splitting up the two would produce a territory with a large French-speaking population, I think even the local majority.
I had not remembered as being so much, even in the Lorraine part....but i haven't looked at the data in a while.
splitting up the two would produce a territory with a large French-speaking population, I think even the local majority.
On the other hand, I guess people will be upset no matter whom Wilhelm gives Alsace-Lorraine to, so it might as well be Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
Well, the ones I have decided on are:From the end of the original Es Geloybte Aretz timeline to the modern day, what would you say are the most important territorial changes? Other than Big Germany, what are the most radical differences between a 2020-or-so map of OTL and of TTL?
Status of Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
Post-colonial West Africa ...
Remaining colonial empires as of 2000
THat is the question I was pondering. All of these are part of the US colonial empire, but how does this develop ITTL? I could imagine a strongly inclusive idea - following the French, and thus a perceived "Republican" model - that extends statehood, but equally, a lack of interest in the federal government that leaves Hawaii and Alaska territories or even releases them into some sort of independence. Both have their problems and their plausibilities (if you think Senate representation is unfair now, imagine statehood for the Philippines...). I love the thought of Alaska as a kind of arctic Kuwait, but - I don't think Washiungton would let them go, realistically.Alaska was...purchased by the USA from Russia in 1867, so are you really thinking instead about whether it has achieved statehood?
Hawaii was not yet US territory formally by the time of your POD, but its trajectory was so strongly in that direction that....I think you would need some very big butterflies, fast, to keep it from becoming American. (Not impossible, but it would take some working out!)
I suppose we never discussed whether the Spanish-American War happens in your timeline - or maybe we did, and I missed it . . . but yes, you do need that for these other territories to end up in American hands (though the Philippines would still end up independent once again, at some point, even if it did!).
I think regardless of the policy developed in the metropole, education, organisation and growing collective consciousness will mean people in the colonies will not accept continued subject status. It will take longer and may be less successful, but in the end I do not think the Western world's public will accept the kind of thing going on in Gaza now, and ultimately, that is going to be the only other option. Much more likely there will be a kind of soft decolonisation with stronger economic dominance baked in. Without a Warsaw Pact to link up with, the former colonies wioll not have a real exit option to that.I am still thinking about Africa, too, and the more I think about it, the less confident I feel about my sense of its trajectory could be plotted in this 20th century, where the great colonial powers do not undergo the world wars of OTL.
There is an interesting article, "Planned Decolonization and Its Failure in British Africa," by John Flint in African Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 328 (Jul., 1983), pp. 389-411 (23 pages). It looks at British Colonial Office papers planning decolonization efforts from . . . 1938.
The Colonial Office files certainly do reveal that an almost complete reversal of attitudes towards social change in the British African territories developed in London after 1938. Before that time the indirect rule philosophy, which had been developed entirely outside the Colonial Office by colonial service personnel, held virtually unchallenged sway, as did the economic doctrine sacrosanct in the Treasury, that colonies should live off their own resources.' Indeed, if the historian looks for the roots of the 'development of under-development', the fostering of monocultures and metropolitan-oriented transport networks and the creation of 'compradors', they are to be found in the policy of rule through 'native authorities' (truly a 'comprador group' in a state of total dependence upon the British) combined with the concept that infrastructural development to serve the interests of cash-cropping and mining had to be financed from local resources. Before 1938 reform of 'native administration' could be argued by advocates who wished to improve its effectiveness, but those who argued for its abolition and replacement by some other system were regarded as a lunatic fringe. The aim of colonial rule was seen as the preservation of precolonial social organization. The emergence of 'classes," whether bourgeois or proletarian, betokened a failure of policy.
But three developments in 1937-38 upended this mindset, and reset British Colonial Office planning in a major way.
But three specific events of the later 1930's were directly responsible for the shift in attitudes in London. These were the widespread riots in the British West Indies during 1937 and 1938, which shattered the complacency of the Colonial Office and in their aftermath destroyed the long held axiom that colonial territories must live off their own resources on laissez faire principles; the almost simultaneous publication of Lord Hailey's African Survey in 1938; and the appointment in the same year of Malcom Macdonald as Secretary of State for the Colonies.
All this suggests that the trajectory and timing of British attitudes toward colonial development was more contingent than I may have realized.
THat is the question I was pondering. All of these are part of the US colonial empire, but how does this develop ITTL? I could imagine a strongly inclusive idea - following the French, and thus a perceived "Republican" model - that extends statehood, but equally, a lack of interest in the federal government that leaves Hawaii and Alaska territories or even releases them into some sort of independence. Both have their problems and their plausibilities (if you think Senate representation is unfair now, imagine statehood for the Philippines...). I love the thought of Alaska as a kind of arctic Kuwait, but - I don't think Washiungton would let them go, realistically.
Can you expand on this in regards to minorities such as poles, french, Danes, slaves, and the immigrant community like Muslims, Africans, and Chinese please.German society is divided three ways between Socialism, Conservative Nationalism, and political Catholicism
I was thinking about Indonesia, since it's not mentioned as settled - could the Dutch drive it into a 'Francafrique' direction, where (apart from Java with maybe half of Sumatra) various smaller states are essentially subsidiaries of the Dutch government, even as they are also independent? That was the target in OTL, but US disapproval and the impossibility of suppressing an independence-minded Java made it fall apart.
Of course the India example argues against it, if India is united why not the Dutch Indies, but I think especially Aceh and the Moluccas had enough sense of self to split if allowed... and then the Dutch can built on that.
the coast? didn't the ottomans take over that originally? Anyway i can see a ottoman empire easily pushing in. Rashids are their player their and i can see them making effort to check ottoman influence moreover.So who's in charge in the eastern bits of what OTL is Saudi Arabia? (That is, the part with all the oil). I can't see the Ottomans being in favor of the Saudis running the place. And the British are probably going to be tempted to meddle.
Per Wiki the area was already Saudi by 1902So who's in charge in the eastern bits of what OTL is Saudi Arabia? (That is, the part with all the oil). I can't see the Ottomans being in favor of the Saudis running the place. And the British are probably going to be tempted to meddle.
Not all of it. The coast was still Ottoman till 1913, when the Saudis seized the area, and the fight with the Rashidis went on for a while. An Ottoman empire undistracted by WWI may do something about that.Per Wiki the area was already Saudi by 1902
Stefan Zweig will be a much happier man in this timeline.Well, the ones I have decided on are:
The continued existence of Austria-Hungary covering IOTL Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and parts of Serbia, Romania, Italy and Ukraine.
Who?Stefan Zweig will be a much happier man in this timeline.
Austrian Jewish writer, raised in cosmopolitan Vienna whose entire world was subsequently destroyed by not one but two world wars.He was a writer.
That is heart-wrenching to read man, effin' a' `~`Austrian Jewish writer, raised in cosmopolitan Vienna whose entire world was subsequently destroyed by not one but two world wars.
His book "The world of Yesterday" is a eulogy to pre-war Europe, written with much sadness.
"For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths."