I had not remembered as being so much, even in the Lorraine part....but i haven't looked at the data in a while.
Es Geloybte Aretz Continuation Thread
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I had not remembered as being so much, even in the Lorraine part....but i haven't looked at the data in a while.
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?
Well, the ones I have decided on are:
The continued existence of an Ottoman Empire covering Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and part of the Arabian peninsula
The continued existence of Austria-Hungary covering IOTL Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and parts of Serbia, Romania, Italy and Ukraine.
An independent Manchuria
No independent Mongolia
Poland bigger and a lot farther east
India including IOTL Pakistan and Bangladesh
Finland including Kola peninsula
Things I have NOT decided on yet, but which will be different:
The final boundaries of the South African Union
Post-colonial West Africa
Final southern borders of France
Central Asia, as in, at all
The outcome of a potential war between Chile and Argentina (might happen, might not)
Remaining colonial empires as of 2000
Status of Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
There are naturally going to be a lot of smaller differences. Almost all borders in Asia and eastern Europe and most in Africa will be different from today's, but in many cases these will be relatively slight differences. Egypt without the Sinai and Greece without Salonika are still recognisably Egypt and Greece, for example. But Algeria without Algier and Oran may not even be called Algeria.
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 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.
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.
No, I don't think so, either.
There were of course considerable economic interests that fought statehood in Alaska - the so-called Alaska Syndicate, and then a number of other major interests (meatpacking, etc.) in its wake . . . but I think the basic logic of Alaskan statehood can only be delayed, not stopped. World War II was the great accelerator for both Alaska and Hawaii in OTL, and America will be fighting no WW2 here, though various scares with Integrist Russia and imperial Japan will spur some development . . . my gut says that Alaska finally gets statehood in the 1970's or 80's, while Hawaii strikes me as probably remaining a territory or shifting into some kind of commonwealth status. But without more information on how the U.S. develops in this very different 20th century, I have to think there is a range of possibilities to choose from here.
South Africa could also be interesting. No WWI or WWII means more people surviving. A significant proportion of these people will move to colonies. More British origin representation in the white population in South Africa could have huge repercussions for post dominion status politics. No South West Africa mandate either. Potentially could provide a refuge for Afrikaans rejecting British rule.
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.
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.
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.
Without American pressure, Papua New Guinea will likely stay a Dutch possession. What happens to the rest of Indonesia depend on Germany and UK, Germany may see Dutch influence in the region as a proxy for German influence and support the establishment of several smaller states.
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.
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.
Edit: of course, the relevant dates have probably been butterflied.
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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."