The Dead Skunk
- Thread starter Lycaon pictus
- Start date
This does feel a tad rich coming from Isambard Kingdom Brunel of Great Eastern/7ft-broad-gauge fame.
Excellent as ever, LP
Shiny. It had always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of this TL (which I've been seriously enjoying for years) that the Royal Navy, which spent the entire 19th century being at worst second with any new invention that might help them take, sink, burn or destroy the Queen's enemies, had sat on its hands for 20 years whilst the French, Italians and Americans started the steam age without them. They'd certainly be a fleet of samples, because none of the solutions to building a paddle warship work, but I couldn't really see them not bothering at all - even OTL they had ocean-going steam sloops with few but very heavy guns by 1831. Monitors were a bit of an exception but that was because monitors and North Atlantic weather really don't mix.
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Good to see the British won't just be playing catch up with the continent. With Spain crumbling at the edges again we need something to balance the power of Bonapartist France and United Italy.
Nit going well for Carlos over any sea is it these days? How's South America these days by the way? We have head about issues in Central America, New Spain, and the Caribbean but that big ol' continent seems quiet lately doesn't it?
Nit going well for Carlos over any sea is it these days? How's South America these days by the way? We have head about issues in Central America, New Spain, and the Caribbean but that big ol' continent seems quiet lately doesn't it?
Looks like the Spaniards will be hard pressed to control the Philippines. I wonder if Britain will intervene.
Lycaon pictus
Donor
There was a certain institutional lag there, mostly because about the time France started experimenting with paddle frigates the Royal Navy had (a) a track record of success, and (b) a large, expensive fleet to maintain already. When they finally did decide to start work on steam warships (some time after Isola di Cenere) there was some delay precisely because they wanted to come up with a better design first, something that didn't take up so much space amidships… and then the Hiemal Period hit and budgets got tight. But now they have a better design, and it's everybody else who has to play catch-up, so from the Navy's point of view this rather sluggish process has apparently been vindicated.
South America is mostly peaceful… except for Brazil, which is anything but. More detail later. The resurgence in the transatlantic slave trade at this particular moment has given Dutch Suriname a chance to import some slaves they're going to wish they'd left in Africa.
Britain's much too busy right now.
I guess it doesn't hurt to drop the name early. The President Pro Tempore is currently Thomas L. Winthrop (DR-Mass.), mostly on account of seniority.
If impeachment is successful we have a new president then...
Damn. This guy dies in early 1841. February 22 tbe. If he becomes president it's going to .... interesting.
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Hmm, early Filipino independence?
I still think it will come to resignation with Clay brokering some deal.
That tracks with Clay's abilities and usual modus operandi.
You know, if it goes the resignation route, this is going to have some major Nixon parallels: I'm imagining Daniel Webster thundering "what did the President know, and when did he know it!?"
Nah, Webster is a DRP; any deal Clay makes would likely have him onboard even with clenched teeth. It will be: the Populists Liberationists, and maybe even the Reformists calling matters out I expect. Still it seems it will take bit for things to blow as 1840 seems the year the Troubles truly kickoff.
Reformists... I miss Chasing Dragons.
I'd like to make a comment on the big picture based on hints in the previous updates.
So Aristism is an ideology which we know the gist of by this point, a rationalization for ultrareactionary thought promoted by the aristocracy in areas where they haven't been supplanted by the bourgeois.
Elmarism we are still fuzzy on. But it generally seems like future liberals tolerate Elmarism more than Aristism. Since we know Aristism is centered in the Viceroyalty of Peru, we can assume Peru modernized and expanded more over time. I think they likely consume at least Paraguay and Colombia at some point and maybe all of Patagonia.
So Aristism is an ideology which we know the gist of by this point, a rationalization for ultrareactionary thought promoted by the aristocracy in areas where they haven't been supplanted by the bourgeois.
Elmarism we are still fuzzy on. But it generally seems like future liberals tolerate Elmarism more than Aristism. Since we know Aristism is centered in the Viceroyalty of Peru, we can assume Peru modernized and expanded more over time. I think they likely consume at least Paraguay and Colombia at some point and maybe all of Patagonia.
