Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Yes, but thematically I felt they suited the next chunk better
bahahah good god
Thanks!
Within the ruling coalition there’s probably an extremist element of some kind but Mexico had at this point a very traditionalist (elitist that is) conservatism that sort of eschewed mass action and didn’t have much of an intelectual project behind it beyond “the landowners and the Church are rad” so we Wont be seeing Synarchy show up for a while
Probably more TL accurate if it's Pershing doing flame eyes against the flag... lol
Also since you've discussed the CSA/Mexican HDIs (the results of which I generally agree with) I'm curious about the American HDI.
Prologue - Questions, Questions
Prologue - Questions, Questions
Since 1815, the United Kingdom had ushered in what had become known as the Pax Britannica, an era of broad peace around the world underwritten by the undisputed mastery of global sea power by the Royal Navy and London's role as the beating heart of world finance. By the late 1860s, however, the cracks in Britain's armor were becoming apparent. Its participation in the Mexican Intervention had seen them inadvertently setting up the domination of Mexico (at least for the 1860s) by France and the independence of the CSA and lasting enmity of the United States, and while British diplomacy had helped end the Third Unification War between France and Prussia the subsequent peace treaty nonetheless ended with consolidated, powerful new states in central Europe in Germany and Italy that upended the post-Vienna world order, in part due to the massive hegemonic potential of Germany and the October 1867 destruction of the Sistine Chapel and flight to Malta of Pope Pius IX, creating a difficult diplomatic situation for Protestant Britain hosting in exile the chief of the Catholic faith.
This set of circumstances occurred simultaneously to a remarkable deterioration of British traditional prestige at home in short order. The assassination of Prince Alfred in Sydney in 1868 by an Irish nationalist badly inflamed Hibernophobic public sentiment across the Empire, most notably in Canada, which had longstanding fears of the United States using Irish-American auxiliaries as a cutout for annexationist plans, cementing an Anglican-chauvinist hierarchy in particular in Toronto and Halifax dominated by the Anglophilic, imperialist Orange Order of Canada, a sister organization to the original lodges of Ulster. These events occurred in tandem with the failure of the Second Reform Act back in Britain, which would have greatly expanded the franchise for the House of Commons, ending the career of its chief proponent Benjamin Disraeli and leading, over the course of a rotating cast of Prime Ministers over the next several years, to the ascendancy of a firmly conservative bloc of landed nobles around the Earl of Carnarvon, whose four-year government would come to be regarded as a disaster and emblematic of Tory misrule, particularly thanks to its hostility to the working class during the severe economic conditions of the 1870s but also thanks to its bungling of two of the most important issues of the time: the Eastern Question of the Ottomans and Near East, as well as Britain's role in South Africa; these issues were not helped by the sudden death of Prince Albert Edward, the heir to the throne, of typhoid fever along with his friend the Dutch King, seeing two of the Queen's sons dead in short order and opening the question of how stable the monarchy indeed was with all the work Victoria had done to repair its prestige after the debacles of the Regency Era.
Despite post-Panic doldrums of the 1870s, though, the leadership vacuum left by Britain did not destabilize the world as many feared, and indeed the decade could be seen as a time of internal upheaval and national introspection after the map-changing chaos of the 1860s under a veneer of decaying conservatism. Mexican institutions became cemented and indeed the story of the country was one of tremendous success as it enjoyed unprecedented political stability after nearly thirty years of constant conflict and civil war, though anger from radical republican organizations culminated in twin riots on the Zocalo of the city center, the second of which saw an attempted assassination of the Imperial Family, from which thankfully none of Maximilian's family died but it did leave his eldest son and heir, Louis Maximilian, badly wounded, with his left eye blinded and severe scarring on that side of his head. As for the United States, in the aftermath of the Panic and the collapse of the Republican Party into its more radical faction and a more conservative breakaway Liberal Party, the Democrats came to dominate the decade, but remained split between its traditional Jacksonian small-government faction and newer, younger ambitious reformers who were intrigued by the growing elements of the nascent labor movement across the country. This divide was a factor in the fall of President Hoffman from grace as the corruption of his political allies in New York, such as "Boss" William Tweed, became a political liability, and resulted in the election of the staunchly conservative Thomas Hendricks as President; though little of note occurred in his otherwise placid and peaceful term, he would be the last proper Jackson-Douglas Democrat elected as the party in the two ensuing decades radically and dramatically shifted from being the party of the American traditionalist right to the party of its progressive left.
