Things that often get ignored in TLs...

[Snake Featherston]

obviously yes, in fact you could almoust say the many battles and wars are in fact by-products of the rest, sometimes even tips of the iceberg in a way, or critical moments of system overload and crash
but it is simpler for people to concentrate on the obvious and supposedly familiar, all the more so since if you actually went digging into all the historical facts about all that constituted the, mostly not so turbulent and for some not so interesting course of history, you risk getting lost in a mountain of converging stories and emergent systems in which all parts are almost equally important
so people stick to what they are familiar with, interested in, or can find on wikipedia

As I said, depending on how it's done, this can make an AH world more realistic. If I were to use linguistics, I'd ask someone like Leo who has a degree in the field to help check my facts, for instance. That's one of the great aspects of AH.com, there are resources here in terms of the members, not just the Internet.

How do you deal with that well? Some things are fairly obvious; bigger esperanto, for instance. But charting an entirely new language?

Extrapolate from OTL trends and note the role that the legacies of military and economic imperialism can play in the world's largest language. It might have been an eternal French-speaking Lingua Franca world had it not been for the financial issues with French colonization of the New World, after all, the French and Spanish were first....

On the other hand, France is still here after what, 1200 years? Perhaps there will always be an England...

I would not consider today's republican France to be anything at all like the western half of the split of Verdun, or even like the very first Republic of 1789. Yes, France is still here, but the France of today is a radically different society (albeit in a very positive, not at all negative direction.) As for England, the England of today is the predominant power in the Union of England, Scotland, and Wales, but the England of today is not that of Alfred the Great, either.

I wish I had your confidence here. Look at North Korea; and Stalin followed, after all, Lenin.

North Korea is allowed to continue to exist because none of the neighboring countries can afford the humanitarian and financial crisis from the collapse of the regime, and unlike Afghanistan or Iraq, those neighboring countries can grab Uncle Sam by the balls financially enough to keep us from going in and doing it anyway. As for Stalin...there's no Soviet Union anymore, is there?

There have been a few of these, I think. Hrmm. I forget which, though. Oh, Bentham is one with a fairly different philosophical context.

I did try my hand at this; search for Answers for Milinda, for Hellenistic Buddhism tying into incipient Gallic urbanization.

I will look into your TL as well. I do appreciate, by the way, all the suggestions and TLs people are saying to look into, it's really nice.

I've given some thought as to what Modern Latin might look like in a Roman-Empire-survives-to-the-present-day world. Unfortunately--and this is why it's better that most AH scenarios don't delve much into language--I'm not a qualified linguist or a speaker of the language I was considering. I like to study linguistics, and I know more about it than the average person. But I am by no means an expert on how language changes over the centuries. And neither are most people who deal with AH. If I tried to actually work out the structure of a Modern Latin, the result might impress laymen, but real linguists would just point and laugh.

You could ask Leo, I'm sure he'd be willing to help you. He is the resident linguist, after all. And the shape of your modern Latin would depend highly on the nature of the Roman society you invision and other aspects of the world, as well.

If I may, do you have any suggestions for a good crash course on economics for a writer to use instead of the stuff pulled out of his arse?

I do not, but what I would suggest is to search for different viewpoints and interpretations of economics, as there's no guarantee ATL X or ATL Y will follow the economic ideas of OTL, but a good knowledge of things like Voodoo Economics, Keynesianism, Monetarism, and things like Libertarianism, and yes, Communism are all worth having.

Also I seem to have mixed up 4 & 5 with 5 & 5.1...

Tis OK, it happens.

1. Because i dont think anyone of us is a professor in linguistics and i dont see why this should be a factor in ATLs when OTLs history books never tell who speaks what language.

Leo Caesius is. And I don't about the ones you read, but the ones I read track the emergence of national identities and what happened with the rise of nationalism and language (IOTW, tiny dialetical region imposes itself over all others).

2 - 4. Because we dont think like that/dont want it to happen?

Then you'd better come up with damn plausible reasons why it doesn't.

5. I dont care much about Africa IRL, why should i care about a African WI?

Different strokes for different folks. As nice as all the American history WIs is as an American, I want to deal with WIs that affect entirely different aspects of Planet Earth. If you don't, well, that's fine, it's not like you're required to do this.

5.1 I am no economic historian and no only economic basics and thus i avoid writing about it.

If you want realism like that why not write one yourself. I dont see the fun in writing all of this into stories

I'm working on such a TL, If I Forget You O Samaria. That's the reason for the slowness of the next update, I'm seeking to provide a snapshot of the world at the time of the rise of Rome.

Cant really, my POD is a bit too late (WMA).

Well, if your POD's too late, then it's too late. That's all right.

That is definetely going to happen for at least two nations in my TL.

Look forward to reading it.

That has already happened to Germany in my TL, although in an unorthodox, highly violent fashion.

Now I'm more intrigued, considering OTL German Unification, I wonder how much more violent...

Havent dealt with Australia and Africa yet because im a little occupied with Europe, but plan radical butterflies there.

Look forward to reading that, as well.

Ive just done that with my latest post, and I can say the Bismarcks will play a large role in financial history in my ATL.

Excellent...

Ah, I think I have done some cultural intermixing in South America. India too is more interesting; heck the Danes are there...

Danish South Africa? Your TL will be one of the first I look at.

but all 6. are valid points, people really do neglect a huge load of what constitutes the totality of reality when making conclusions about history

its just that any which way you approach t you cant avoid simplification, you simply dont have enough facts

You can't avoid it, no, but you can't ignore it altogether the way so many people do. For instance, assuming by some divine intervention Nazi Germany wins WWII, people need to consider the effects of such a victory on both the economic structure of Germany, on the demographics of Europe, and on the wider world at large, especially since any Axis victory would have seen only the European Axis win, the Asian ones would have lost.

This point is apt; I will include finance and economics in We'll Meet Again but my knowledge is limited. Besides, I have to build financial systems in the ATL, and that requires quite a lot of knowledge. A complex system of economics in the ATL is impossible; i can really only talk about the foundation of certain systems to make things easier later on and certain booms and busts.

And that's better than most, so I will look forward to checking out We'll Meet Again.

 

[Broz]

what i find strange is how little used are ideology and psychology, in making ATL
ideology especially
so much obviously depends on the particular form an ideology takes, the segments of the population it presents or draws support from, the class system it proposes or does not propose, its views on economy, identity, war, nature, freedom, etc...

yet most ATL deal with existent ideologies, changing little or nothing about them

this seems strange since this surely is one place you can apply the butterfly effect to the maximum

 

[Snake Featherston]

what i find strange is how little used are ideology and psychology, in making ATL
ideology especially
so much obviously depends on the particular form an ideology takes, the segments of the population it presents or draws support from, the class system it proposes or does not propose, its views on economy, identity, war, nature, freedom, etc...

yet most ATL deal with existent ideologies, changing little or nothing about them

this seems strange since this surely is one place you can apply the butterfly effect to the maximum

I also agree with this. In a timeline where, say, the Roman Empire lasts for another century or two in the West, the butterflies from that alone could remove absolutism, much less the 19th and 20th Century ideologies. Or a world where the Council that decided Indians were human decides they are subhuman instead could lead to a much nastier and brutal West, especially when groups like the San and the Aborigines are encountered.

It would be entertaining to read about such worlds, not so much to actually live in them.

 

[Faeelin]

I would not consider today's republican France to be anything at all like the western half of the split of Verdun, or even like the very first Republic of 1789. Yes, France is still here, but the France of today is a radically different society (albeit in a very positive, not at all negative direction.) As for England, the England of today is the predominant power in the Union of England, Scotland, and Wales, but the England of today is not that of Alfred the Great, either.

But they're still around, and the King of England still is. So's Denmark, Norway, Sweden.... China was an Empire up to 1911. So maybe it's not so hard to see a perpetual empire.


Change need not entail revolution.

 

[Snake Featherston]

But they're still around, and the King of England still is. So's Denmark, Norway, Sweden.... China was an Empire up to 1911. So maybe it's not so hard to see a perpetual empire.


Change need not entail revolution.

I would note here one feature of the first four societies you mentioned: none of them had any sustained external forces attempting to collapse them (and they still don't, for that matter.) The British monarchy of today is a figurehead, and bears precious little resemblance to that of 500 years ago, much less that of today. I'd venture that monarchs such as King John would not recognize Elizabeth II's monarchy, now would they? And in the case of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, none of the Scandinavian nations have been under any sort of actual threat to their very existence (and the one such potentiality, the Nazi Empire and its pursuit of a union of the Germanic peoples crashed and burned within 12 years).

In China, by contrast, a series of internal and external forces all conspired to tear down the Empire, because the Imperial system with its cultural, economic, and military support apparatus as such had never been in serious question. Not long after it did begin to face such forces (starting around the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion), the Chinese Empire fell apart entirely, and has never had a version of the English Restoration.

The situation required for a perpetual empire is for it to exist in relative safety and without outside pressure to threaten the whole fabric of society. When that goes, all bets are off, and that's what did in the independent Indian societies of 1492 and the Chinese Empire, and also the Ottoman Empire. Edit-And none of the proposed perpetual empires were ever likely to face such a blessed situation, unless the Nazi solution were to prove far more effective and productive than such a system of building a mausoleum on quicksand thinking it's a mansion built on marble could ever have been (which humankind as a whole can be grateful for.)

 

[Faeelin]

I think Chinese living under the Yuan and Early Qing would find it hard to believe their society had never faced serious external threats, no?