Really? When it is mentioned. On the other hand, surviving does not mean they are intact. Perhaps Peru will eat what is left of Ecuador.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-dead-skunk.194832/post-11962818 strongly implies (in my reading) that Gran Colombia is still around as of 1980 (as is the aristist Virreinato).
Its been hinted something is going on in Brazil during the current war that is quite unpleasant.
If the Sun Never Sets on Your Empire… (2)
Lycaon pictus
Donor
This next update is going to be all over the place.
Sultan Husein certainly did not “found” or “oversee the creation” of the modern Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Even saying that he “permitted” it is giving him too much credit. In truth, the Bulgarians themselves created it in the years after the fall of Constantinople, choosing their own clergy and resuming the Bulgarian liturgy that Greek patriarchs had tried to stamp out. Husein was far more interested in keeping an eye on potential rivals than in trying to prevent any of this—indeed, most of the opposition to it came from the Christians of Constantinople who wanted to keep the local church Greek-dominated…
Although of necessity the Ministry’s representatives treated the Serbian and Greek Orthodox Churches as equals, they showed the Bulgarians no such courtesy. Indeed, historical evidence is unclear as to whether the elders sent to organize the Bulgarian branch of the Russian church even realized that a local Orthodox Church already existed.
It was certainly a great clash of cultures when representatives from the Ministry of Spiritual Reform and Popular Enlightenment met with the elected clergy in Sofia. The meeting, on June 20, 1837, was an utter disaster for the Ministry, and ended with them storming out of the room, Starets Yazykov bursting out “You people are worse than khokhly!”[1] as they did so. It was this, as much as the Tsar’s endless search for a willing Russian noble to appoint as king of Bulgaria, that convinced the Bulgarians their alliance of convenience with Russia was not meant to last. Not two weeks later, in Niš, the priest sent by the Serbian Orthodox Church was driven out by an angry mob of his “liberated” congregation…
The irony of the war between Miloš and Milan is that both of them lost. On April 20, 1838, Radetzky’s army scattered Milan’s supporters at the gates of Kragujevac. The general sent a messenger to Miloš at the rear of this army to let him know that his capital was his again.
The messenger returned with grim news. Milan’s artillery attack on the rear of Radetsky’s army earlier that morning had failed to make much impression on the audience, but it had succeeded at one goal—putting a one-pound ball through the torso of his father and rival. Radetzky, and Austria, had won the battle, but they would have to come to terms with Milan simply because they had no one else to claim the Serbian throne.
The terms took all summer to agree to, but in the end were simple. Milan abandoned all claims to lands in Bosnia, Kosovo, or anywhere else outside Serbia’s prewar borders. Serbia joined the Sudzollverein and would permit Austrian troop movements to support the war in Bosnia-Rumelia. The Orthodox Alliance was less by one.
A general rule, borne out by many sad examples throughout history, is that if a good man takes on a bad job, the man will turn bad before the job turns good. In the case of Pasqual Enrile y Alcedo, Captain-General of Guatemala[2], this seems to have been… partly true. As the man who had been effective commander of the army in Haiti through the long, losing war, he knew better than anyone what sort of war he was facing in this uprising—and Haiti had never shared a land border with Tehuantepec or Gran Colombia to facilitate weapons smuggling. From his point of view, the one bit of good news was that more than half the wrath of the rebels was being visited on the Miskito rather than on his own army, and this was cold comfort when many of those Miskito were subjects of Carlos rather than King Robert Charles Frederic…
Enrile’s army were soldiers, not NCs[3], and to anyone familiar with the darker parts of 20th-century history the atrocities they committed would no doubt seem dull and perfunctory. But they burned farms and villages that fed and housed rebels, and killed civilians who showed any sign of resistance. Estimates of how many were killed in the ’37-’38 campaign range from one to four thousand.
