I'm sorry if it's been covered before and I'm simply forgetting, but what exactly is the government doing to direct private investment towards the shipyards? This is before the founding of a national bank, so one can imagine the Naval & Colonies Ministry issuing bonds affordable to the average Portugese, backed by the revenue collected from the consolidating and growing merchant fleet and colonial empire. Common Portugese people get a nice, safe, and not to mention patriotic investment to help grow their savings, and the government gets the influx of cash it needs for the Castro Plan.
At this point the government is doing it mostly through the Chambers of Commerce (Lisbon, Porto and Rio), which technically own and regulate the new Merchant Navy. The Portuguese Navy as people knew it at the time was still funded by the crown, but Castro's reforms limited its make-up down mostly to the big warships it could afford (the 2nd and 3rd rates in squadrons), while lesser warships were increasingly a Merchant Navy monopoly. In addition, sailors of the 'private sector' were also either propped up by individual initiative or educated by the CCs, which at this point had a vested interest in securing their own logistics.
This new system is still mostly only implemented in metropolitan Portugal and some Brazilian cities. Lesser colonies building their own war or commerce vessels still have to fund them traditionally, at this point.
I would've said that it was stretching reality for Portugal's navy to so quickly be in the state to take on a European midweight like the Dutch, but judging from the timeline this 2nd Luso-Dutch War is either during or just after the 4th Anglo-Dutch War, with the Netherlands coming out of it with navy and economy trashed. It'll be hard for the Portugese to not come off as being nakedly opportunistic, but I guess everybody who isn't Britain would at least be satisfied with Britain not getting all of the Dutch corpse to herself - every penny landing in the coffers of some irrelevant Iberian state is a penny not going to Perfious Albion.
At this point you can't help but make an incorrect assumption because, quite frankly, this TL hasn't revealed enough of what's going on
yet to make a more accurate calculation of the odds. There's still some factors outside of sheer ship numbers that will affect the foreshadowed conflict, namely the people leading the combat, a few critical events and some important strategic aspects. Obviously I'm not gonna reveal any of them here.
To be clear, though, it will be during the 4th Anglo-Dutch War, but not at a point where it would significantly affect the odds outside of Europe.
How this war will play with Revolutionnary Wars? Will the United Provinces be occuped by France, like OTL?
Under the butterfly effect of the events posted so far, they will have no significant effect between them. The two conflicts are simply too separated both in terms of timing and location.
Speaking of which, how will corporate law be impacted by such moves? OTL, until late in the XIXth century, granting legal personhoog to entities was very restricted (until 1867 in France, for exemple). Likewise, banking laws migh have to change.
In Portugal there's pretty much no corporate law to speak of at this point. Pombalist Portugal is
that underdeveloped, legally speaking, and private enterprises still have to deal with a Crown that has absolutist tendencies, even though these are waning off during Joseph II's reign. In terms of law code, most of the codex is still using Phillipine Ordinances. The ongoing pre-industrial revolution, though, will force a big revamp in the next cabinet term, but you'll have to wait to see what happens.
The military might be one of the ways cultures merge in Portugal. For exemple, how will Indian cuisine be received in Brazil, and how will change to fit the local tastes?
I have no idea. Positively, I would assume. : p
But for a more concrete answer, you'll see in later posts where Indians are being directed by PRP and how they are affecting things.
For exemple the reunification of Timor?
Well, here's a map of OTL Southeast Asia, right around this time and just in the middle of the 4th Anglo-Dutch War, helpfully showing what was independent, what was vassalised, and what was officially part of somebody elses' empire.
(Video it was taken from.)
View attachment 463483
I'd say Portugal uniting the islands it partially controls is the easy pickings, in a way it's even desirable for the Netherlands too, it should be clear to them that they have to consolidate what they've got and everybody will know they're not in the position to expend cash on maintaining land borders with a rejuvinated Portugese army. The Portugese will want to come out of the war with something compact and defensible that can make them money and help secure the rest of their Far East empire. Even with their newfound strength, something like taking all of Java would just be a huge commitment of limited naval resources, they'll be making themselves Target No. 1 for the Dutch when they rebuild their fleet and they'll be getting so locally powerful that they won't be able to trust Britain will have their back.