 

[Dan1988]

How do you deal with that well? Some things are fairly obvious; bigger esperanto, for instance. But charting an entirely new language?

Hey, why not? With me, the next time I do a TL, I'm actually planning on incorporating in a new language and how it has changed over time (maybe even a few incidents where the linguistic differences cause some problems).

 

[Dan1988]

-snip-

I'm not a linguist either, but playing around with languages and linguistics is actually fun. What is the key is that language is always prone to change, and even if you get a neo-Latin going, it's going to look like one of the Romance languages due to Vulgar Latin.

 

[Dan1988]

1. Because i dont think anyone of us is a professor in linguistics and i dont see why this should be a factor in ATLs when OTLs history books never tell who speaks what language.

Hey, I'm no linguistics prof either. However, I think that the language issue is one that I think would be worth exploring. Say, for example, if one were to write a "surviving Vinland" TL. Obviously, they are not going to speak the same language as others in Scandinavia, so a "Vinlandic language" would be interesting, if not just for what different Native American words would end up looking like.

 

[Snake Featherston]

I think Chinese living under the Yuan and Early Qing would find it hard to believe their society had never faced serious external threats, no?

There was a wee bit of difference, though. Yes, the Mongols and Manchus were external threats, but they simply wanted to take over the system,, not destroy it altogether and scrap it for a new one. Emperor Khubilai and his successors were more Chinese than Mongol, especially around the time of the rise of the Ming. And the Manchus were simply seeking to administer the system, again, on the current apparatus, not replace the Chinese Empire with the Manchu Totalitarian state or what have you.

The nature of the threat in the late 19th Century, when people were not simply wanting to be Emperor instead of the Emperor, but wanted to be President instead of the Emperor made the Imperial system have to find a rationale to justify itself, something it had never had to do before.

 

[False Dmitri]

There was a wee bit of difference, though. Yes, the Mongols and Manchus were external threats, but they simply wanted to take over the system,, not destroy it altogether and scrap it for a new one. Emperor Khubilai and his successors were more Chinese than Mongol, especially around the time of the rise of the Ming. And the Manchus were simply seeking to administer the system, again, on the current apparatus, not replace the Chinese Empire with the Manchu Totalitarian state or what have you.

To be fair, that's really all many of the Germanic invaders of Rome wanted as well. Odoacer and Theodoric fancied themselves as taking over and succeeding the Caesars.

 

[False Dmitri]

Mind if I shamelessly plug a fairly big project I'm in? It has aspects of AH but bills itself as a shared world of constructed cultures, since the history is secondary to the culture stuff, and since the events do not flow logically from a single PoD; indeed, if anyone were to actually count the points in which the TL diverges from reality, only to re-converge later on... well, they'd have to count very high. Anyway, it's called Ill Bethisad, which means "The Universe" in one of its many made-up languages. I don't like saying, "Look at us! Look at us!" but I think, Snake, that you might like some of what has been put together, mostly by people smarter than I am who have been involved far longer than me.

1) From what I've seen, there aren't an awful lot of TLs that deal with linguistics. Surely in the event of a longer-lasting, say, Roman Empire, the Latin Language would have been in a stronger position or the Germanic languages in a weaker one? If the Romans say, expand to the Vistula and thus establish a foundation to be rebuilt on, might there not be hybrid Latin-Slavic languages or Latin-Germanic ones?

Constructed Romance languages is what the project initially was all about! There is Celto-Romance (Brithenig in Wales http://hobbit.griffler.co.nz/introduction.html; Kerno in Cornwall http://www.bethisad.com/kerno.htm; and Bhreathanach in old Strathclyde http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/breath.html). There are Slavo-Romance languages like Venedic in Veneda, which replaces Poland (http://www.geocities.com/wenedyk/language/), and Slevanjek in the Slovakia region (http://wiki.frath.net/Slevan). As for Germano-Romance, I can think of only one, called Jovian, spoken in a region centered on Alcase (http://www.cinga.ch/langmaking/jovian.htm).

Most of these have only a vague alt-historical justification, like "The Romans settled this area a bit more, or something." There's another, I think based on the idea of a stronger Mughul Empire, called variously Moghul and "Fake Persian": http://www.geocities.com/rodlox/Conlangs/Faux_Farsi.html.

5) Certain continents are entirely, if not entirely, mostly entirely, ignored in AH. Where are the Oceanian PODs dealing with different layouts of the islands, and different Australias? Why are African PODs so often ignored (I've got a TL in the works about an alternate Bantu spread and the results that has on later African culture, it's in the embryo stage as of present time, but it's my next project after IIFTOS (shameless plug.))? Where are the South American PODs? Or the ones that deal with Native Americans? Or Central Asians?