In his March 1838 report to Madrid, Enrile wrote that thanks to the good work of the Royal Corps of Engineers, the roads from Chiapas to Costa Rica and to the Atlantic and Pacific ports were in better shape than they had been, but that “had we simply hired the locals to do the work, we might have built two thousand miles of good roads for less than the price of this war and shed not a drop of blood”—a sharp criticism, since Carlos had commanded him to institute the mita in the Captaincy-General precisely to avoid the expense of paying them. Enrile further added; “The Lenca, the Matagalpa, and the other Indios of our lands have been prey to the depredations of Mosquito savages. The English, when they are not proclaiming their own self-canonization for their work against slavery and the slave trade, are turning a blind eye as their cat’s-paws consign our subjects to that same fate.”
Unfortunately, in May of 1838 Enrile took ill and died of malaria[4]. Command of the army in Guatemala fell to his right-hand man, General Thomas Robert Bugeaud, a French royalist who had immigrated to Lima in ’30 and quickly won the favor of Carlos, then Prince-Viceroy. Bugeaud had no interest in whatever might have inspired the revolt, and saw no reason not to cooperate with the Miskito in defeating it. Nor did he care whether or not the Miskito were acting with the permission of their king.
By mid-1838, the situation in eastern Brazil had stabilized into several coherent fronts. In the northeast, the Freedman’s Council still held sway, but was being gradually pushed back out of Bahia del Salvador into Pernambuco.[5] As long as the conservatives held even a portion of the coast, they could continue to trade Minas Gerais gold for French weapons and ammunition.
But Pedro’s royalists still held Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, São Paolo, and everything south, and had the loyalty of the Brazilian Navy. With this, they were ready to drive north along the coast, cutting the conservatives off from the sea. But then it happened.
On November 11 of the previous year, William Brown had finalized the restoration of entreriense democracy in the most unmistakable way—having been defeated as president, he’d accepted the results of the election and handed the office over to his successor along with wishes for success. This was good news for Entre Ríos, not such good news for Brazil or peace. His successor was Juan Antonio Lavalleja, a refugee from the Cisplatine who was determined to drive the hated Brazilians out of his homeland.
Pedro’s government was expecting Lavalleja to launch some sort of invasion in May. They were not expecting it to be so large and well-armed[6]. By the end of the month, Montevideo had fallen. It would have been an opportunity for the Ouro Preto[7] government to declare the independence of its territory from Brazil—if that had been the limits of its ambition.
But they wanted all of Brazil. They wanted the northeast, they wanted the south, they might even have wanted the Banda Oriental, they wanted to force their king to recant his abolitionist views, and most of all they wanted their slaves to stop disappearing into the swamps and jungles to the northwest…
At first glance, pre-War Formosa would appear analogous to a frontier territory in the United States—or, for that matter, Canada, Australia, Argentina, or a dozen other places. It was a place where an expanding nation of city-builders met an aboriginal hunter-gardener people they despised. It was a place where local administrators sometimes tried to protect the natives and honor agreements with them, but where there always seemed to be more settlers demanding more land—particularly on the western plains, which were far more conducive to their form of agriculture.
And as on other frontiers, the natives often dealt in good faith and just as often had reason to feel betrayed. The first time Europeans had ruled the island was in the seventeenth century, when the Dutch and Spanish established bases on the coast. The Dutch later evicted the Spanish, but they in turn were killed or driven out by Koxinga, who had secured an alliance with the natives. (Complicating matters further, the Dutch often brought in Chinese to work on Formosa, only to drive them to rebellion with ill treatment.)
But it is a fact that Qing administrators were often reluctant to encourage—and often outright forbade—Han colonization and/or sinicization of the island they knew as Taiwan. Precisely why this was the case is a hard thing to explain to Westerners. The Qiānhuā school considers this an early example of “the great cultural diversity within the Chinese sphere, and the care which the wise took to preserve it.” (I am literally quoting a textbook first approved in 1975 in Nanjing.) While certainly preferable to the Group of Five’s Bàquán ravings about “Manchu tyranny suppressing the superior Han race,” this is still far more prescriptive than descriptive.