The lull of world affairs of the mid-1870s could not last forever, though; nudged on by some of Carnarvon's creatures in the Colonial Office, Britain got into an ill-advised war with the native kingdoms and Boer Republics of South Africa in the 1877-78 Basuto War, which ended in humiliation - the first ever major European Empire by a native force, and would conclude with an unsteady state of affairs in that corner of Africa for years to come that suddenly unsettled British affairs in its colonial empire greatly. This was exacerbated by France's complete purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875 under Britain's nose, meaning that the world's most important waterway was now in French hands entirely, dramatically changing the strategic considerations of the British position in Africa and the Indian Ocean.
This was, in part, a factor in Britain's muddled response to the eruption of crisis in the Balkans in the autumn of 1877 when uprisings in Serbia and Bosnia triggered a response from Russia and the Russo-Turkish War erupted. Unlike in previous iterations of conflict between St. Petersburg and Constantinople, this time the Ottomans were prepared and required no foreign assistance (not that much would have been forthcoming, anyways) and were able to entrap and defeat the Russians at Plevna in a decisive battle where Tsar Alexander II himself was captured in the field and his army cut off from reinforcements. The subsequent Berlin Conference in early 1878 was intended to thus serve as something of a second Vienna, only this time underscoring how important Otto von Bismarck and the German Empire were to European security. In the seminal treaties that followed, the Ottomans agreed to recognize the de facto independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania as de jure but other than that were able to escape without any territorial concessions and the Constitution of 1876 that provided for some level of parliamentary representation in the Ottoman realms was able to survive.
The Treaty of Berlin marked the apex of Germany's ascent to world power and the triumph of Bismarck's project to place it as the central power of Europe both geographically and diplomatically, but also an important hingepoint in history. Germany had already drawn a response in geopolitics - the three losers of the Unification Wars in France, Austria and Denmark cobbled together a secret alliance that would come to be known as the Iron Triangle, and it had to now rely on Italy as its chief ally both due to them sharing the distinction of having risen at the expense of Paris and Vienna but also because following the Berlin Conference the previously Germanophilic Russia began the long and steady process of turning her eyes away from Europe and instead focus more wholeheartedly on consolidating her Empire in Central and East Asia.
It also occurred at the conclusion of what can be seen as an era of traditionalist 19th century conservatism associated with Metternich's Europe and the reaction that crushed the spring of 1848 thirty years prior, and was thought to have been triumphant in the victories of the Second Mexican Empire and agrarian, slaveholding Confederate States. The Tories were trounced in a landslide in the United Kingdom by the Liberals under Spencer Cavendish, the Lord Hartington, that would usher in a modernizing period of reform with contours recognizable to Liberals of the 20th century; two years later, the Liberals of the United States won a narrow election to take control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, ending the Jacksonian party system that had persisted for fifty years. Even in France, the daring and ambitious young Napoleon IV, in tandem with his marriage to Maria Pilar de Bourbon of the fallen Spanish dynasty, rolled out a new direction for conservative rule in the National Contract that provided some state support for indigency and unemployment with the understanding that it was centered in loyalty to Church and Crown.
Of course, perhaps nothing emphasized this turning of the tide quite like the sudden and shocking assassination of Wilhelm I in Berlin in June of 1878, bring his long-ambitious heir and only son Friedrich III to the throne along with his radically liberal British-born wife Victoria, namesake of her mother, potentially injecting Anglophile reform and modernization into the staid Prussian court. On both sides of the Atlantic, a new liberal ascendancy had arrived...
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@Gman hits the nail on the head here. The US is maybe a tick or two higher (so similar to Canada or the Netherlands) since it already has a high HDI iOTL, but its GINI coefficient is more like the UK or Canada in the mid-30s or so rather than low 40s.
Prologue - La Decade d'Or
Prologue - La Decade d'Or
While violent conflicts paired with mass social upheaval in the 1910s on both sides of the Atlantic would cause a great deal of historiography, particularly of the conservative persuasion, to look back at the entire Belle Epoque period as a sort of lost golden age, perhaps no stretch of said time so encapsulated the ambitions and optimism of that generation quite like the 1880s. In the United Kingdom and United States, it was a time of ascendancy for a more muscular type of classical liberalism that took its mantra of reform and modernization quite seriously, though the grand visions Liberal parties on both sides of the Atlantic started the decade with would end more as unfulfilled promises by its conclusion.
The 1880s were both a time of American hegemony establishing itself in the Western Hemisphere and revealing how fragile it was and how far it yet had to go. The election of James G. Blaine as President in 1880 as candidate of the young Liberal Party marked the end of the Second, or Jacksonian, Party System of the United States and the inauguration of what came to be seen as its direct replacement, the Liberal Dynasty, which depending on whom one asked and how one balanced control of Congress against control of the Presidency as being more important would last for somewhere between twenty-five to forty years. Liberal ambitions at home balanced Whiggish support for internal improvements with classically liberal commitments to free trade in the form of reciprocity treaties, which opened markets to the goods of the United States without overly exposing American manufacturing interests to competition in turn; the Liberals would also (not without controversy) pass civil service reform and greatly expand the role of the bureaucracy as well as the Navy, a hard turn from the small-government ethos of the Democrats. When paired with a strong economy after a half-decade of depression followed by another half-decade of middling recovery, their reward was for a massive landslide reelection for Blaine; however, his second term would be far less glittering than his first.
One priority of the Blaine years, spearheaded by his young but ambitious Secretary of State John Hay, was a process known as Continentalism, in which North and South America would mark their differences from the squabbling of Europe through cooperation, diplomacy and reciprocity (unspoken in all this of course was the central, decisively dominant position in this arrangement the United States would reserve for herself). This was initially not entirely unsuccessful; the Pan-American Congress was held for the first time, and though the more utopian visions of the day did not win out, Blaine's transformation from a xenophobic protectionist to a committed internationalist was complete, and the Liberals shifted to a firmly Anglophile position from then on. The effort to promote peace in the Americas was, initially, also helped by the ascendance of James Longstreet, a former Confederate General and Governor of Virginia who won the violent election of 1879 and immediately set about formalizing party structures through his remade Confederate Democratic Party and building a vast patronage network that by 1883 essentially controlled every aspect of the Confederate government apparatus, from the Presidency down to county clerk positions. This Democratic ascendancy was built in part on building an alliance between the planter oligarchy and the middle classes, in part on constitutional reforms that allowed the Confederacy to invest in internal improvements and a brown-water navy to defend her vast rivers, and in part on crushing the paramilitary groups that had plagued Dixie's politics since secession. Longstreet made his policy of ushering in a Reconciliation Era with the United States a priority, and in an ironic twist of fate, Hay - who had once been Abraham Lincoln's private secretary - oversaw as chief diplomat the cementing of possibly the most cooperative hour of relations across the Ohio in the fifty years between the War of Secession and the Great American War.
Reconciliation with the Longstreet-era Confederacy was one of the few unqualified successes of the Contintentalist project. The increasing centralization of power in Mexico City led to deep resentment in the Mexican North, particularly amongst local caudillos who chafed at any erosion of their day-to-day power. The bubbling feud between the capital and the provinces finally erupted in violence, first with the 1880 assassination of Prime Minister Tomas Mejia and then in 1882 with the Revolt of the Caudillos, a conflict in which several regionalist caudillos across the North, West and South of Mexico raised arms in Mexico's first civil war after fifteen years of peace and prosperity. The war was a savage one, seeing tens of thousands killed during its three years, but rebels were successfully beaten off in epochal battles at Guadalajara and Irapuato, at the latter by famed general Miguel Miramon, and by 1885 the North had been successfully pacified and many of the caudillos pacified and reintegrated this time into national politics - a decision which would come to bite Mexico before too long, as Northern landowners soon became one of the most dominant forces in the Mexican parliament. Beyond the chaos in Latin America's ascendant power, the emergence of Brazil was a southern hegemon seemed guaranteed with the death of Pedro II and the transition to a regency over his grandson, Pedro III, which nonetheless sparked deep internal disagreements that threatened to destabilize the country between various factions of monarchist and republican conservatives, and the fallout of the Saltpeter War of 1879-80 between Chile, Peru and Bolivia culminated in the technologically advanced Chilean Navy forcing a standoff with the United States Navy over a brief peacekeeping intervention in Panama, which erupted into the brief and bizarre Chilean-American War of 1885, where Chile managed to credibly fight to a draw (particularly in brutal battles in the Drake Passage at the heart of the Southern Hemisphere's July winter) and badly harass American shipping. The subsequent peace treaty, negotiated largely by Britain, left both sides feeling badly resentful - Chile at having concessions imposed on it including reparations and American access to its raw goods, the United States at having been stung by what they considered a miniscule opponent - and their contest for naval superiority in the Pacific ongoing.