Time to plug my own page, an alternate Easter Island: http://www.geocities.com/henua_home/index.html. I'm not good enough to make any fake languages for it, but I have been working on a script. For like a year... expect one... soon? I think that, as many have mentioned, most people who post on this board are not well versed in non-Western history. To which I say, learn! But people write what they know, and very few people know everything about every place .

Central Asia has a rather well developed structure as well, found here: http://ib.frath.net/w/Turkestan.

Or, hell, for that matter, alternate religious PODs? I'm religious, been raised an Evangelical and all that, but my first major TL deals with an alternate Judaism and no Christianity (but perhaps a related cultural manifestation), so it doesn't bother me much, religious history is still religious history. Why no TLs, perhaps, on a different nature of paganism, perhaps a world where Western paganism develops theology and intricate natures of societies and the East doesn't, prompting the rise of a syncretic Christian culture in India, and a West that retains a form of polytheism up to the modern age? This is Alternate history, after all.

There was a site on a modern Celtic paganism called An Graveth or Cravethism, but the site appears to be down: http://ib.frath.net/w/Cravethism. There is one on a hybrid of Slavic paganism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Lutheranism, called Vera and described here: http://ib.frath.net/w/Eerä.

5.1) Why is finance more or less ignored in most TLs?

There's a fairly lengthy bit on exchange rates, although it doesn't go into the details of finance per se. But it's at least more detailed than you'll find in most AH: http://ib.frath.net/w/Currency.

6) Cultural intermixing.

IMO, that's what makes althistory interesting in the first place! This other project I'm involved in has far too many good examples of cultural cross-pollinization to list, but I'll plug one of my own that I'm fairly proud of. Whummlin is a sport devised by Scottish colonists in the Georgia region. It combines the Native American game of chunkey with curling: http://ib.frath.net/w/Whummlin.

Sorry again if this sounds like an ad. I just think IB may have features that you'd find interesting.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Mind if I shamelessly plug a fairly big project I'm in? It has aspects of AH but bills itself as a shared world of constructed cultures, since the history is secondary to the culture stuff, and since the events do not flow logically from a single PoD; indeed, if anyone were to actually count the points in which the TL diverges from reality, only to re-converge later on... well, they'd have to count very high. Anyway, it's called Ill Bethisad, which means "The Universe" in one of its many made-up languages. I don't like saying, "Look at us! Look at us!" but I think, Snake, that you might like some of what has been put together, mostly by people smarter than I am who have been involved far longer than me.

I will indeed check it out.

Constructed Romance languages is what the project initially was all about! There is Celto-Romance (Brithenig in Wales http://hobbit.griffler.co.nz/introduction.html; Kerno in Cornwall http://www.bethisad.com/kerno.htm; and Bhreathanach in old Strathclyde http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/breath.html). There are Slavo-Romance languages like Venedic in Veneda, which replaces Poland (http://www.geocities.com/wenedyk/language/), and Slevanjek in the Slovakia region (http://wiki.frath.net/Slevan). As for Germano-Romance, I can think of only one, called Jovian, spoken in a region centered on Alcase (http://www.cinga.ch/langmaking/jovian.htm).

Most of these have only a vague alt-historical justification, like "The Romans settled this area a bit more, or something." There's another, I think based on the idea of a stronger Mughul Empire, called variously Moghul and "Fake Persian": http://www.geocities.com/rodlox/Conlangs/Faux_Farsi.html.

Let's see...I think if more records had survived of Romano-Britain ya'll might have a much easier time of it with Celto-Latin, but Slavo-Latin I'd like to see, and as for Germano-Latin, we already have that, we call it "English."

I will definitely check out the alternate Persian language...

Time to plug my own page, an alternate Easter Island: http://www.geocities.com/henua_home/index.html. I'm not good enough to make any fake languages for it, but I have been working on a script. For like a year... expect one... soon? I think that, as many have mentioned, most people who post on this board are not well versed in non-Western history. To which I say, learn! But people write what they know, and very few people know everything about every place .

Central Asia has a rather well developed structure as well, found here: http://ib.frath.net/w/Turkestan.

Interesting...a different version of rororongo? I shall definitely look into it...

There was a site on a modern Celtic paganism called An Graveth or Cravethism, but the site appears to be down: http://ib.frath.net/w/Cravethism. There is one on a hybrid of Slavic paganism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Lutheranism, called Vera and described here: http://ib.frath.net/w/Eerä.

Sounding like a broken record, but Eastern Orthodoxy and Lutheranism and Slavic religion is just too delicious a combination to miss out on.

There's a fairly lengthy bit on exchange rates, although it doesn't go into the details of finance per se. But it's at least more detailed than you'll find in most AH: http://ib.frath.net/w/Currency.

Sounding cooler and cooler...

IMO, that's what makes althistory interesting in the first place! This other project I'm involved in has far too many good examples of cultural cross-pollinization to list, but I'll plug one of my own that I'm fairly proud of. Whummlin is a sport devised by Scottish colonists in the Georgia region. It combines the Native American game of chunkey with curling: http://ib.frath.net/w/Whummlin.

Sorry again if this sounds like an ad. I just think IB may have features that you'd find interesting.

Nah, this kind of thing is what I started this thread for. There's a lot of interesting TLs for me to look at. And Scots + Native Georgians = WIN!

(Sorry for the Netese...)

Nah a chunk of India thats Danish, specifically Mysore.....then again, thinking about it, that IS a tad unorthodox....hehehehe...I have to write more to weaken Britain there but....hehehehe

Yeah, that would be worth checking out indeed.

To be fair, that's really all many of the Germanic invaders of Rome wanted as well. Odoacer and Theodoric fancied themselves as taking over and succeeding the Caesars.

And then Justinian went and screwed it up. As I said, external influences, in this case the actual original internal force making it worse for itself than otherwise it might have been.

 

[Lord Insane]

From the perspective of my TL- in fact, a whiningish defence of my TL:

1) From what I've seen, there aren't an awful lot of TLs that deal with linguistics. Surely in the event of a longer-lasting, say, Roman Empire, the Latin Language would have been in a stronger position or the Germanic languages in a weaker one? If the Romans say, expand to the Vistula and thus establish a foundation to be rebuilt on, might there not be hybrid Latin-Slavic languages or Latin-Germanic ones? I've also not seen the effects of different societies and their strengths and weaknesses on the structures of language itself. With a balkanized China or US scenario, the different dialects present in OTL will get stronger and more like separate languages. If said balkanization goes on long enough, entirely separate languages might evolve, depending on the nature of it. On the other hand, with a scenario like a longer-lived Mongol Empire or a greater-sized Islamic Caliphate under Arab rule, the resulting dialects of Mongolian or Arabic might leave greater influences than IOTL (and with Arabic, that influence can be all out of proportion to the initial number of speakers). There's also a tendency to ignore that just as a modern Anglo can't understand Beowulf, or modern Romance speakers Classical Latin, or what have you, that language changes over millenia from loanwords and from general evolution over time are also ignored..

Not enough time for major changes, really. There is one major change that would be compared to OTL already, but the format of the TL makes it hard to mention, since it is a pure negative change, that is, it was something that happened in OTL, but for various reasons won't happen in TTL, and won't happen for reasons that make it hard to push in in a footnote, at least at this point. Other than that, most changes as yet would be fairly specific things (less popularity for calling Germans Huns, no true name for tanks as there have been no tanks yet, etc). I do plan to mention that changes have occured if allowed by the subject matter later on in the TL, at least in some form.

2) I also don't see in many scenarios that ultimately societies that get hegemony become overconfident, their ruling principles ossify, and then it all goes to hell and the society may or may not be rebuilt. That's the story of China (with rebuilding going on) and the former Roman Empire (without rebuilding it.) It also seems that TLs never take into account things like the OTL 1910s, where a massive social upheaval simultaneously topples multiple societies, such as the Porofiriato, the Chinese Empire, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire (slightly later than the others, but all the same...), the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Taisho Democracy. If Imperial Germany imposes a German domination of Europe, then it goes on and on, and Europeans never get together enough to topple it, or alternately, the German Empire never gets overconfident or stagnant and thus brings itself down. If the Soviets conquer all of Western Europe, same thing. If the Ottomans and Byzantines survive longer, their survival into the 20th Century and beyond is all but assured, never mind that the demands that brought down both OTL Empires never lessened and just continued..

Not enough time for it to happen, yet o). The Germans only got their dominance a few years back (not even a decade yet), neither the Austro-Hungaro(-Poles) nor the Ottomans have been hit with a major crisis since the War, and the War was less of a strain for both of them, so the specific demands that brought them down in OTL were lessened, altough the specifics that brought them to a point were that could bring them down might not have.

3) The converse of the above. If the US or China or some region IOTL united is divided, it always stays divided, no Qin Shi Huangs come along and impose unity (or Chandragupta Mauryas). The presence of nationalism, as well as the Roman example are often ignored in such TLs. Even if people think that a United US is just like OTL, the nature that such a unification takes, whether peaceful or a military unification like the creation of the Maurya Dynasty and the Qin Empire, will have immense, long-lasting effects on the "new" US. A militarily-united USA might prove to be much more despotic than the OTL one, for instance. A peacefully-united (on the model, perhaps of the Haudenosaunee) one might be more isolationist, but more inclined to trade both with indigenous peoples and neighboring countries and with other continents..

Doesn't really apply to the TL.There is more to say, but it will take a long time until I get that far in the TL.

