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  1. Alexander the Good Enough and the Federation of Poleis

    The premise here is not of a Hellenistic federal Rome that will be hanging around being impressive for centuries. Think rather of the balance of power dynamics of the Hellenistic period. For over a century, a rough 3-way competition was sustainable. One power was based in Macedon and leading...

  2. Alexander the Good Enough and the Federation of Poleis

    It's tricky. Getting Philip might be a better direction to go. There are some tricky bits with Darius' proposal - the Persians will be back eventually, there would still be a lot of desire (and frankly some need, given the economics of Macedonian war) for loot, and the propaganda and hostages...

  3. What if instead of going trying to conquer into India, after conquering the Achaemenid empire, Alexander the great tried to conquer Sparta & Crete?

    As others have rightly noted, Sparta had already been swatted down by the Macedonians with trivial effort compared to, say, Thebes and Athens. Why is Sparta left as a different color on various maps of Alexander's empire? Because virtually everyone in the Peloponnese (including, now that I...

  4. Alexander the Good Enough and the Federation of Poleis

    Thanks for the replies. My apologies - I was actually too busy to write the original post, but couldn't restrain myself. So I definitely was too busy to engage with good posts in a proper conversation. The past year I've been consuming the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which led me...

  5. Alexander the Good Enough and the Federation of Poleis

    An idea I've had floating around for over a decade springs from the nature of the League of Corinth, Philip II's system for managing his hegemony over Greece. What if events had conspired so that instead of being a short term expedient soon dwarfed by Alexander's empire, the League evolved into...

  6. What technologies could be invented to ensure the most technologically and scientifically adavanced Mesoamerica?

    That gets me thinking with ideas that could easily lead me down a rabbit hole of additional research distracting me from all the existing projects already distracting me from each other. Just putting this out there: A timeline where the Long Pause of Austronesian expansion never happens, or is...

  7. What technologies could be invented to ensure the most technologically and scientifically adavanced Mesoamerica?

    While there's certainly truth there, the reason for the transition was that the outsiders could take a dramatically disproportionate role in the new system, and their edge - not solely alliances - made that happen. I've been trying to get my hands on J.F. Guilmartin, “The Cutting Edge: An...

  8. What technologies could be invented to ensure the most technologically and scientifically adavanced Mesoamerica?

    Chocolate? Cocaine. They did trade by sea, but it was limited in scale and very peripheral to both civilizational regions' economies. A "normal" product or one available anywhere isn't going to do it. Something that takes a lot of transport to move won't even get started. Something like silk...

  9. AHQ: Has there even been a religion or culture that started off monotheistic and became polytheistic?

    There is a whole heck of a lot of pre-existing ideological baggage being dragged into the thread, some of it sort of an OTList bias, if that could be a thing? I can see where I could start an argument or three, but I'm not sure I can see a productive way to contribute. Still, interesting ideas...

  10. How might a modern baby boom occur?

    I skipped the middle pages of the thread, so perhaps I missed it, but you appear to be fighting imaginary enemies. That said, I do disagree with the idea that women's rights are the causative factor. I would argue women's lack of rights slows down a trend that has its roots in economics and...

  11. How might a modern baby boom occur?

    To address the OP, there are two fairly simple answers. First, the semi-plausible case. You could have a small baby boom if the vast majority of breeding age people in a developed country felt financially unable to start families (check!), then very large numbers of that demographic got in...

  12. How might a modern baby boom occur?

    Agree that how you'd get a religious revival becomes the largest question, followed by how exactly did we come to an era in which religion has receded so much from human life. Reeeally don't think 1990 is near the cut-off, though. The trend is global and was coming all century, regardless of how...

  13. To the Victor, Go the Spoils (Redux): A Plausible Central Powers Victory

    I should have said at the time, but this is an excellent post, and I really appreciate it. Thank you for sharing insight that is a bit obscure here. And yeah, if anything the Ukrainian-Polish border is one of the least "wrong" borders east of the Rhine... at least in that there simply couldn't...

  14. To the Victor, Go the Spoils (Redux): A Plausible Central Powers Victory

    Man, just phenomenal to be able to read your meticulous work while teaching the Russian Civil War at work. Great AH is so powerful for framing a clearer perspective on the past.

  15. To the Victor, Go the Spoils (Redux): A Plausible Central Powers Victory

    Welllll.... I don't think they have to lose the whole empire. For one, look at Guyana and New Caledonia today. Fighting it out for (much of) Algeria has appeared before, though the problems there are many. But I would argue that even much of West Africa and Madagascar might never fight their...

  16. Ghastly Victories: The United States in the World Wars

    From a certain Nazi perspective, that's actually what the Holocaust was. We're losing and every Power is cooperating against us, even the ones that have opposite ideologies, so clearly The Leader was right about the World Jewish Conspiracy, so hurry and destroy "the real enemy" while we can.

  17. To the Victor, Go the Spoils (Redux): A Plausible Central Powers Victory

    Putting aside the practicalities of the Brest-Litovsk states exercising any independent power, I am struck by how... Balkan... it all is? They're only just thrown together. Their ethnic groups are heavily mixed in a patchwork stretching right across all those new borders. And even if one were...

  18. Ghastly Victories: The United States in the World Wars

    We know it's dumb, and worse than dumb is a horrifyingly consequential mistake, but traitor? He's "betraying" the "friends" who - let's recall - built a giant defensive line calculated to force Germany to fight the next war in Belgium. And he's doing so hoping to minimize harm to his people...

  19. AHQ: Why did monotheism generally replace polytheism?

    I would be very interested to see an argument to support monotheism already being on track for triumph in the 3rd century. Not having seen such a thing, I highly doubt it. No new system was poised for any meaningful replacement pre-Constantine, according to any historian I've encountered. As to...

  20. AHQ: Why did monotheism generally replace polytheism?

    Exactly! Yeah! That's what I was getting at in the long post a few pages back. The significant aspect here is what he did, how long he reigned, and the dynasty he forged that could make his actions a policy lasting beyond one man. None of which is "monotheistic." Monotheism didn't take off at...
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