For what it’s worth, it is the opinion of this author that the Qing simply did not wish to colonize what Beijing could not control. The Emperor’s court heard the stories of the American Revolution, the splitting of Portugal and Brazil, and the secessions of Gran Colombia and Argentina, and they thanked Heaven for the superior foresight that let them preserve the Middle Kingdom from such catastrophes…
Wherever ships full of wealth sail past shores full of poverty, someone will try to play pirate, and pirates had long been a part of Formosa’s history. But the pirates of Formosa in the 1830s knew better than to tamper with British shipping. The French merchantmen that sailed to Quelpart and back were too large and well-armed to consider as a target. Going down into the Philippines ran the risk of running into the better-armed Moro pirates there—or worse, a Spanish or Dutch warship. And when the War of 1837 began, ships sailing under American flags became very hard to find in those waters.
But there were much easier targets close at hand. Well nigh every nation that had ocean-going ships and access to opium took part in the China trade. Many of them favored clippers—small, light, fast ships that could not possibly carry as many guns as a freighter—for this low-buik, high-profit commerce.
With Americans almost locked out of the China trade by the Royal Navy, the French in particular were able to act as middlemen, buying American opium, ginseng, and (fake) rhino horn and selling it for silver in China. To avoid the attention of the Administrator of the Canton Customs, they smuggled it into smaller ports and bribed local magistrates to look the other way. But at sea as on land, no one is more vulnerable to crime than a criminal. The French clippers were faster than any junk, but could be cornered if you found them near the coast. Whether they were carrying silver or opium, the pirates could make a profit from it—not to mention the usefulness of the ships themselves, once the crew had been reassigned to the scavengers of the deep…
[1] I assume by now we’re all familiar with the Russian slur for Ukrainians, who also prefer to have their clergy elected by congregations and have been very slow to act on the Ministry’s diktats.
[2] Carlos brought back the original name of this colonial possession in ’35.
[3] Nuevos conquistadores
[4] He died in 1836 IOTL.
[5] If you’re following along on a map, Brazil’s internal boundaries were different at this point—Pernambuco was much larger and included substantial western land.
[6] Entre Rios has been doing better than a lot of other countries over the last few years in terms of economic health.
[7] Where the remaining conservative rebellion has its capital.
[8] An early G.G. Elmar quote regarding the slave trade.
Sultan Husein certainly did not “found” or “oversee the creation” of the modern Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Even saying that he “permitted” it is giving him too much credit. In truth, the Bulgarians themselves created it in the years after the fall of Constantinople, choosing their own clergy and resuming the Bulgarian liturgy that Greek patriarchs had tried to stamp out. Husein was far more interested in keeping an eye on potential rivals than in trying to prevent any of this—indeed, most of the opposition to it came from the Christians of Constantinople who wanted to keep the local church Greek-dominated…
Although of necessity the Ministry’s representatives treated the Serbian and Greek Orthodox Churches as equals, they showed the Bulgarians no such courtesy. Indeed, historical evidence is unclear as to whether the elders sent to organize the Bulgarian branch of the Russian church even realized that a local Orthodox Church already existed.
It was certainly a great clash of cultures when representatives from the Ministry of Spiritual Reform and Popular Enlightenment met with the elected clergy in Sofia. The meeting, on June 20, 1837, was an utter disaster for the Ministry, and ended with them storming out of the room, Starets Yazykov bursting out “You people are worse than khokhly!”[1] as they did so. It was this, as much as the Tsar’s endless search for a willing Russian noble to appoint as king of Bulgaria, that convinced the Bulgarians their alliance of convenience with Russia was not meant to last. Not two weeks later, in Niš, the priest sent by the Serbian Orthodox Church was driven out by an angry mob of his “liberated” congregation…
The irony of the war between Miloš and Milan is that both of them lost. On April 20, 1838, Radetzky’s army scattered Milan’s supporters at the gates of Kragujevac. The general sent a messenger to Miloš at the rear of this army to let him know that his capital was his again.
The messenger returned with grim news. Milan’s artillery attack on the rear of Radetsky’s army earlier that morning had failed to make much impression on the audience, but it had succeeded at one goal—putting a one-pound ball through the torso of his father and rival. Radetzky, and Austria, had won the battle, but they would have to come to terms with Milan simply because they had no one else to claim the Serbian throne.
The terms took all summer to agree to, but in the end were simple. Milan abandoned all claims to lands in Bosnia, Kosovo, or anywhere else outside Serbia’s prewar borders. Serbia joined the Sudzollverein and would permit Austrian troop movements to support the war in Bosnia-Rumelia. The Orthodox Alliance was less by one.