4) In cases of greater success of totalitarianism or other autocratic dictatorships, the process of devolution that occurs in all such cases is often handwaved away. The Qin state devolved to such rapidity that it completely crashed and burned, but the examples of France (turning from the violent Revolutionaries the more peaceful Neo-Bourbons), the USSR (from Stalin to Brezhnev), the PRC (from Mao to Xiaoping), to innumerable instances from dynasties worldwide, they all testify that eventually no matter the nature of a society, that it will sooner or later change and adapt, or collapse, and for totalitarian or repressive states, such change often means collapse..

The last part of the TL was to a large degree about changes in an authoritarian state caused by a need, or at least the perception of a need, to change or fall...

5) Certain continents are entirely, if not entirely, mostly entirely, ignored in AH. Where are the Oceanian PODs dealing with different layouts of the islands, and different Australias? Why are African PODs so often ignored (I've got a TL in the works about an alternate Bantu spread and the results that has on later African culture, it's in the embryo stage as of present time, but it's my next project after IIFTOS (shameless plug.))? Where are the South American PODs? Or the ones that deal with Native Americans? Or Central Asians? Or, hell, for that matter, alternate religious PODs? I'm religious, been raised an Evangelical and all that, but my first major TL deals with an alternate Judaism and no Christianity (but perhaps a related cultural manifestation), so it doesn't bother me much, religious history is still religious history. Why no TLs, perhaps, on a different nature of paganism, perhaps a world where Western paganism develops theology and intricate natures of societies and the East doesn't, prompting the rise of a syncretic Christian culture in India, and a West that retains a form of polytheism up to the modern age? This is Alternate history, after all..

Too late a POD for most of that. Far too late a POD. That doesn't mean the happenings of the continents beyond Eurasia and North America will be ignored, of course. But: we need those PODs you mention, but we do not need only those PODs- a different, say, American Civil War has its place, as well. I'd say you are to a degree blending two common issues here, of which one is not so much a problem with the TLs made on their own as it is a problem with *which* TLs are made.

5.1) Why is finance more or less ignored in most TLs? The reasons for societal collapses when they occur are usually financial or cultural or what have you. The role that financial structure and trade relationships between various cultures plays is virtually ignored, also. If it's done, it's done in Turtledovesque fashion with complete ignorance of what and why except that the events portrayed are a duplicate of OTL. And the role of economic strain in the collapse of Indigenous American and African societies is almost entirely ignored. Marxist history overdoes the role of economics, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant, for Chrissakes!.

I don't know enough, and economics have the problem that it often is almost impossible to get away from ideological biases- just look at the Great Depression debates! Duplicating OTL is an easy way to get around that, if not the best one. Not going into detail can help.
I try to keep finance in mind, at least, even if it mostly doesn't crop up in the TL.

6) Cultural intermixing. The Arab Empires of the period from AD 600 onwards have had an immense impact on Christianity, ditto Chinese society on Japan, and of course, the nature of the English and their attitude to colonization in both Canada and the US (but also in the Caribbean) produced radically different situations for Indians. A world where a Neo-Roman Empire comes into contact with the Indians, say, or perhaps a super-China or Japan or even India itself coming into contact with the Indians (sorry Flocc, but this was too delicious a pun to ignore) and the cultural intermixing that produces? Also, this is as good a place as any to note that in most TLs, India plays precious little importance, when IOTL, it was and still is one of the major cultural centers on the planet, and Africa also, for that matter.

Things won't happen on as broad as scale as you mention here, but, as with the language-thingies mentioned above, there will be slightly different cultural mixing. Perhaps not always both ways, of course.

 

[Snake Featherston]

From the perspective of my TL- in fact, a whiningish defence of my TL:

Not enough time for major changes, really. There is one major change that would be compared to OTL already, but the format of the TL makes it hard to mention, since it is a pure negative change, that is, it was something that happened in OTL, but for various reasons won't happen in TTL, and won't happen for reasons that make it hard to push in in a footnote, at least at this point. Other than that, most changes as yet would be fairly specific things (less popularity for calling Germans Huns, no true name for tanks as there have been no tanks yet, etc). I do plan to mention that changes have occured if allowed by the subject matter later on in the TL, at least in some form.

Since your TL deals with a recent POD, that's understandable. But a TL that has the US and the Byzantine Empire both together? Hell, no.

Not enough time for it to happen, yet o). The Germans only got their dominance a few years back (not even a decade yet), neither the Austro-Hungaro(-Poles) nor the Ottomans have been hit with a major crisis since the War, and the War was less of a strain for both of them, so the specific demands that brought them down in OTL were lessened, altough the specifics that brought them to a point were that could bring them down might not have.

Well, German hegemony wouldn't collapse in a decade, not even under the Nazis, so that's again understandable.

Doesn't really apply to the TL.There is more to say, but it will take a long time until I get that far in the TL.

I understand.

