This is quite interesting. Mind if I pick your brains? Or at least borrow from this thread?
I'm doing something called 'Land of Ice and Mice', aka 'Ultimate Thule.'
It's a timeline where as a result of small cultural changes around 717, the proto-inuit of Alaska, known as Thule, end up incorporating certain Dene-Ina cultural practices, which have the effect of preserving and proliferating certain edible plants, notably Sweetvetch, Bistort and a local plant called Claytonia Tuberosa not found generally in the north. The result is a slightly higher population, an earlier 'wave of expansion' across the Arctic, and an Inuit culture which evolves a series of pre-agricultural practices, which tip over into agriculture. The Inuit emerge as an Agricultural society, making extensive use of microclimate engineering, lithic mulch/stone cover agriculture, and evolving a suite of arctic/subarctic root crops which grow in marginal soils, but have a perennial cycle, taking two or three years to mature. Along the way, they domesticate caribou and musk ox.
Maybe not your cup of tea, and perhaps it seems implausible to you. But that's an argument for another time. There's nothing ASB to it. The plants are all real edible plant species, and the extrapolation is that they can be selectively bred into more productive domesticated varieties within three hundred years. I'm fairly conservative actually.
Anyway, about 1500 the Thule culture, or its crops end up in Iceland, and from there make it to the provinces around Trondheim about 1530. Around 1565 the crop package, is introduced into Sweden and Finland. And it starts coming into use in the Kola peninsula. It's a slow growing crop package, as noted, and it's based on a three field rotation system, it obviously takes up more land than southern crop packages, but it tolerates much poorer soils. It's not competitive in the south. But in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic, it's viable.
The result being an accumulating demographic shift in the upper regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola peninsula, among other places. It's not an overnight thing. Basically, its an accumulating thing where its introduced. First generation, mild population divergence, mostly due to reduced infant mortality, and more stable food supply. Second generation spreads, and you have a population increase. Third generation you've got significant divergence. Spread is a mixture of accretion and policy. In Norway and Sweden, it ends up being pushed, in different ways, for different motives. Other areas, like Kola, its not pushed, but it spreads on its own. Bottom line, it changes the demographics of the center and north significantly, with larger populations and more value attributed to lands. By fourth generation, significant populations. Also changes to the dynamics of Thule immigrants, Norse, Swedes, Pomors, Sammi, Nenets.
Anyway, so that's where I'm going with this, and I've been poking around the history around the Barents and White sea, the Pomors, Sweden, Russia, Poland-Lithuania, etc. trying to work out butterflies. There's a few things I've settled on. Norway breaks free of Denmark in 1613. The great famine of 1696 in Sweden and Finland is, if not completely butterflied, then substantially blunted. But I note that there's all kinds of wacky crazy hijinx going on in this part of the world between 1530 and say 1750.
Anyway, you guys seem on top of the history in this part of the world.
Can I pick your brains?