The other big thing they could get from a resounding success is small but significant, indeed it's what Britain wrangled out of the Dutch: Free access through the Malacca Straits. This could mean also the taking of a small island for a simple naval base, to match that of the Netherlands.
View attachment 463495
I really appreciate the care it went into discussing what might happen here. It makes me glad people are paying attention.
But just like Lusitania said, these things have been decided and written
a year ago. To reassure you all, I did considerate all the factors you mentioned here
and more, so without giving any details I can more or less safely guarantee that the resolution to all that will be pretty satisfying.
I was thinking for the past few days, would you like any help with proofreading new posts? I really really enjoy this timeline, and if you need a little help tidying up the prose I would only be too happy to help.
We are currently working out an issue where some of the formatting and even some of the punctuation in these posts are being randomly eliminated when Lusitania transfers things from our workbench files into the forum platform, so some of these posts might look like they need proofreading when they are really just damaged by the upload. It happens in many writing sites, including fanfiction.net
If the problem persists, we will consider getting a proofreader. I used to have that role, but now I've migrated into writing most of the TL, so it's possible that I won't be able to juggle both tasks.
In the meantime, something we would really appreciate would be updates and corrections to promotion material, especially the TV Tropes page.
I'am a brazilian and for me this makes no sense at all historically speaking, in otl why you see the provinces you putting pro slavery are the ones which aren´t suppoded to be profiting because of slavery as the sugar and cotton trade in the northwest that was the more economically important in this region was in downfall and this region was as such poorer combined with the fact that most of the land was not made for agriculture being a geo-climatic anomaly, and had as such less slaves, while the north was completely underveloped and didn´t need slaves at all, the so called "drogas do sertão" or drugs of the backwood weren´t labor intensive and used mostly indigenous labour, while the anti ones where the ones which needed slaves because of the gold and other mineral were heavily dependent in slave labour and here is where most agricutural lands in Brazil of good quality are and where most of the agriculture was done, can you please explain why you have changed that, also this probably means a earlier abolishment of slavery in Brazil, so please explain why you have done that.
We changed it mostly due to the evolution ITTL of the Brazilian economy, like Lusitania explained. I do apologise for the lack of detail into which states were more heavily evolving towards slave-based economies, but we simply assumed it would be easy to infer.
To clear things out, at this point, in this TL, the coastal states largely determine the perception of the Brazilian 'backyard', and some cities, namely Bahia and Rio, politically dominate the discourse even if their influenced neighbors, like Parnaiba and Minas Gerais respectively, do not reflect their priorities and have their own vote on things. This is because of the internal competition caused by the CPD and MAD reforms which basically surrendered Portuguese authority and allowed the governors to sort things out with the Vice-Roy, in combination with regional rivalry.
Currently, ITTL, due to the CPD, Rio is focusing less on extracting gold for exportation and more on developing its own varied economy with said gold, with only some regulatory taxes still paid to Lisbon as a matter of sovereignty. It's also balancing discourse with Cisplatina, which is distinctively anti-slavery in this Brazil, so this is a very different Rio de Janeiro, politically speaking, than IOTL by 1780. In the early parts of this TL, there are also sections that explicitly talk about Pombal creating a lot of new plantation companies in northern states. This has created a 'narrative of Brazil', where the northern states are now relatively slave dependent compared to middle and southern states, which you could say is the hidden POD in this TL for Brazil's side.
So yeah, we do not have here a situation as radical as what we might imagine from American Civil War movies, but still one of significant friction caused by very radical intensification of plantations in the north (mostly around Bahia which, again, dominates representation of that half of Brazil), and de-intensification in the south in these last 30 years. It's really Portugal's fault for insisting in meddling in Brazil prior to the CPD and MAD, and now things are going down the intended self-correction, with some inevitable bumps along the way.
