Sounds good to me too. One must wonder what may happen if Auraria becomes home to a significant immigrant population.......
This seems like one of the areas where Jared will have to decide what the net demographic effect of Aururian plagues + Aururian crops will be...
And the rate of technological progress, and the effects of Aururian interaction with Asia - the Nangu are already trading actively with Java and Japan, and technologically they are capable of reaching any port in East Asia as far as Port Arthur / Lüshunkou, although they wouldn't be anywhere near as good at naval warfare - and various other things.
This is a situation where there's a lot of factors at play, and I haven't worked out all of the details yet, by any means. But I can mention a few general trends:
In
northern Europe, Aururian crops provide only a relatively minor demographic boost except in certain specialised areas - Denmark and post-*Potato Famine Ireland being two already mentioned - because things like potatoes and other crops give a higher yield per acre. On the other hand, Aururian plagues - both diseases initially, and Marnitja as an ongoing problem - reduce population growth rates.
Wildcard developments could still come into play - for instance, with the *Thirty Years' War, some parts of the Holy Roman Empire are less depopulated than in OTL, while others (e.g. Bohemia) are
more depopulated. Some technological cross-fertilisation may also have an effect, including the effects of Aururian medicine and the concept of peer review. On the whole, though, contact is probably a net drag on northern Europe for a century at least, probably two or more.
Southern Europe, however, still has the population drag of the Aururian plagues, but the effect of Aururian crops is a significant increase in the carrying capacity of the region. At some point this will lead to a larger population than OTL, and depending on other social and political factors, may also lead to significant emigration from some southern European countries.
Of course, there's plenty of other targets for any such emigration apart from Aururia.
Developments such as
1) someone from Europe colonizes parts or all of Aururia. After all it's called "Lands of Red and
Gold," isn't it?
I hope not, though we've already seen the entering wedges of European hegemony in places.
Indeed, although it's far from obvious what form of European hegemony that will lead to. The obvious extremes are what happened to the Americas - wholescale political conquest and in many cases population replacements - versus what happened to East Asia - economic influence more than anything else.
The gold and spices of Aururia are massive drawcards for European
interest in the place. On the other hand, the logistics of invasion are much harder than that of crossing the Atlantic in OTL, and the population are both technologically superior to those regions, and somewhat more resistant to Old World diseases (due both to local conditions and the sheer travel time). So on the whole, I'd expect the outcome to be closer to the East Asian model, although obviously the disease factors still need to be considered.
My impression of these Aururians is, they are tough customers. Not just brawlers or brave fighters; they are shrewd. It must be hell in a lawsuit when your opponent's lawyer is an Aururian... I think they'll resist, and they'll be hard to swallow, and they'll turn colonial domination around to make it as much their deal as their nominal conquerors. But still, it might happen, if not to the whole continent in one hegemonic swallow, than to parts.
The level of political sophistication varies enormously around the continent. So, more subtly, does the systems of political organisation and their vulnerability to outside disruption.
On the one extreme you have the Atjuntja, whose political sophistication is somewhat lower, and whose economic structure - centrally managed control of trade and resources - is rather vulnerable to disruption by as simple a fact as European seaborne transportation. The Yadji are somewhat more politically sophisticated, but also have a rather centralised system of political control and planning - managed by the ruling Yadji family and their control of the priestly bureaucracy.
On the other extreme, you have the kingdom of Tjibarr, who while they are technologically inferior to thee Old World, have a long history of effective diplomacy, an almost instinctive grasp of the balance of power, an economy and political climate which encourages long-term planning, and a cultural tendency for argumentation and disputation. Taken together, these mean that anyone who shakes hands with a Gunnagal would be well-advised to count their fingers afterwards. And they have the geographical good fortune of being located in a position which makes it much harder for Europeans to project power into their heartland.
The Nangu, while economically and demographically vulnerable - there's only about sixty or seventy thousand of them, all told - have a very strong commercial focus and political nous which leaves them very receptive to European technologies and other innovations.