The last part of the TL was to a large degree about changes in an authoritarian state caused by a need, or at least the perception of a need, to change or fall...

I'll be checking it out.

Too late a POD for most of that. Far too late a POD. That doesn't mean the happenings of the continents beyond Eurasia and North America will be ignored, of course. But: we need those PODs you mention, but we do not need only those PODs- a different, say, American Civil War has its place, as well. I'd say you are to a degree blending two common issues here, of which one is not so much a problem with the TLs made on their own as it is a problem with *which* TLs are made.

Once you get to post-1900, then the main cultural centers will be Eurasia and North America, for a while at least, assuming things develop recognizably as OTL. So then, yes, I understand that.

As to the second part of your statement, absolutely, things have their place but Civil War and WWII ad nauseam is just that, ad nauseam.

I don't know enough, and economics have the problem that it often is almost impossible to get away from ideological biases- just look at the Great Depression debates! Duplicating OTL is an easy way to get around that, if not the best one. Not going into detail can help.
I try to keep finance in mind, at least, even if it mostly doesn't crop up in the TL.

It could happen that to ponder an entirely distinct economic system removed from OTL Communist-Capitalist dichotomies might avoid the ideological bias problem altogether, because depending on the POD, something that completely butterflies away modern economic ideas and ideologies is not impossible at all.

Things won't happen on as broad as scale as you mention here, but, as with the language-thingies mentioned above, there will be slightly different cultural mixing. Perhaps not always both ways, of course.

And again, depending on what POD you choose the cultural interaction plus the framework it occurs in can be more or less different when you get to the modern age. And yes, interaction is not always both ways, at least not obviously that way.

 

[Atom]

its very very difficult to write pre-columbian American TLs. Theres a lot of stuff you have to find from often obscure sources and much of the knowledge in the area is in flux. At this point theres a sort re-re-revisionism on the scale of native American states, how many there were, how advanced they were, how they got there and everything else! its a rather frustrating feature of the area.

 

[False Dmitri]

its very very difficult to write pre-columbian American TLs. Theres a lot of stuff you have to find from often obscure sources and much of the knowledge in the area is in flux. At this point theres a sort re-re-revisionism on the scale of native American states, how many there were, how advanced they were, how they got there and everything else! its a rather frustrating feature of the area.

At that point you just need to make some creative choices about what historians' theories you use as the basis for your TL. If it works as fiction and as creative cultural construction, I say go with it.

Obviously, going with crackpot theories results in fantasy, not AH. But yesterday's mainstream history is today's crackpot theory, and vice versa.

 

[storkman]

Some thoughts

I was reading this thread, while pondering my last trip through the archives (Confederate Victory! Nappy Wins! Germans don't make silly mistakes!), and some ideas came to mind. I hope I can supply some food for thought...

First, the preponderance of Western-oriented timelines makes sense. Most posters are interested in their own civilization and how it may have developed differently. I don't think it's because everyone hates India or Khmer or wherever, just that (say) a longer-lasting Roman Empire is more relevant to my world.

Second, there are ... templates ... available for OTL grand sweep of history. We have some idea of what an ascendant Spain or Britain would look like, because we've seen them. We don't have any model for an aggressive colonizing Mughal Empire, so it's harder to extrapolate. Also, you miss out on the shivery almost-like-OTL feeling of "54'40" AND fight!".

Third, maps. Maps are fun, and coloring them in with vast swathes of pink/purple/green is even more fun! I share the wish for more linguistic/technological/social AH, and have seen some excellent ones, but they tend to be more "intimate" (to pick a word), and have less sweep and grand scope, and of course, mappage. Perhaps the soft-AH elements could be used more as color or supplements to more standard AH timelines.

Fourth, ennui. Many posters here have happily devoured AH for years, and eventually get tired of now-cliche scenarios which they've seen a dozen times. Personally, I don't see this... the exact same POD could be taken hundreds of different ways. Example:

Romanus: Let's fight!
Alp: Oh man, do we have to? I wanna go fight the Fatmids!
Romanus: Oh, okay, fine. Have it your way.
[Alp, Romanus go back to their respective armies]
Alp: Men, I've scared the infidel Bizzies away with my personal magnificence. Now what?
Romanus: Men, I've scared the heathen Muzzies away with my personal magnificence. Now what?

See? The possibilities are endless!

Fifth, personal preference. Some posters have and idee-fixe that their favorite country got a raw deal in history, and want to "fix" it. (Considering that almost every country that's ever existed is now gone, they may have a point) Or they lurk in other timelines, waiting to pounce whenever their favored nation gets a bad break, loudly asserting that there's no way things could have gone worse than they did. Not naming any names, but you know who you are. It's all part of the fun.

Sixth, there really are points in history where everything balances on a knife's edge. This is especially true the further back you go, where kings really mattered, armies were smaller, and one battle (or marriage!) could change everything.

