Native America? Request for refs

I'm depending on them not getting news about the new world, and if they get the news, nothing thinking it's important enough to act on.

So basically Europeans being clueless because this scenario doesn't work without western Europe clutching the idiot ball.

Why else risk a trans-oceanic voyage?
The same reasons that voyages were risked OTL when it was known what this hulking land mass was?

The fur trade is worth big bucks, to pick something it would be hard to miss in North America.

I don't think it's that difficult to have an Eastward looking, conservative regime in Europe. It makes sense if things have been politically stable for the past five centuries.
"A" Eastward looking, conservative regime in Europe is easy. But you're trying to stifle the area between Barcelona and Hamburg.

At what point? In OTL in the 15th century, Western Europe was certainly a backwater. By any metric you care to name, it was eclipsed by Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. And ITTL, that status quo continues through the twentieth century.
In the 15th century? By China, yes. East Asia in general, probably. South Asia I don't know. But not Middle East or Eastern Europe anymore.

How he did what? You mean that he was governor of a colony in India? I do need to look up more about Asian/European relations in the 15th century, but TTL will have major butterflies there. No gunpowder empires for one thing. Chinese fire lances maybe, but certainly not cannons or guns. I'm not sure whether that gives more of an advantage to the Portuguese or to the Indians.
To quote from The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: "(T)here is no doubt that the development of the long range armed sailing ship heralded a fundamental advance in Europe's place in the world. With these vessels, the naval powers of the West were in a position to control the oceanic trade routes and to overawe all societies vulnerable to the workings of sea power. Even the first great clashes between the Portuguese and their Muslim foes in the Indian ocean made this clear. No doubt they exaggerated in retrospect, but to read the journals and reports of da Gama and Alburquerque, describing how their warships blasted their way through the massed fleets of Arab dhows and other light craft which they encountered off the Malabar coast and in the Ormuz and Malacca roads, is to gain the impression than an extraterrestrial, superhuman force had descended on their unfortunate opponents. Following the new tactic that 'they were by no means to board, but to fight with artillery' the Portuguese crews were virtually invincible at sea."

Which also relates to the issue of how backward Western Europe is.

You're essentially trying to make the region of the world most driven to expand and exploit outside its borders into an area that has no interest in anything except the traditional landbound routes for no reason.

General Greene: Even if the Mongols ravage Germany, that still leaves the Atlantic-bordering states that did what they did OTL - and they're the ones that need to be made into stagnant pits for this to work.
 
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This might be a stretch, but perhaps a way to pull Europe away from effective cross-Atlantic contact is to make the Mongols more successful then they were.
It's a possibility, but then we would still get the Black Plague, and the concomitant improvement of life for peasants who survive. We'd also get the leap forward in technology, medicine, and economics that Mongols caused when they linked up European, Chinese, and Arab experts. You'd also have to make the Mongols brutal and repressive governors, which they weren't (they were brutal and repressive conquerors, but once you were conquered, they mostly stopped killing you.)

A Mongol Eurasia might turn into an intense, inward-focused, scientific-economic powerhouse, blasting through Enlightenment and wrestling Industrialization to the ground. Europe in the 1700s is all glass and steel towers filled with shark-toothed investment banks. The New World gets a two-hundred year reprieve, but when the Old World arrives, it's in airplanes. :)

So I want to go the other way. Twentieth century Eurasia is ossified and mature 13th century Eurasia. Sleepy little principalities engaging in incremental improvement and lackadaisical tribute-trade. Borders shifting constantly over the heads of uncaring peasants. Great advances in medicine and materials science, but "money" is still chunks of shiny metal and "government" is the scary man who lives in the big house on the hill. Chivalric war evolved to the point where aristocrats watch it over picnic lunches.

Anyway, the OTL Mongols are so much of a wank to begin with (a continent-spanning military empire founded by a middle-aged man with no education from a ethnic group of universally despised forest-people), giving them the rest of Europe seems a bit much :)
 
The fur trade is worth big bucks, to pick something it would be hard to miss in North America.
That is a point.