The Kiyungu and the Kurnawal fall somewhere in between those extremes.
So, in that case, there's some immigrants right there. Some will come in fancying themselves the new bosses; others as servants of these lordly types.
There's no doubt that there will be plenty of individual Europeans who will find reasons to settle in Aururia. The question which is more difficult to answer is whether those migrants will be numerous enough to have a major demographic effect on the continent. Which depends both on the incentives for mass migration from Europe, and the demographic and political balance inside Aururia which will dictate how easily Europeans can settle there.
In OTL, IIRC, there were only really two European powers where a major proportion of the population emigrated overseas as part of colonial empire-building: Britain (including Ireland for these purposes) and Portugal. Spain had some overseas emigres, but as a proportion of the population it was much lower. France generally didn't send many of its population overseas, nor did the Dutch, much (especially the VOC).
ATL Spain may have more of a push for emigration than it had in OTL - thanks to Aururian crops - but I'd expect that to matter more in Latin America than in Aururia. Britain and Portugal will have much the same push for emigration, although whether that will end up in Aururia is much less likely.
Of course, a lot of Europeans from other nations emigrated into what were relatively empty lands - Germans, Italians and others into the USA, Italians and others into Argentina, and so on - but this was mostly because those lands were relatively unpopulated (thanks to Old World diseases), rather than being a particular push from a colonial power to establish much in the way of migration.
If Aururia is relatively more populated than it was in OTL - which of course it will be - then it will be seen as far less welcoming than OTL Australia was, even in conditions where Britain and others are sending more migrants.
In OTL, the pre-contact population is highly argued, but it declined by perhaps 90% between 1788 and 1900-1920, and only started to recover thereafter. The surviving Aboriginal population was, of course, largely swamped by British and later emigration.
ITTL, Aururia has a pre-contact population of something over 10 million. The demographic losses, while catastrophic, won't be as bad as in OTL in percentage terms.
This is for two reasons. Firstly, the presence of native epidemics means that there is somewhat stronger adaptive immune systems (for reasons I've outlined previously). Secondly, the earlier contact while navigational technology is lower means that Old World epidemics will arrive more slowly, over the course of more generations, and there will be less of a "one-two punch" like what happened in the OTL Americas (and to a lesser degree OTL Australia) where major epidemics like smallpox and measles hit right after each other, leading to even worse population losses because of an already-weakened population.
The net effect will be that the Aururian population is still very badly hit, but will decline over a slower period to something like 3-3.5 million, and then start to recover. This will still leave a relatively-inhabited continent, which will be much less open to mass European migration.
2) in the case where parts of Aururia remain nominally or even clearly independent, in several centuries, parts of Aururia might get to be important in their own right, important enough to be courted as alliance partners on the stages of global politics. Some of those alliances will be with parties that lose battles; the upshot would be, exiles on the losing side of some foreign faction fight who have been defeated and needed to flee will be looking for new homes, and from time to time their Aururian allies will freely or grudgingly offer such a refuge.
Could well be, particularly if there ever is a global war of the equivalent of WW1 or WW2. Of course, part of those migrations may also mean Aururians displaced from their own homeland and setling elsewhere.
So no, not the overwhelming legions of colonists from some hegemonic country that displaced and diluted the native population down to practically nothing of OTL. But there will probably be some sort of resident foreign population; if some major Aururian state is on the losing side of something as big as say the OTL 1848 revolts, a lot of refugees from that set of mostly aborted or soon coopted rebellions wound up in the USA OTL. For them to go all the way to Aururia, when Aururia isn't "opened" to settlement the way the mid-19th century US was, I think it has to be more than a distant spot on the globe; some positive iink would have to draw these refugees.
Mass migrations are certainly much less likely to target Aururia, yes. Other factors may still attract an immigrant population - gold, spices, refugees, and so on are obvious possibilities - but those would have to be rather large migrations to make the native Aururians a minority on their own continent.