In Britain, meanwhile, the Liberal government of Lord Hartington positioned itself more as a government of the reformist left than the center to center-right, as in America, passing a massive overhaul of the British franchise that greatly expanded the voter base and reformed parliamentary constituencies to make rural areas less immediately powerful; a number of other modernizing innovations were pursued there, as well. The events that would most define the Hartington era, however, was the continued escalation of the Irish Home Rule movement, which by the early 1880s had plunged much of the island into violence and invited violence against Irish nationalists abroad and sympathetic socialists at home, and also the Egyptian Revolution in 1882, in which the Egyptian Colonel Ahmed Urabi launched an attempted coup against the ruling Khedivate that was subservient on paper to the Ottomans but in practice a vassal of the French and British. The overly-aggressive British intervention in Alexandria, coupled with the Ottomans negotiating directly with the French, left British policy flatfooted and resulted in the re-absorption of authority in Egypt by the Ottomans with French assistance, essentially turning the Eastern Mediterranean into a Franco-Ottoman lake. While the Berlin Congress of 1885 on the matter of Africa established straightforward spheres of influence in the Dark Continent for European powers, the entire period 1882-85 was seen as a continuation of British influence's sharp decline, and into the void - and part of creating said void in the first place - came France, arguably the country with the strongest 1880s of them all.
The French position at the start of the decade had been strong and getting stronger as it was. The National Contract of Napoleon IV had endeared him to the country's working class and Bonapartist prestige was at its highest perhaps ever; the autocratic but competent regime of Francois Bazaine and Patrice McMahon had dramatically developed the country's rail system and access to hard metals from Mexico had created a well-financed banking sector, perhaps best embodied in Marseille's Credit Maritime which provided the capital for much of France's overseas adventurism. After a war scare with Spain in 1879 triggered by loose lips from the German-born Spanish crown prince had subsided, France was able to enjoy a position of not fearing her immediate neighbors too much for the remaining decade, with good relations with Italy, British strategic incoherence and an inward-turn and rising anti-militarism in Germany starting in late 1883 after the failed Waldersee Putsch, an inept attempt at a military coup against Kaiser Friedrich after Bismarck's sacking that November. This gave France the ability to focus on consolidating her overseas empire, both formal and informal, and this led to her interests in expanding her Asian presence. In a series of campaigns, France was able to violently suppress and consolidate its holding over Tonkin, which when combined with her increasing support for Sinophobic elements in the semi-protectorate of Korea, triggered the Sino-French War between 1884-85. After destroying the Chinese fleet at Ha Long Bay in Tonkin and then upon the high seas in the Formosa Straits, France was able to defeat the Chinese on land in the southern hinterlands and Korea, and also capture Formosa. The resulting peace treaty was a humiliation for Qing China, which their ability to demand tribute from Korea and Tonkin eliminated, and the islands of Hainan and Formosa ceded to France outright as territorial conquests; a lengthy period of military and social reform spearheaded by the teenaged Guangxu Emperor began shortly thereafter, which started seeing some tentative results by the end of the decade but earned him the enmity of powerful court conservatives, most prominently the Dowager Empress Cixi.
France thus by decade's end, especially after Germany further embarrassed itself in a brief gunboat war with the United States over Samoa, looked to be the most ascendant power in Europe, a state vigorously promoting a paternalist brand of welfare conservatism tied strongly to Catholic values and royalist hierarchy, and as Britain resolved to review its strategic posture, France increasingly came to be seen as enemy number one, both on land and at sea, driving a minor rapprochement with Germany, especially as it looked like the liberal Friedrich would never fully recover from his severe bout of throat cancer in 1887-88. The "Golden Decade" of France and elsewhere, then, despite its strong economy, technological innovations and chauvinistic imperialist mien, papered over a number of issues bubbling under the surface. Publid discontent with elected officialdom was growing and politics were growing more complex; in the United States, labor strikes throughout the summer of 1886 proved that labor groups such as the Knights of Labor had potential staying power, especially as the soft-socialist Henry George was elected Mayor of New York, while in the Confederacy, the bourgeoise National Reform League and working-class National Farmer and Laborer Party provided direct support for pushing back against the machine politics of the Longstreet Consensus.
Despite its reputation as a time of plenty and peace, the decade thus ended on an uncertain note, especially with what was to come. American politics were unsettled by the sudden death of President Blaine of stress and a lengthy struggle with Bright's disease, throwing the constitutional succession into question and helping lead to the election of proto-populist Democrat George Custer, a former celebrity cavalry officer and author; in the Confederacy, Longstreet's successor Lucius Q.C. Lamar began countenancing increasingly autocratic, even violent, methods to avoid especially the NFLP challenging the Democratic hierarchy. Europeans were no more settled; British Prime Minister Stafford Northcote died and thrust his Conservative Party into chaos and infighting, while the passing of Tsar Alexander II five years after being badly injured in an assassination attempt brought his much more conservative son Alexander III to power instead. But, as exemplified by the highly-successful 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris that featured the daunting Tour Eiffel as its centerpiece, it was nonetheless a time associated with hope and growth, where world-changing marvels unthinkable even just ten years earlier were seemingly increasingly commonplace, and a world where the Emperor of France could ice skate beneath the great iron awnings of the world's tallest structure seemed a world where anything was possible... [1]
[1] This remains among my favorite chapters of Cinco de Mayo, in particular as it closes a decade and "Part"
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
I am glad the prequels are in place. Cinco De Mayo is as massive of a timeline as I've ever seen, and I've only read bits and pieces of it. I don't mind the spoilers here at all, because it helps me refresh on events that I had missed beforehand. One day I'll get through the whole timeline, I promise!
Yeah, this is more or less the exact reason I’m doing them. It’s a good refresher for me, since a lot of materials was written two or three years ago, and it also serves as a good if not wholly comprehensive way for new readers to jump onboard for the rest of the ride without having to catch up on *waves hand* all of that
Prologue - Twilight of a Century
Prologue - Twilight of a Century
The overwhelming optimism with which the 1880s had ended came to an abrupt and ugly end almost as soon as the new decade had begun. The Russian influenza pandemic roared to life in January and February of 1890, rapidly moving throughout Europe and before long to the United States and the rest of the Americas. It was, at that point in time, one of the worst outbreaks of influenza in recorded history, perhaps famous in particular for the prominent figures whose lives it took - the British statesman Lord Salisbury, the Queen of Spain, and the eldest two sons of Alexander III of Russia. Worse, the spider's web of massive European loans to developing foreign countries ground to a massive halt with the Paris Bourse Crash that same February, partly out of fears of the spiking wave of flu cases. [1] With the Bourse closed for nearly a week, the French banking system virtually collapsed overnight as soon as it reopened, triggering a similar bank run and crash in tandem in London, where Barings Bank was already spiraling into a crisis due to its investments in Argentina, which would see a total economic collapse concluding in the Revolution of the Park which brought the radical and progressive Civic Union of Leandro Alem to power. Collectively, this would be the worst banking panic in history up to that point, dwarfed only by the 2002 crisis a century later.
These twin gut punches to the world economy - first the nasty flu that would linger deep into 1893, and then the collapse of the world's two largest financial centers - served as fuel on the populist fire growing around the world. Unlike 1870 - from which Britain had arguably still not recovered when the even-worse Panic of 1890 struck - the labor movement had consolidated itself as a genuine force by the last decade of the 19th century, and agrarian agitation by increasingly destitute farmers ruined by the farm credit crisis as well as poor harvests combined to erupt in a massive social upheaval that would dramatically change politics all over the globe. Incumbent governments - the Tories in the UK, Democrats in the United States, National Liberals in Spain, the Autonomists in Argentina - were battered by their oppositions throughout the first years of the decade, and political violence emerged as a potent tool of the lower classes, first and foremost in America, where George Custer became the first President to be assassinated when he was gunned down by the Native American son of a woman his men had killed twenty years prior at a Washington train station.
The burst of radicalism onto the political scene manifested itself in many different ways. Most prominently, in Britain it led to the rise of Joseph Chamberlain, a man whose political career had largely thought to be over by the late 1880s after an ascendancy in the Hartington years but who came to stand as the central figure of the radical wing of the British Liberal Party. Upon his appointment as Prime Minister in 1892, he immediately began an aggressive program of reform that overshadowed the more piecemeal approach taken by Hartington a decade earlier, managing through his polarizing campaigns with the assertive and sophisticated internal party pressure organization the National Liberal Federation to pass a small-scale land reform, universal manhood suffrage, and the early inklings of the British welfare state; at the helm of the Liberals, Chamberlain won landslide elections in 1894 and 1899 that served to essentially permanently make the Commons the superior House of Parliament. His time in office also would see the expansion of the British presence in Uganda and Nigeria, and despite not solving much of the fundamental grievances of Ireland or colonial India during his fourteen years of consecutive office at 10 Downing Street, it was nonetheless seen as a time of peace, recovering wages and newly confident British imperialism behind the muscular, cocksure position of Chamberlain.
This was not to say that Chamberlain's tenure was entirely without controversy or conflict. He had entered office at the same time that Albert Victor had infamously renounced his succession rights to marry his love, Helene of Orleans, because she was forbidden by both her father and the Pope to convert to Anglicanism; a year later, Victoria passed away aged 74 shortly after the marriage of her grandson and heir, George V. His first year was also dominated by fears of war with France, or Germany, or both - the Siam Crisis over French attempts to invade the Lao Highlands of northern Siam had seen the French Navy park itself within cannon distance of Bangkok and Germany, Siam's chief ally and patron from Europe, respond with fleet response of its own. The Treaty of Madrid that December, regarded as Chamberlain's finest diplomatic work, largely cooled the tensions but the episode revealed the extent to which European powers would begin having to not just pay great attention to what happened in Asia, but the ways in which they could be dragged into conflicts of their own by it.
The vast social changes of the 1890s revealed how quickly those who just years before had seemed like innovative and forward-thinking men now appeared anachronistic fossils. After returning to power in 1892 behind an uninspired but straightforward campaign largely on reassuring competence from former Secretary of State Hay, the Liberals in the United States found that they had gone from being the modernizing, reformist aspirants of the Blaine years to an increasingly tired defender of an increasingly unpopular laissez-faire status quo which their wealthy, WASPy party apparatus in New England seemed to typify and embody, particularly the brash, cunning and ambitious Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. The Hay administration's interests, thanks largely to the aloof President atop it, was preoccupied primarily with foreign matters, and so in the 1890s the People's Party burst onto the scene in the American West, demanding vast new regulations of the economy to protect farmers and other working men. For a moment, it appeared that they could perhaps eclipse the Democratic Party - vote-splitting certainly had an impact in buffing up the otherwise-dwindling Liberal Congressional majorities of the time - but instead they were slowly over the 1890s instead absorbed state-by-state into Jackson's baby, with the Democrats by the end of the decade having remarkably pivoted clear across the political spectrum from the party of the old-fashioned Jacksonian small-government ethos to advocating for a more muscular role in regulating economic affairs, particularly going after the much-hated trusts that the Hoar Anti-Trust Act of 1892 had failed to fully quell. This shift was embodied in both politics and media, with the symbiotic rise and partnership of the wealthy businessman William Randolph Hearst to Governor of New York on the backs of an expansive, pro-labor populist platform using the "yellow press" newspapers of bombastic news baron Theodore Roosevelt as his chief advocate and bullhorn.
