Neutrality challenge in pre-1900 world order

Fenestella

Banned
A state/statelet, militarily weak, geographically close to an old-school empire B (well before 1900, Roman, Mongol, ... you name it)

Is it possible for A to be a neutral country instead of a client state of B's?
 
Andorra made it quite successfully, being close not to one, but *two* great empires (though declining).
 
More than one regional power to play off against each other, and geographic bastions of some kind.

Could an island do as well as a mountain fastness? Say Sicily, poised between Italy and North Africa? The trouble here is that it is only in fairly modern times that sea power in its modern form exists, where ships can maneuver and navigate and coordinate on the high seas for battles of maneuver. An island people can concentrate resources others might need to expend on armies. But they have to have access to the comprehensive suite of resources they need to completely maintain their ships; if Sicily has a shortage of the kind of timber needed to make masts or suitable hulls, they are screwed, unless they can keep in contact with some reasonably nearby shores that can make up the deficit. And then their enemies might choose to cut that supply line instead of attack directly, and wait out the deterioration of their navy.

I think we can see why mountain people tend to fit the bill better.

To mountain fastnesses I can add parts of Palestine and Lebanon; historically lots of little polities, often refuges of small religious sects, have held out there.

Afghanistan also comes to mind, and maybe the Himalayan kingdoms and Tibet.

They also tend to be quite poor; if some great power really wants to control their territory, they tend to be out of luck. It helps to not have too much meat on their bones, and not to be essential to someone's strategic vision. Or anyway be so costly to hold that the great powers tend to prefer to bribe them (cheaply done) than to try and control them directly.
 
For a different take, it should be possible to set up a "little brother" type of dynamic, where the dominant power shares close cultural ties without actually holding any kind of real power - there'd be some level of domination just due to the size different, but nothing overt.

*USA and *Haiti, with a PoD of the early leader in the Haitian Revolution deciding to make hostages out of the Europeans, rather than killing most of them? Avoiding the massacre prevents *Haiti from being a pariah state, may plausibly result in an early recognized independence (convince Britain and the US to recognize the nation, and they can prevent Napoleon from landing troops), could butterfly into gradual manumission in the border states (Virginia still came close until Nat Turner; without the example of a terrifying slave rebellion, that push is much stronger), and yet there's no reason that the US should really try to annex the nation.

Cultural dominance is guaranteed, of course, but with the free/slave state balance needing to be maintained until after the Civil War there's not going to be a strong push to make *Haiti a state, and if the revolution doesn't completely destroy the economy, Britain as a secondary trading partner helps avoid a banana republic situation. You could well get *Haiti in economic orbit around the *USA without political control.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Thing is, it's kind of hard to come up with a surefire way to tell that a small state is definitively not a puppet/client state.

Like, say, Yugoslavia. Is that a Soviet client state or independent?
 
Like, say, Yugoslavia. Is that a Soviet client state or independent?

It's pretty hard call to say that one of the leaders of Non-aligned movement and receiver of extensive US aid is a Soviet puppet.

Honestly, if you were a bit more knowledgeable about it you would see it's a pretty ridiculous question.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
It's pretty hard call to say that one of the leaders of Non-aligned movement and receiver of extensive US aid is a Soviet puppet.

Honestly, if you were a bit more knowledgeable about it you would see it's a pretty ridiculous question.
Well, yeah, that's kind of the point. Yugoslavia looks like a soviet-influenced client state from a distance, because it's all communist, but when you look closer you see that it's actually kind of complicated.

So take... say, Bavaria in the 1850s. Was that a client state of Austria? Prussia? Or something in between?

Or if Bavaria's too powerful, what about various other German states and statelets...
 
Well, yeah, that's kind of the point. Yugoslavia looks like a soviet-influenced client state from a distance, because it's all communist, but when you look closer you see that it's actually kind of complicated.

So take... say, Bavaria in the 1850s. Was that a client state of Austria? Prussia? Or something in between?

Or if Bavaria's too powerful, what about various other German states and statelets...

Oh, I see what you mean. Good point.
 
So take... say, Bavaria in the 1850s. Was that a client state of Austria? Prussia? Or something in between?

Or if Bavaria's too powerful, what about various other German states and statelets...


I think the German states example reinforces an earlier point someone made about being a defensible bastion. Bavaria and Saxony could not stay neutral as their borders could not be held against stronger powers without the aid of a different stronger power so they continually had to play the game of alliances.
 
Top