What countries could have become great powers/empires but didn't?

[water123]

Speaking of Balkanizing, I think a Bosnian led Balkan Union could become a world power. A Serbian one would just fall apart.

IMO, you'd need to fundamentally change how Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats think of each other. Serbs and Croats iirc mostly think of themselves as the same people, with Croatia being the Catholic one, and Serbia being the Orthodox one. However, Bosnians are seen as traitors by both sides, having converted to Islam during the Ottoman Imperial period. You'd need to butterfly away Yugoslavia to do this, or at least give Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats time to develop strong national identities separate of each other, and even then after doing that why would they wanna form a Balkan Federation?

 

[Wallet]

IMO, you'd need to fundamentally change how Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats think of each other. Serbs and Croats iirc mostly think of themselves as the same people, with Croatia being the Catholic one, and Serbia being the Orthodox one. However, Bosnians are seen as traitors by both sides, having converted to Islam during the Ottoman Imperial period. You'd need to butterfly away Yugoslavia to do this, or at least give Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats time to develop strong national identities separate of each other, and even then after doing that why would they wanna form a Balkan Federation?

There were talks of a communist Balkans union after WW2 led by Yugoslavia. I’d figure that one led by Yugoslavia led by Serbs like OTL would spent too much time trying to discriminate against the Bosnians to unite with Bulgaria and Romania. But one led by Bosnians wouldn’t have those problems, with the help of the Soviet army of course.

 

[water123]

unite with Bulgaria and Romania

This just means that around every fifteen minutes a Bulgarian or Romanian will try to rebel, alongside the fact that the Soviet Army would more likely annex those places into the USSR than give them to an unwieldy and uncomfortably powerful Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia OTL had ethnic problems, and the locals were at least nominally close and of all of Yugoslavia only Serbia, Montenegro, and (briefly) Albania had been independent in the last half century. Throw in Romania and Bulgaria, both of which had strong nationalist tendencies and a far different history than the Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian continuum, and you have a situation that make the Yugoslav Wars make the Lebanese Civil War look like peanuts.,

 

[Wallet]

There were talks of a communist Balkans union after WW2 led by Yugoslavia. I’d figure that one led by Yugoslavia led by Serbs like OTL would spent too much time trying to discriminate against the Bosnians to unite with Bulgaria and Romania. But one led by Bosnians wouldn’t have those problems, with the help of the Soviet army of course.

This just means that around every fifteen minutes a Bulgarian or Romanian will try to rebel, alongside the fact that the Soviet Army would more likely annex those places into the USSR than give them to an unwieldy and uncomfortably powerful Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia OTL had ethnic problems, and the locals were at least nominally close and of all of Yugoslavia only Serbia, Montenegro, and (briefly) Albania had been independent in the last half century. Throw in Romania and Bulgaria, both of which had strong nationalist tendencies and a far different history than the Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian continuum, and you have a situation that make the Yugoslav Wars make the Lebanese Civil War look like peanuts.,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_Federation

This was a serious proposal though. The leaders of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria met in 1947 to discuss a merger.

 

[cmakk1012]

Than the US falls apart and Balkanized

Speaking of Balkanizing, I think a Bosnian led Balkan Union could become a world power. A Serbian one would just fall apart.

IMO the Serbian and Croatian nationalist mindset is far too fundamentally opposed to the Bosnians to even contemplate such a union. Serbians are still upset about the Field of Blackbirds over 600 years later—Islam is (or at the very least was during the 19th and 20th centuries) seen as the hated enemy, representing Turkish domination and oppression, and the Bosnians are its local representative.

You want a less contentious Balkan Union? Have the Slovenians lead it somehow I could actually see that happening in a world where Austria conquered most of the Balkans and then lost them to a nationalist revolt, as the Slovenians were in a relative position of power within the Empire.

 

[Timaeus]

Than the US falls apart and Balkanized

Yeah, but I was asking about California and Tejas becoming great powers in the fallout of a balkanized USA.

 

[Corsair_Caruso]

Also, the Romano-British: practically the only former Western Roman province to successfully defend itself for any length of time, an achievement which is particularly impressive when you realise just how much things were going to pot at the time (in a lot of areas, it seems that the level of material culture after the Roman withdrawal regressed to a level lower than that before the Romans came). It would be interesting to see how things might have developed if they'd managed to keep up their success.

Technically, they were still going until 1295, when King Edward of England conquered the last area of North Wales that had been holding out.

Ah yes, of course. Gwynedd: the last outpost of the Western Empire.

Oh, I’m super interested in this from a linguistic perspective.