The Hay years in the United States were associated largely with the recovery from the early 1890s depression and, at least in the view of Liberal bosses, a return to the staid and sunny optimism of the Blaine era, with the 1896 reelection campaign largely trying, with a fair deal of success, to ape and mimic Blaine's own triumph in '84. However, times had changed, both at home and abroad. Despite Liberals being keen to leverage the technological, cultural and architectural marvel that was the seminal, era-defining 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the city just a year later was struck by the Pullman Strike, the largest mass strike in American history that ground Illinois to a halt and inspired the nascent Socialist Party for decades to come. Foreign relations, despite Hay's experience at the helm, were no more smooth in the more complicated 1890s; despite Mexico's remarkable recovery from its civil war and the early 1890s depression under the Premierships of Felix Zuloaga and Miramon, rivalries with the Confederacy and Mexico over Central American markets and the development of a canal across Nicaragua were starting to bubble up, particularly with John Tyler Morgan, a more thuggishly uncooperative Confederate President, now at the helm after the controversial process in which he was essentially foisted upon Democrats at the 1891 convention in Nashville by party bigwigs including Longstreet. The Continentalist program of Blaine and Hay in the Americas was starting to unravel, though Hay would not live to see it collapse - indeed, he would not live to see the decade out, felled by an Italian anarchist's bullet in an assassination inspired by the stabbing of the Prince of Orleans in Geneva, the bombing death of Austrian crown prince Rudolf and his wife in Budapest by a Hungarian nationalist, and most immediately the murder of Umberto I of Italy in Milan. America closed the 1890s largely how it had started them - with the country in stunned shock as a President was killed.
Europe was no stranger to the rise of mass politics either, but it varied in how it approached them. In Germany, after the death of Friedrich from resurgent cancer, his heir Heinrich I (his elder brother having died of a boating accident in 1880) made efforts to continue his father's liberal reforms while rebuilding his relationship with Prussia's conservative landed nobility, and as with all things German it managed to be both a failure and a success simultaneously, depending on one's perspective. Belgium took a markedly different approach - following the assassination of his father in 1888 by a socialist, King Leopold III had emerged as possibly Europe's most reactionary monarch outside of Russia in addition to being regarded as a cad personally, and he encouraged his sons to largely take after him and gave them a front-row seat to what a "parliamentary autocracy" could indeed look like with his oppressive practices and use of parliamentary majorities to quash his opposition. [2] French policymakers were certainly taking notes; having risen up in the ranks militarily and in the Cabinet over the preceding decade, Georges Boulanger, Minister of Defense, had accumulated enough power and influence to essentially have his own parliamentary bloc in his Ligue des Patriotes to act as a shadow Premier and eminence grise, and after the death of his ally Felix Faure of a heart attack whilst in the middle of receiving fellatio [3], he finally achieved the top spot with a growing and hard-edged right-wing governing bloc in the rubberstamp Corps legislatif behind him, to the point that it caused even Napoleon IV some consternation.
As Siam had revealed, though, it was in Asia that Europe's attention really belonged, as the aftershocks of the Sino-French War continued to ripple out. The reforms of a Japan that had no intention of being treated like China were beginning to cause some consternation for European policymakers, but the creakiness of Qing China finally saw its breakdown in the Tiananmen Putsch in which military officers loyal to Cixi undid the Hundred Weeks' Reforms, imprisoned and slaughtered reformists by the thousands and forced hundreds more into exile, and placed the Guangxu Emperor under house arrest even though his powers were not curtailed formally. This conservative counterreaction by the most ardently traditional elements of the Manchu court came at a time when China was already destabilizing rapidly due to poor harvests and resentments in villages over Western extraterritoriality and the mass conversion of Chinese peasants to Christianity by European and American missionaries, and in the last months of 1899 a violent rebellion rose up across much of northern China, concentrated at first in Shandong but then spreading slowly outwards.
At first, this grassroots uprising did not cause Europeans much alarm - they were more distraught by the events at Tiananmen the previous year - but it should have. Spain had already discovered the ferocity with which Asian peoples would fight to drive European influence from their lands as they dealt with an unstoppable insurgency in the Philippines that had failed to capture Manila thanks only to the brutal and inhumane tactics of the colony's new Captain-General, the grim Valeriano Weyler, who had pivoted from killing Carlists and anarchists to now rounding up Filipinos by the hundreds of thousands to place them in reconcentrados - concentration camps. What started as an insurrection in the Philippines over resentment at the powers of the monastic orders ordained by Spain to help govern it would before long have an unintentional mimic on the mainland, as the dawn of the new century would bring with it a sun tinged red with the blood of millions as China became the center of the world's attention for the age of imperialism's most infamous colonial conflict...
[1] I can distinctly remember how eerie it felt writing about all this back in early 2021... art imitating life, as it were
[2] For those new to the Cincoverse, "Evil Belgium" is probably the OG absurd meme for this timeline that we've just kept running with
[3] Again, true story, and Peak French