Burim Kelmendi, This Time We’ll Get It Right: A History of the Post-Ottoman Balkans and Interventions Therein (Eng. trans.)
A general rule, borne out by many sad examples throughout history, is that if a good man takes on a bad job, the man will turn bad before the job turns good. In the case of Pasqual Enrile y Alcedo, Captain-General of Guatemala[2], this seems to have been… partly true. As the man who had been effective commander of the army in Haiti through the long, losing war, he knew better than anyone what sort of war he was facing in this uprising—and Haiti had never shared a land border with Tehuantepec or Gran Colombia to facilitate weapons smuggling. From his point of view, the one bit of good news was that more than half the wrath of the rebels was being visited on the Miskito rather than on his own army, and this was cold comfort when many of those Miskito were subjects of Carlos rather than King Robert Charles Frederic…
Enrile’s army were soldiers, not NCs[3], and to anyone familiar with the darker parts of 20th-century history the atrocities they committed would no doubt seem dull and perfunctory. But they burned farms and villages that fed and housed rebels, and killed civilians who showed any sign of resistance. Estimates of how many were killed in the ’37-’38 campaign range from one to four thousand.
In his March 1838 report to Madrid, Enrile wrote that thanks to the good work of the Royal Corps of Engineers, the roads from Chiapas to Costa Rica and to the Atlantic and Pacific ports were in better shape than they had been, but that “had we simply hired the locals to do the work, we might have built two thousand miles of good roads for less than the price of this war and shed not a drop of blood”—a sharp criticism, since Carlos had commanded him to institute the mita in the Captaincy-General precisely to avoid the expense of paying them. Enrile further added; “The Lenca, the Matagalpa, and the other Indios of our lands have been prey to the depredations of Mosquito savages. The English, when they are not proclaiming their own self-canonization for their work against slavery and the slave trade, are turning a blind eye as their cat’s-paws consign our subjects to that same fate.”
Unfortunately, in May of 1838 Enrile took ill and died of malaria[4]. Command of the army in Guatemala fell to his right-hand man, General Thomas Robert Bugeaud, a French royalist who had immigrated to Lima in ’30 and quickly won the favor of Carlos, then Prince-Viceroy. Bugeaud had no interest in whatever might have inspired the revolt, and saw no reason not to cooperate with the Miskito in defeating it. Nor did he care whether or not the Miskito were acting with the permission of their king.
Dennis Lincoln, Spain Over the Sea
By mid-1838, the situation in eastern Brazil had stabilized into several coherent fronts. In the northeast, the Freedman’s Council still held sway, but was being gradually pushed back out of Bahia del Salvador into Pernambuco.[5] As long as the conservatives held even a portion of the coast, they could continue to trade Minas Gerais gold for French weapons and ammunition.
But Pedro’s royalists still held Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, São Paolo, and everything south, and had the loyalty of the Brazilian Navy. With this, they were ready to drive north along the coast, cutting the conservatives off from the sea. But then it happened.
On November 11 of the previous year, William Brown had finalized the restoration of entreriense democracy in the most unmistakable way—having been defeated as president, he’d accepted the results of the election and handed the office over to his successor along with wishes for success. This was good news for Entre Ríos, not such good news for Brazil or peace. His successor was Juan Antonio Lavalleja, a refugee from the Cisplatine who was determined to drive the hated Brazilians out of his homeland.
Pedro’s government was expecting Lavalleja to launch some sort of invasion in May. They were not expecting it to be so large and well-armed[6]. By the end of the month, Montevideo had fallen. It would have been an opportunity for the Ouro Preto[7] government to declare the independence of its territory from Brazil—if that had been the limits of its ambition.