Seventh, and finally, Byzantium. It was the last heir to antiquity, so has immense sentimental value. The entire OTL history of the ERE is so freakin' ASB that people can't help stirring the pot even more. Plus, my own feeling is that (kind of like Austria-Hungary) they tried so hard and kept their bizarre anachronism state alive for so long against all expectations, that AH writers want to throw them a bone.

Whew! That about wraps it up. To apologize for all this verbiage, I'll throw out some PODs...

* Arabs defeat Byzantines on schedule, but get spanked HARD by Sassanids. Do they regroup and try again, or pour everything West?

* Arabs defeat Sassanids on schedule, but get spanked HARD by Byzantines. Do they regroup and try again, or pour everything East?

* Atahualpa gets a vision ("In hoc signo vives") -- or somehow hears about what happened to the Aztecs -- and in the famous confrontation with Pizarro and Friar Vincente he does NOT throw the Bible on the ground. Instead he says "I am intruiged by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter". Now what?

* Columbus sails under the aegis of Venice. The colonial era gets a vastly different start, more like trade missions than conquest and settlement, at least at first. Spain has just taken Granada but they're still full of vinegar, and Africa's just sitting there...

* Manhattan Project fails, Americans invade Japan. Millions die in ensuing chaos, USSR takes over Hokkaido. Maybe Sovs set up Ainu as collaborator elite (heh). What does Japan look like in 2008? Are the islands depopulated enough that they bring in settlers from China? USA? How long does the occupation last?

* Crassus avoids Carrhae, instead sparring with Parthians in hilly Armenia. Rome doesn't lose it's aura of invincibility, Crassus doesn't die but instead comes home with a modest military victory or two. With the Triumvirate still strong, can the Republic survive?

 

[Berra]

I don't find it in TLs per se but a lot of questions about UN seems to ignore the early history of the organisation. It was set up after WWII containing two power blocks, one containing what still was colonial empires, one was a dictatorship, one of the worst.

They managed to form an organisation that have done good at times but it is limited by it's origin. Thus it can't become the leuage of democracies, have to tolerate dictatorships and stuff like that.

 

[Snake Featherston]

1) Eh, I'm rather different that way. OK, I can see a lot of the potential ways to alter Western civilization, now what are ways to alter the rest of humanity so that the likes of China or the Hindus or the Sub-Saharan Africans get to dictate terms? That's the way I approach things.

2) Seeing a Mughal Empire or a Gupta Empire be wanked would be a nice change of pace.

3) I'm not that good with maps, I'd need to ask someone else to make mine... That's one reason I focus on the soft AH.

4) Yeah, you could spin the same PODs different ways, but Sealion is one notorious example of the same impossibility being raised over and over again. Another is the likelihood of a united India prior to Britain's arrival.

5) Eh, things can always get worse. It's getting them better that's hard....

6) Yes, there are. Now, when's a Tallas TL going to be written? Or a world in which the 10 Lost Tribes...oh, wait SHAMELESS PLUG I'm already writing that one SHAMELESS PLUG.

7) I'd say that the Umayyads were the last heir, not Byzantium, if only because Islam didn't really start altering social patterns until the rise of the Abbasids.

7.1) Considering Europe was an underdeveloped, anarchic backwater, my guess is they invade the Sassanids for Mk. 2.

7.2) That was OTL, pretty much, we already know the answer. The Arabs got the shit kicked out of them at the First Battle of Constantinople.

7.3) The Spaniards sign a treaty and break it as soon as the ink is dry, as happened in the US. Or alternately, as the Tawantinsuyu disintegrated, you may see the Spaniards simply wait and start playing its division against it, and thus conquer more thoroughly over a longer period of time (and perhaps leading to more indigenous successor ethnic groups in any *2000s Latin America).

7.4) Venice would have had a helluva time financing such an expedition. A colonial era built on trade effectively butterflies away the US and much of Latin America. More intensive colonization of Africa is hard to speculate on, one potentiality would be that OTL French Africa would be more Spanish-speaking, and that a Scramble for Africa comes earlier. Possibly more British influence on the New World if Spain refuses to do anything about it.

7.5) 'Twould require a different laws of physics, that would. Assuming that Downfall goes in, Japan likely becomes an entirely different nation by 2008, it would require a full rebuilding. Due to the underpopulation, new arrivals might be more likely, and Japan might resemble a modern-day Polynesian or Melanesian state more than IOTL, with a smaller native population and a ruling elite from Outside.

7.6) No, it wouldn't. Carrhae was just one problem, Julius Caesar in Gaul was another. When he succeeded like that, he'd still want war, but Crassus might be experienced enough to give ol' Jules the once-over.

Berra: That bothers me also. In a TL with no World Wars, for instance, there's no pressure for such a thing.