 

[nandalf]

United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. Its breakup essentially broke Lisbon's power, but had it survived you could see a pluricontinental superpower ripe to dominate the 19th century, a truly integrated empire unlike anything the world had seen before. It could even have acted as an inspiration to actually implement Britain's Imperial Federation...

To have a transatlantic state was D.JoāJ VI plan all along and the Brazilians elites were supportive of it, they would gladly pay taxes to Lisbon as long as we got internal autonomy and free access to the rest of the Portuguese empire, common armed force, foreign and economic policy, and of course one Bragança Prince in Brazil. It was the Porto liberal revolution of 1820 and the narrow mindness of the Portuguese courts in ordering to close the ports to foreign countries and effectively trying to downgrade Brazil from a United kingdom to colony that led the Brazilian elites to embrace independence.Brazilian provinces were already sending delegates to Lisbon.

 

[cmakk1012]

Oh, I’m super interested in this from a linguistic perspective.

More knowledgeable people like @piratedude would know more about this than me, but British Romance died out very quickly in sub-Roman Britain with only a few tantalizing but dubious loanwords making it into Welsh.

 

[Byzantine fanatic]

Oh, I’m super interested in this from a linguistic perspective.

It can be seen in place names today. For example, Pontardawe in Wales. The name can be broken down 'pont' = bridge, derived from Latin; 'ar tawe' = on the Tawe, which is the name of the river.

 

[piratedude]

More knowledgeable people like @piratedude would know more about this than me, but British Romance died out very quickly in sub-Roman Britain with only a few tantalizing but dubious loanwords making it into Welsh.

I've actually been corrected in this matter

On the contrary, loanwords from Latin penetrate even the most basic strata of the language and can be easily dated to before the rise of the Catholic Church or Anglo-Saxon arrival in Britain. If we leave aside "cultural" words for which there would have been no native Brythonic equivalent (book, letter, school etc), there's still a remarkable number of Latin loanwords which have become the basic or only word for the concept in the Brythonic languages. For example:

coes 'leg' < L. coxa
braich 'arm' < L. bracchium
asgell 'wing' < L. ascella
barf 'beard' < L. barba
boch 'cheek' < L. bucca
corff 'body' < L. corpus
corn 'horn' < L. cornu
gwain 'vagina' < L. vagina

And that's just in the realm of body parts. For comparison, in English a Latin- or French-derived term for a part of the body is rarely the basic word, and there's always a solid Germanic synonym which remains in use (e.g. stomach vs belly): in Welsh these are the basic or only terms and the original Brythonic words have not survived.

As it happens, the Latin element in the Welsh lexicon is the part which has received the most scholarly attention. Falileyev's 2002 article Latin Loanwords in Old Welsh is comprehensive and up to date, although deals only with the rather limited corpus of Old Welsh (it is telling, however, that even in such a small number of documents the evidence for a thorough Latin lexifical penetration into the language is overwhelming). Haarmann's 1970 work Der lateinische Lehnwortschatz im Kymrischen is an excellent statement of the current common opinion in Celtic linguistics on the Latin influence on the Brythonic lexicon: the essential summary of the evidence is that Brythonic experienced a massive influx of Latin loanwords during the period of the Roman occupation, which were often mediated early by the Roman army rather than later by the Catholic church. I can supply the evidence for why it's thought that the army contributed more than the church if you like, but this post is getting rather long as it is without even addressing the Latin structural influence and its implications. However, before moving on I think it's worth noting that the native term for the autochthonous inhabitants of Britain in all three Brythonic languages is in fact a loan from Latin rather than a continuation of the Celtic original.

Schrijver, in his 2002 article The Rise and Fall of British Latin makes the point that "Lexical borrowing represents the most superficial level on which languages can influence one another. Particularly in the case of Latin, influences on a more structural level are to be expected." And this indeed is what we see. Let's look at phonology first, and then morphosyntax. Schrijver lists six phonological areas in which Latin influenced Brythonic, I'll limit myself to the three which to me seem the most significant:

Proto-Celtic, as far as we can determine, had word-initial stress, a feature which still obtains in the Goidelic languages. In Brythonic this was retained until about the second century CE, before shifting to a Latinate penultimate stress. This is significant for two reasons: it allows us to reliably date a number of Latin loanwords to before the influence of Christianity; and it is during this period that the Vulgar Latin of Gaul underwent a series of syncopes and apocopes to arrive at a similar system (we can therefore reasonably assume the same for the spoken Latin of Britain). Again, it is significant that from our evidence Gaulish underwent the same changes during this period.