But they wanted all of Brazil. They wanted the northeast, they wanted the south, they might even have wanted the Banda Oriental, they wanted to force their king to recant his abolitionist views, and most of all they wanted their slaves to stop disappearing into the swamps and jungles to the northwest…
Leopold Hytner, Where Did All That Blood Money Go?[8]
At first glance, pre-War Formosa would appear analogous to a frontier territory in the United States—or, for that matter, Canada, Australia, Argentina, or a dozen other places. It was a place where an expanding nation of city-builders met an aboriginal hunter-gardener people they despised. It was a place where local administrators sometimes tried to protect the natives and honor agreements with them, but where there always seemed to be more settlers demanding more land—particularly on the western plains, which were far more conducive to their form of agriculture.
And as on other frontiers, the natives often dealt in good faith and just as often had reason to feel betrayed. The first time Europeans had ruled the island was in the seventeenth century, when the Dutch and Spanish established bases on the coast. The Dutch later evicted the Spanish, but they in turn were killed or driven out by Koxinga, who had secured an alliance with the natives. (Complicating matters further, the Dutch often brought in Chinese to work on Formosa, only to drive them to rebellion with ill treatment.)
But it is a fact that Qing administrators were often reluctant to encourage—and often outright forbade—Han colonization and/or sinicization of the island they knew as Taiwan. Precisely why this was the case is a hard thing to explain to Westerners. The Qiānhuā school considers this an early example of “the great cultural diversity within the Chinese sphere, and the care which the wise took to preserve it.” (I am literally quoting a textbook first approved in 1975 in Nanjing.) While certainly preferable to the Group of Five’s Bàquán ravings about “Manchu tyranny suppressing the superior Han race,” this is still far more prescriptive than descriptive.
For what it’s worth, it is the opinion of this author that the Qing simply did not wish to colonize what Beijing could not control. The Emperor’s court heard the stories of the American Revolution, the splitting of Portugal and Brazil, and the secessions of Gran Colombia and Argentina, and they thanked Heaven for the superior foresight that let them preserve the Middle Kingdom from such catastrophes…
Wherever ships full of wealth sail past shores full of poverty, someone will try to play pirate, and pirates had long been a part of Formosa’s history. But the pirates of Formosa in the 1830s knew better than to tamper with British shipping. The French merchantmen that sailed to Quelpart and back were too large and well-armed to consider as a target. Going down into the Philippines ran the risk of running into the better-armed Moro pirates there—or worse, a Spanish or Dutch warship. And when the War of 1837 began, ships sailing under American flags became very hard to find in those waters.
But there were much easier targets close at hand. Well nigh every nation that had ocean-going ships and access to opium took part in the China trade. Many of them favored clippers—small, light, fast ships that could not possibly carry as many guns as a freighter—for this low-buik, high-profit commerce.
With Americans almost locked out of the China trade by the Royal Navy, the French in particular were able to act as middlemen, buying American opium, ginseng, and (fake) rhino horn and selling it for silver in China. To avoid the attention of the Administrator of the Canton Customs, they smuggled it into smaller ports and bribed local magistrates to look the other way. But at sea as on land, no one is more vulnerable to crime than a criminal. The French clippers were faster than any junk, but could be cornered if you found them near the coast. Whether they were carrying silver or opium, the pirates could make a profit from it—not to mention the usefulness of the ships themselves, once the crew had been reassigned to the scavengers of the deep…
Joseph/Shuchang Chao, Island of Deer
[1] I assume by now we’re all familiar with the Russian slur for Ukrainians, who also prefer to have their clergy elected by congregations and have been very slow to act on the Ministry’s diktats.
[2] Carlos brought back the original name of this colonial possession in ’35.
[3] Nuevos conquistadores
[4] He died in 1836 IOTL.
[5] If you’re following along on a map, Brazil’s internal boundaries were different at this point—Pernambuco was much larger and included substantial western land.
[6] Entre Rios has been doing better than a lot of other countries over the last few years in terms of economic health.
[7] Where the remaining conservative rebellion has its capital.
[8] An early G.G. Elmar quote regarding the slave trade.
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Lycaon pictus
Donor
This is pretty close. Both ideologies will have their adherents all over the world, but Peru/Chile will be one of the places where Aristism rises.
Elmarism is not exactly like Marxism, but it is a form of socialism and it does purport to offer an explanation for historical forces and a way to free the world from those forces.
Here are the most common symbols for both ideologies—the remer and the roue-saisie, which represents the Wheel of History in the power of human will.