Most plausibly balkanized world?

if you kept the world tribal, without the wheel or any for of long distance transportation, you would find the world dotted with small autonomous collectives
 
No Homo Sapiens Sapiens and the Neanderthals and others live in tiny tribes scattered across the world.
 
Have the Holocene Interglacial last just up to the emergence of the Natufians, follow it with another Glaciation that lasts a few thousand years and that ATL is perfectly balkanized to a degree not possible with even the more primitive kind of states.
 
Well, you either have to make successful wars somewhere on the scale between impractical and unthinkable in all cases (which probably means just about everyone has a MAD-capable weapon or else a major change in human culture and psychology, or possibly something that looks balkanized straight-on, but when you look at it cross-eyed you've got a single world government. Or vice versa.), or else you need to have the military strength of all of the microstates in a fairly close balance at every level of locality, and then explain away while natural-seeming alliances don't happen...
 
No colonisation would seem the simplest way, or only limited - then you have the Indian Nations, the various Indian states (in India), a sleuth of African tribal kingdoms, self-ruling Pacific islands, and so on

Throw in the HRE for fun

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Obviously the British should give independence to thirteen difficult colonies separately with defence treaties to preserve their independence.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
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No colonisation would seem the simplest way, or only limited - then you have the Indian Nations, the various Indian states (in India), a sleuth of African tribal kingdoms, self-ruling Pacific islands, and so on

Throw in the HRE for fun

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

And the European kingdoms would be poorer, which can have interesting consequences.

However without the Europeans local empires might rise in Africa and India, which lessen Balkanization.
 
Plausibly? The 12th-century Russian type of land dividing (a ruler divides his land among his children, who divide it among their children, etc etc until you have hundreds of small states) is common in other parts of Europe (just like it was in France a few centuries before, and I think the HRE also splintered in a similar way), and the Mongols never come to crush it. Come 1400, you have thousands upon thousands of tiny states all across Europe. That's probably when the situation about stabilizes - in a way reminiscent of Puss in Boots: not much left to divide between children.
Then, such a situation leads to very minor colonising (not much money and especially materials). Indians (both American and Asian), Africans and Oceanians survive in their small tribes.
Of course, there would inevitably be a guy who would conquer a lot of land... comparatively. (Like how the whole Athens vs. Sparta thing, while a lot to them, is barely noticeable on a map of Europe.) And his children, and their children in turn, would divide even that. Balance, you know.
The only blemish on the whole thing might be the existence of China... which, of course, still is 1) isolationist and 2) often divided among warlords anyway. So that also doesn't matter.
Oh, and I don't know what would happen to such a world when the Industrial Revolution comes... if it does. Maybe it doesn't. I'm not very good at predicting such things.
How many divisions there are? Don't know. Ten thousand as a wild guess, most of them in Europe.

Less plausibly: Culvana from Thande's Moonstruck.

More plausibly and/or with a later POD: not much more than a few hundred. Space-filling countries are inevitable in some places (e.g. Kiribati might not have its OTL borders, but what there certainly won't be is each little archipelago as its own country; North Siberia and Nunavut, and for that matter Greenland, would be either affixed to whoever wants to own them, or at most divided between two or three such countries; that's certainly not the only cases). Still, a surviving HRE might well double that number, and a princely-state India (or a fragmented USA/Brazil/Mexico/whatever) add another bunch; the end result is probably close to a thousand. Maybe a little more - but not by much.



...So what, how? ;)
January First-of-May
 
Ten countrys in North America

Obviously the British should give independence to thirteen difficult colonies separately with defence treaties to preserve their independence.
Then you could have Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Canada West, New England, The New York Empire, Confederate States of America, Arizona, Republic of Calafornia, Morman, Indian Terratory.
 
Super Black Death, to the extent that settlements are pretty much isolated from one another for a century, or two, or three. This leads to more dialectal and linguistic diversity, less technological advancement, and a much later discovery of the New World. This makes for a much more balkanized world.
 
Depends on when the PoD is and what you describe as a country.

Historically speaking their have been alot of periods where the world was 'Balkanized, for instance Europe in 1300 had over 100 countries.
 
Super Black Death, to the extent that settlements are pretty much isolated from one another for a century, or two, or three. This leads to more dialectal and linguistic diversity, less technological advancement, and a much later discovery of the New World. This makes for a much more balkanized world.

Errr, Years of Rice and Salt? :rolleyes:
Anyway, I recommend Hyper Black Death that not only killed 99% Europeans, but other Afro-Eurasians as well...
 
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