"A" Eastward looking, conservative regime in Europe is easy. But you're trying to stifle the area between Barcelona and Hamburg.
Which I accomplish by means of the Catholic Church.
Without the distraction of the Mongol Invasion, and in the face of encroachment from Islam and Orthodox Christianity, the Vatican completes long-term goal of creating stable, large states, and forges a Papal Block from Portugal to Poland. The Block trades Eastward through Constantinople, held by the Milanese. After several devastating crusades and reconquistas, a trade concession is worked out between the three European religions that keeps everyone happy.

In the 15th century? By China, yes. East Asia in general, probably. South Asia I don't know. But not Middle East or Eastern Europe anymore.
The 15th century is after the Mongol Invasion. A better comparison would be Western Europe to everywhere else in the 11th century. That's the Jin and Song dynasties, Golden Age Islam, and the Byzantine Empire just coming down from its Renaissance.

To quote from The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: "(T)here is no doubt that the development of the long range armed sailing ship heralded a fundamental advance in Europe's place in the world. ...
When did those developments happen?

I think the difference in our philosophies of history is that I don't think that western Europeans are especially apt to explore or be advanced. That's what happened in OTL, but only because of particular contingencies.

But also, yes. I am planning to write a book about this. And the plot and themes of the book demand a world like I've described. Story-telling first, world-building second.
 
Which I accomplish by means of the Catholic Church.
Without the distraction of the Mongol Invasion, and in the face of encroachment from Islam and Orthodox Christianity, the Vatican completes long-term goal of creating stable, large states, and forges a Papal Block from Portugal to Poland. The Block trades Eastward through Constantinople, held by the Milanese. After several devastating crusades and reconquistas, a trade concession is worked out between the three European religions that keeps everyone happy.

What papal goal of "stable, large states"? This would run directly counter to the papacy's policy towards the (Holy) Roman Empire, to pick the most obvious example of a state the Church could have bolstered but instead sought to check and weaken.

The 15th century is after the Mongol Invasion. A better comparison would be Western Europe to everywhere else in the 11th century. That's the Jin and Song dynasties, Golden Age Islam, and the Byzantine Empire just coming down from its Renaissance.
Sure. But if we're looking at Europe as of the Age of Exploitation, we're looking at the 15th century, not the 11th.

When did those developments happen?

I think the difference in our philosophies of history is that I don't think that western Europeans are especially apt to explore or be advanced. That's what happened in OTL, but only because of particular contingencies.
The specific ships we're talking about? 15th century. But its a result of earlier developments and improvements from centuries earlier.

The situation of the High Middle Ages is too dynamic to be ossified in any our-world-like scenario. The 15th century is a consequence of earlier developments, which themselves were from earlier developments, and its all building on each other with enthusiasm and energy (not unique, but the reasons the Muslim world stumbled are hard to duplicate because the circumstances are different).

I never said they were especially apt, but stopping it requires stopping things across very broad area without any single institution or figure you can influence that would make a difference. If you want to change, for instance, the fate of China, you can mess with an Imperial dynasty. If you want to change the fate of Europe, you have to mess with many competing polities which don't have a common head (and no, the Pope doesn't count - the Pope never had that level of authority over Europe's kings and policies no matter how hard certain popes tried) - making it so that for instance France is lead by monarchs who think this "New World" business is rot will be greeted with "More for us!" by everyone else until the French kings recognize its a bad idea.

But also, yes. I am planning to write a book about this. And the plot and themes of the book demand a world like I've described. Story-telling first, world-building second.
The plot and themes of this book demand an ASB scenario?

Why not just write an outright fictional world, instead of trying to have Europe be like this?

This isn't meant to be critical - I'm just at a loss for how using names like "England" and "Catholicism" and a very strained alt-history framework serves the story and themes (whatever those are).
 
