samcster94
Banned
I think the Confederacy works well as an evil pre 1900 state. It was founded explicitly on slavery and racial inequality while citing "Almighty God" as an argument for its existence. The slavery element is chilling as even in 1861, slavery was widely seen as a bad thing.To be honest, I don't think any of the states currently listed in this poll can be called "evil". Certain governments of many or ever all of them committed evil acts. Certain people in service of many or ever all of them committed evil acts. But even then, "evil" must be qualified in the context of its time. Was the Roman Empire "evil", or was it just...an empire? Empires do both good things and evil things, almost by definition.
The only kind of powers I'd call objectively evil are nightmare tyrannies like Nazi Germany (see: Holocaust), the USSR under Stalin (see: Holodomor), Cambodia under Pol Pot (see: killing fields), China under Mao (see: great leap forward), North Korea (see: batshit insane dictators and concentration camps) or the Islamic State (see: burning lots of people alive while attempting to set up a repressive theocracy). Warlord regimes and certain dictatorships in Africa tend to qualify for similar reasons. I think you can put something like the CSA on this list as well, being so disgustingly all about slavery.
But there we get to a crux, because I don't think the antebellum USA qualifies as evil. In part because, while it practiced slavery, it did so in a time when this was not widely considered a great evil. When a change in attitude came about, a new moral understanding was gradually embraced in the North. In the South, not so much. I'm trying to say that doing things we now recognise as evil when they were widely considered normal is less unforgivable than still doing those those things even when the world at large already understood that it was wrong.
Context matters. If you want a pre-1900 country that can actually be called evil, I'd say the CSA is your best bet. Ironically, that one's not on the list.