In spoken Romance during the first few centuries CE, we see a loss of final nasals in polysyllables but not in monosyllables. We see exactly the same phenomenon in early Brythonic. Thus we find nasal mutation in Brythonic triggered only by monosyllables (e.g. fy nhŷ 'my house' < *men tegos) rather than the situation that obtains in Old Irish, where nasal mutation is triggered by any word ending in a nasal consonant, regardless of syllable structure: compare Welsh y pen bach without nasalisation with Old Irish a gcenn mbecc with nasalisation, both from a putative Proto-Celtic *sosin kʷennon bekkon. Given the importance of mutation in the later Celtic languages, this is not a trivial change.

Proto-Celtic, like Classical Latin, had a vowel system which opposed long vowels to short vowels, a situation which persisted into Old Irish. Brythonic and early Romance, however, collapsed this quantity-based system into one primarily based on quality. The manner in which this took place is tellingly similar to what happened in the Romance of northern Gaul. We can assume that both Latin and Brythonic had a vowel system ī i ē e ā a ō o ū u at the time of the Roman conquest. By around the fourth century however, both had transformed this into a vowel system along the lines of *i ɪ e ɛ a æ o ɔ y ʊ, with length now being conditioned by stress and syllable structure rather than being contrastive and inherent to the vowel.

From the point of morphosyntax, there are three main points where Latin influence on Brythonic is clear. Further, it's clear that the kind of Latin which influenced Brythonic was not the Latin of scholarship or the church, but the spoken everyday Latin of the people. The implication here, of course, is not Catholic missionaries intoning sermons and prayers in good ecclesiastical Latin from which the uncomprehending peasants picked up a word or two, but rather of long-term bilingualism with strong evidence of language shift in favour of Latin.

Firstly, Brythonic, along with early Romance, lost its case system (again, note that Irish, where the Latin influence was solely one of Catholic missionaries intoning sermons, retains a case system to this day). Furthermore, the manner in which the case system was lost seems to have closely paralleled that of early Romance: from a six-case system we see a collapse into a two-case system.

Secondly, like Romance, Brythonic lost the neuter gender. Again, Old Irish maintained a three-gender system until the beginning of the Middle Irish period. The manner in which this happened is probably similar to how it happened in Romance again: via the loss of nasal vowels in polysyllables.

Thirdly, and significantly, Brythonic developed a synthetic pluperfect tense (a synthetic tense is one where you change the end of a verb, not one where you add an auxiliary verb: in French, for example, je chantais 'I was singing' is synthetic while j'ai chanté 'I sang' is analytic). This has no parallel in the other Celtic languages and appears to be relatively late. Creating a whole new synthetic tense is unusual enough but the really significant thing here is that the new Brythonic pluperfect was formed in exactly the same way as the Latin equivalent: by adding the imperfect forms of the verb to be to the perfect stem. For example, in Latin we have the verb aget 'he acts', which has the perfect stem ēg-, as in ēgit 'he has acted'. To form the pluperfect, we add the imperfect form of the verb to be- in this case erat 'he was' to the perfect stem: ēgeram 'I had acted'. In early Brythonic then we have the verb *aget 'he drives', which has the perfect stem *axt-, as in *axte 'he has driven'. So we add the imperfect of the verb to be *ējat 'he was' to the perfect stem giving *axtējat. Or, in Modern Literary Welsh: â 'he goes', aeth 'he has gone' and aethai 'he had gone'.

tl;dr - yeah, there's actually loads of evidence.

 

[Whiteshore]

Anyways, what about Novgorod? Could they have unified Russia instead of Muscovy?

 

[xsampa]

Anyways, what about Novgorod? Could they have unified Russia instead of Muscovy?

Novgorod was simply hampered by its geographical location: It was too far north to produce food, and was dependent on the city-states of Vladimir-Suzdal for its food supply. On the other hand, Muscovy only got as lucky as it did because its rulers collaborated with the Mongols, and were awarded the area of Vladimir Suzdal under Yuriy of Muscovy, allowing it to control Novgorod. The close relations between the Mongols and Muscovy allowed it to defeat neighboring states and unify Russia.

 

[Mina-van-Mako]

Occitania or Aquitaine maybe ?

 

[Sharklord1]

My bid is for the Mexican Empire, Persia, Ottomans, or maybe even Qing or Republican China.

I say Mexico because of its size and therefore influence in the American continent. If it had remained an empire and kept its territories in central america and the American Southwest and California, then it would be a major
Persia had something similar except it was economically wealthier, so it could have been a contender.
The Ottoman's military losses, economic decline, and lack of modernization caused it to die. However, given Turkey's current standing as a country, if the ottomans had started around the same years as other Europeans, it would have never collapsed.
China definitely. China was the gold of Asia and still is, to a degree. If the Qing did their own Meiji restoration, they'd kick European nations and maybe even America out of the continent.