Yes, I think this will be the biggest ideological hurdle in the story.
The problem is, I really believe that the European exploration and exploitation of the rest of the world is an accident of history, and it wouldn't have taken much for us to ignore the Americas. Of course once the process started and European powers figured out that they had two resource-rich post-apocalyptic continents on their hands, the result was inevitable, but making that realization wasn't inevitable. It took a lot of money and effort to fund a lot of crazy ideas before adventures in the New World started paying off. Without a good reason to look for an alternate route to Asia, exploration is more trouble than it's worth.

But I agree that's a boring, negative reason for a huge shift in the way we perceive the world. As much as I think the mere absence of Genghis Khan would have been enough to keep Europe from colonizing the Americas, it would be nice to have some other barriers.

Here are a few possibilities:
1) The first major European intrusion into the Americas (after the Scandinavian fishermen) was made by missionaries in the 1700s. The missionaries, being the products of an integrated Eurasian culture, bring along Muslim surgical and Chinese sterile techniques, plus an extra two centuries of whatever discoveries the large, interconnected Eurasian network has made. Smallpox does not kill 90% of the native American population, but something more like half, with a lot of incentive for the rapid spread of medical (and other imported) technology. It wouldn't be too hard to manage this plague striking at about the same time as the Black Death in Europe (which will be delayed by the absence of Mongols, and finally given a chance to flourish by the trade network that made the missionaries possible). By the time the dust settles, American civilizations are healthier and better equipped to defend themselves.

2) South-Chinese ships (exploring Polynesia) discover the American west coast at about the same time Europe starts making inroads on the east-coast (16 or 1700s). Both lay claim to the both continents, and so for political reasons, they can't colonize or land huge armies. Instead, both powers wage a cold war over American land and resources, with the natives playing off both sides against each other.

3) Contact is made with the Americas (through North Atlantic fishermen or lost Portuguese traders or South-Chinese traders or all three), but then lost when the Little Ice Age and the Black Death hit simultaneously. The Black Death is caused by the integration of Europe and Asia through trade, the little ice-age by the growth of North American forests when smallpox kills off the native population. Things are worse even than in our timeline over the whole Northern Hemisphere, because higher populations in Eurasia were already straining resources. It takes a century for Europe and Asia to claw their way back to some semblance of civilization (1800AD), another to re-establish contact with their lost colonies (1900). After that, some combination of the above to keep things stable?

Any other ideas?
 
Yes, I think this will be the biggest ideological hurdle in the story.
The problem is, I really believe that the European exploration and exploitation of the rest of the world is an accident of history, and it wouldn't have taken much for us to ignore the Americas. Of course once the process started and European powers figured out that they had two resource-rich post-apocalyptic continents on their hands, the result was inevitable, but making that realization wasn't inevitable. It took a lot of money and effort to fund a lot of crazy ideas before adventures in the New World started paying off. Without a good reason to look for an alternate route to Asia, exploration is more trouble than it's worth.

This isn't a matter of ideology, except for your "Screw the riches of the New World, I want to believe that European interest in the New World would be slim to nonexistent in any but the most freakish circumstances".

It would be very, very hard for Europeans to miss the fact that they have opportunities for trade and wealth in the New World once people start seriously looking at it, and people will start seriously looking at it - route to Asia or not - unless you basically have Europe write off exploration/exploitation entirely.

I can understand that for literary purposes that having a New World be what you want in 2000 would be interesting. But speaking as someone interested in both alternate history and fantasy, I think your scenario would be better suited to a fantasy novel which resembles Earth than to actual Europeans, and #2 is just . . .

. . .

what.

So here's my question. Why can't you have Europeans exploring and exploiting North America, but for whatever reason settler colonies fail (quite easy) so that the First Nations (using the Canadian term as the term "Indians" won't exist) can develop and come to terms with - as far as they can - the new world (lower case)?

That way you have Europeans going for the furs and tobacco and such, but much as they would to any places an ocean away - good tradin' opportunities, but that's all.
 
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