese adopter of steam was the Janggala Kingdom. Steam power there was first introduced in 1555, brought in by Chinese labourers working in the coal-mining regions of southern Sumatra. The engines were used mainly to drive pumps to clear water our of mines in the river-crossed region. Transmission of the technology from China to the Janggalas was little surprise: The two powers were geographically close, bound together by trade and politics, occasionally opposed over issues like control of trade through Malacca and influence in the Ma-i Archipelago, and well positioned to pick up best practices from one another through the simple movement of people and bodies between realms.
In the middle of it all was the Asmarid colony at Mubaraka.[1] The island had come to be used mainly as a plantation hub and occasional copper mine, and while not one of the more populous Andalusian holdings, its importance as a hub of cultural interchange can't be overstated. Andalusian merchants operating from the island came into regular contact with Chinese and Nusantaran merchantmen, not only trading for unique goods but learning about new technologies and naturalistic advancements pioneered in the Great Wu realm. It served as a major conduit for Sinophiles to feed knowledge back to their homeland.
Such was the case with steam. The path the technology took to Andalusia came through the cultural transmission line with a pivot point in Mubaraka.
The early years of the Wars of the Red Comet saw the Asmarids eager to stay out of the conflict, preferring to focus on chasing down the Mahdi Army. By 1561, however, European powers beyond the catchment area of the Holy Roman throne were being drawn into the war. A market for Andalusian arms rapidly developed, with Amalfi rounding into a convenient transfer point for jazails and other weapons to filter into the hands of Romanian, Italian and southern German armies. While blackpowder weapons were no stranger to Christendom at this point, weapons manufactured in the Islamic sphere were of significantly higher quality, both in terms of metallurgy and expertise of manufacture.
The market for Andalusian guns combined with the increase in overseas economic activity to create new demand for both guns and ships. Even as demand for high-quality metal rose, so too did demand for wood - at a time when forestry was already strained. The use of coal in blast furnaces rapidly increased during the mid-1500s as Andalusian smiths and builders looked for alternatives that would get around the increasing price of timber. With rising output of metal came an increase in quality metallurgy and a spiking demand for not only guns, but common implements like ploughs and farming tools.
It is from this confluence of demand factors - rising wood prices, spiking demand for quality metal goods, increased use of coal, and shortages in manpower - that the conditions that made alternatives attractive.
~
AD 1566
RUSADDIR[2], MAGHREB, ASMARID EMPIRE
"It's astonishing that you can do this without a river or a horse," marvelled the buyer as he watched the bellows churn away. Without so much as a man to operate it, the device churned and trundled on a regular pace, breathing air into the smith's forge. The sound mingled with the steady clink of the smith's hammer against glowing iron, the heat of it all mingling with the sweat and fire of the forge.
Hands on his hips, Al-Zanqi ibn Hurayth ar-Rammah smiled behind his coarse black beard. "It is astonishing, isn't it? They use these all the time in the land of Sin. It all happens because of water steaming off when you heat it."
"In Sin? You've been there?"
"Oh yes. I worked for a trader out of Mubaraka. We saw many machines like this. Learned how they work, even." Ar-Rammah moved around the rumbling machine, gesturing to it with a broad, callused hand. "It's a special kind of steel. The way the water burns off, it can just destroy normal steel. You need the kind of steel they make the big tanins out of."
The buyer's eyebrows rose with astonishment. "I'd heard about the amazing things that happen in Sin, but I've never seen anything like this. To think that steam could do this...." He looked over with a quick blink. "It won't get me worse weapons, will it?"
"Of course not. Your men will have the most quality jazails dinars can buy," assured the blacksmith.
Again the buyer looked back towards the forge, where work continued unabated. The scent of burning coal tinged their nostrils, the haze of it drawing sweat. Soon enough, though, he nodded to the ruddy-faced blacksmith. "Let me see the merchandise," he urged.
A grinning Ar-Rammah reached for one of his jazails.
