Scramble for the Americas

I had been thinking about this for awhile and I thought it would be a very interesting subject (if not a tad ASB), how would you get the most amount of nations to create their own colonies in the Americas to create a melting pot of diverse ethno-cultures? The POD could be anytime the Americas would be discovered.
 
I had been thinking about this for awhile and I thought it would be a very interesting subject (if not a tad ASB), how would you get the most amount of nations to create their own colonies in the Americas to create a melting pot of diverse ethno-cultures? The POD could be anytime the Americas would be discovered.
Well in OTL, you've got the following establishing new world colonies.

Spain
Portugal
England later Britain
France
The Netherlands
Sweden
Denmark
Russia
The United States
The Knights of Malta
The Duchy of Courland

Basically all sovereign European countries that have an Atlantic coastline, three that didn't have a direct Atlantic coastline (Russia, Malta, and Courland), and one American power (U.S.)
 
Navarre and Brittany could probably join in if they hadn't been absorbed into Spain and France. A more successful Darien scheme gets you Scottish colonies. There might be a possibility for some Hanseatic trading posts too.
Morocco, Italy, Greece, and maybe some African and Asian countries such as China and Japan

The Sahel is a much more attractive prize to Morocco, and closer too (though the Sahara might as well have been an ocean it is shorter than the Atlantic). Greece is under Turkish rule at this point, so that's unlikely to happen. The Italian city states might do it, but they generally focused on the east, and their colonies would be at the mercy of whoever controls Gibraltar. China and Japan both have empty-ish lands next door for colonization. That said, I could see them establishing control in name only and making some of the east coast tribes into loose tributaries.
 
Hit Iberia with a sledgehammer or have it remain under Cordoba. Without the Catholic Church having a strong power to endorse who enjoyed enough land based security to be able to invest in making their huge theoretical gains stick, there's more space for competition as every individual effort is going to be open to contestation and need to succeed or br backed long enough to get established and recognized
 

hipper

Banned
Hit Iberia with a sledgehammer or have it remain under Cordoba. Without the Catholic Church having a strong power to endorse who enjoyed enough land based security to be able to invest in making their huge theoretical gains stick, there's more space for competition as every individual effort is going to be open to contestation and need to succeed or br backed long enough to get established and recognized

have humanity evolve in america rather than Africa, preventing european settlement untill the mid 19th Century.
 
have humanity evolve in america rather than Africa, preventing european settlement untill the mid 19th Century.

That could be done with a 1492 PoD, much less one so far in prehistory. You could easily have a 10000 BC PoD result in Amerindians colonizing the "primitive tribes" of Europe.
 
What if the Spanish empire collapses in the 17th-early 18th century and the various European powers decide to divide it among themselves?
 
Honestly, such a wide variety of European powers attempted colonies throughout North America as a previous poster pointed out. All you need is to intertwine various successful European colonial venture timelines and hamper the abilities of the major European great powers at the time from being able to monopolize power in the New World, and you could have something. The diversity of political powers in the New World would also create a situation where more minor or unlikely countries could jump into the fray by hijacking the colonies of less significant European powers.
 
have humanity evolve in america rather than Africa, preventing european settlement untill the mid 19th Century.
That could be done with a 1492 PoD, much less one so far in prehistory. You could easily have a 10000 BC PoD result in Amerindians colonizing the "primitive tribes" of Europe.

Easily?

Basic geography is against you, my friend. The dice rolls you'd need in order to get the Sunset Invasion are so absurdly lopsided that not only is it ASB, but would be a universe so completely unrecognizable as to have "Amerindian" and "European" lose basically all practical meaning
 
Easily?

Basic geography is against you, my friend. The dice rolls you'd need in order to get the Sunset Invasion are so absurdly lopsided that not only is it ASB, but would be a universe so completely unrecognizable as to have "Amerindian" and "European" lose basically all practical meaning

Amerindian = People from the Americas who look similar to today's American Indians
European = People from the region defined as Europe who look similar to today's Europeans (may or may not include North Africans/Levantines)

European culture, Amerindian culture, no, but people who look more or less the same, sure.

And a TL in a year right at the dawn of the Neolithic and agriculture globally can't somehow result in the situations for the New World and Old World being reversed? Ridiculous. We see all sorts of "what if X plant and Y animal was domesticated" threads and TLs, but the only time we ever see "what if X plant and Y animal wasn't domesticated" is in the context of an empty New World.
 
Amerindian = People from the Americas who look similar to today's American Indians
European = People from the region defined as Europe who look similar to today's Europeans (may or may not include North Africans/Levantines)

European culture, Amerindian culture, no, but people who look more or less the same, sure.

And a TL in a year right at the dawn of the Neolithic and agriculture globally can't somehow result in the situations for the New World and Old World being reversed? Ridiculous. We see all sorts of "what if X plant and Y animal was domesticated" threads and TLs, but the only time we ever see "what if X plant and Y animal wasn't domesticated" is in the context of an empty New World.

Exactly: no practical meaning. We have no clue what that society looks like, what kinds of economies, religion, technology, language, politics, history... quite literally nothing else but the most superficial physical traits. And there's a good reason why Europe can't be talked about in terms of isolated primativeness. Physically you can't keep it isolated from Asia, the Near East, and North Africa, meaning if you want to screw Europe in terms of having accecss to technology, domesticated animals, dieses exposure ect you have to screw over the entirety of Afro-Eurasia, which is so absurdly unlikely without conditions that essentially hit the entire world that its ASB.
 
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