Outside, puffs of white smoke rose above the chimney of the workshop, the telltale traceries of steam making their way into the skies above the Asmarid Empire for the first time. As they'd been doing ever since Ar-Rammah set up the new tool he'd brought back from Mubaraka, heads turned with interest.[4]
Word spread. Fast.
It would not take long before more chimneys would rise above Rusaddir. Then Oujda. Then beyond.
~
END OF ACT IX "A STORY WRITTEN IN BLACKPOWDER"
WE TURN THE PAGE
THE WORLD CHANGES
THE GEARS OF PROGRESS TURN IN ACT X
"THE BREATH OF THE WORLD"
DAWN OF THE AGE OF INDUSTRY
~
AD 2022
THE SKIES OVER THE ATLAS OCEAN
"Releasing payload now," called the copilot.
Whisps of over-ocean cloud rippled past the six-engined aircraft as it cruised into the thick of it. Responding smartly to the crew's commands, hatches along the craft's wings and belly slid open. A silvery hail of particles began to stream free, forming a glittering fan behind the white craft as it plunged deeper into the cloud.
That's right. Eat your breakfast, cloud. The thought was silly, but Captain Karima Alasula couldn't help but think it every time. The naturialism behind it all was obvious enough by now - by seeding maritime clouds like this with just the right mixture of particles and substances, it would ever so slightly lighten the albedo of the planet, bouncing back a little more sunlight and allowing the Earth to heal. But her mind still translated it as feeding the clouds breakfast - fattening them up and letting them float along like big puffy balloons.
She tapped the controls a little. The massive aircraft - a specialized blended-wing-body transport, cruising on the power of ultra-efficient fuel cells driving six electric hyper engines banked into the wings - shifted its trajectory subtly to plot its course through the thickest and widest part of the cloud. The longer their joint mission could spend in the cloud, the better off they'd be.
The data bore it out. Nearly five hundred years of pumping excess pollution into the air had taken their toll on the world. Her effort - well, the effort she was part of - wasn't fixing it singlehandedly, but they were helping. Sea levels had decreased over the past fifty years, and cloud seeding had played its part.
To her right, her copilot glanced over with a mellow smile, brushing an errant lock of blonde hair back behind the visor of her helmet. "All going according to plan," Lilja commented in her typical lightly-lilting Pellandish accent.[3] "This cloud's large enough to take the entire payload."
"I'm sure everyone down there will appreciate that." Leaving her hand on the illuminated control board, Karima eased back in the padded command seat, smiling a little in her own right. Faint green airspeed and altitude indicators shimmered in the aircraft's viewscreen, overlaid virtually over the otherwise white-and-grey billow of the sea cloud they were flying through.
Lilja checked her controls one more time before sighing wistfully, also leaving her hand on the panel. "You wonder sometimes if anyone realized back in the day that this would happen. That there'd be a global price for progress."
"There's one for everything, right," Karima conceded. "At least we can fix it."
"Yeah... I suppose that's true."
Far below, a ground-effect vehicle cutting across the ocean towards the Sea of Pearls. Travelers gazed up at the distant passage of the cloud-seeding aircraft and the distinctive shimmering spray that faded into the cloudbank itself, the eddies and currents of its passage visible even from below.
Their wonder was all too dull. Everyone had seen joint climate-preservation flights before. They would again.
[1] Palawan.
[2] Melilla.
[3] Pelland is a country in Alasca. The accents here are a variant on something Scandinavian.
[4] While steam is being picked up here, it's coming in at a time when the general level of technology is still evolving. The world isn't quite in the mid-1700s on every front, so there's a good chance the next few decades will end up looking more steampunk.
SUMMARY:
1555: Workers in the Janggala Kingdom begin using a Chinese steam engine to pump water out of coal mines in southern Sumatra. Nusantara becomes the world's second scale adopter of the steam engine.
1566: Al-Zanqi ibn Hurayth ar-Rammah, a blacksmith and trader from the Maghreb, sets up a steam engine to power a bellows at his forge in Rusaddir. Lower-pressure steam engines enter use in the Asmarid Empire - the third power in the world to begin adopting the steam engine.
