HOME | DD

Description

OK, someone commissioned me to do a world map for ReagentAH's "Last Straw". www.deviantart.com/reagentah/a… This is a South Africa where the Zulu empire never arises, and the horrendous period of warfare and mass population movements known as the "Mfecane" never take place, preventing the depopulation of much of the south African interior. As a result, the Boer migrations face a much denser and better organized native population, and their expansion stalls out in what in our world would the south of the Orange free state, although there's some compensatory expansion into what in our world would become Botswana and Namibia.Some sizable native states emerge in the interior of south Africa, and have managed to retain their independence till 1911, in part due to the British cape dominion preferring trade than a war of conquest they'll probably be corralled into fighting in.

Now, we are given a map of South Africa, but we really don't know much about the rest of the world. The POD is around 1819, and so Britain already holds the cape, Napoleon is a gone goose, and Latin America is pretty much guaranteed at this point to go independent. What follows and how it differs is unclear. As of 1911 it seems conflict may be in the offing in Europe, and maaaybe France doesn't get along with Britain as well?

The simplest would be to assume that the failure of the Boer Trek has very little effect on the rest of the world, and everything is pretty much identical to OTL (Our Timeline)outside of south Africa. But what's the fun in that?

(I am, personally, a big believer in butterflies. Not just Boer Trekkers and indigenous Africans will have different experiences: so will British officials, Portuguese traders, French explorers and sailors, businessmen, missionaries, etc., etc., and they will in turn interact with other people, whether they themselves return to Europe or not, and people who did end up in South Africa for one reason or another don't go there, and so on, and so forth. I expect it will be only a few decades before nobody identical to OTL is born after a few decades: do you have any idea how spectacularly unlikely that that one specific sperm out of hundreds of billions a human male produces in a lifetime will show up at the exact time and place to keep its OTL rendezvous with the correct egg?)

So, I have felt free to just mess around once we get past mid-century. I am aware that the US Mexican cession was less 30 years after the POD, but the border we got was pretty contingent, and there was strong pressure (from the south in particular) for taking more.

So. Bismarck was still born and became a person of some importance in Prussian politics, but never became as powerful as OTL or a Kaiser’s right hand man, and was unavailable to steer the unification of the German state. Prussia did manage to detach Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark and managed by the end of the 19th century to turn an alt-North German confederation into a genuine federal state, but efforts to bring in the Catholic south led to a late 70s war in which Prussia fought both Austria and France and got its nose bloody: it suffered only minor losses, but it put back efforts to unify all of Germany for a generation.

Napoleon III managed to grab the brass ring in this world, and without the defeat of the Franco-Prussian war his son still rules France as Napoleon IV (although the French Parliament has gained the upper hand, a process already underway in Napoleon III’s declining years.) A more confident France has stuck to its traditional habit of twitting the British, and has sought to increase its influence globally in the traditional pursuit of Glorie. The French have worked to create an alliance under their leadership and have created a sort of latin bloc with the Italians and the fairly recently minted Spanish Republic, or possibly a sort of Catholic bloc with those countries and Austria (it’s a bit unclear). Having been forced to accept that competing with the US in Mexico and central America is just too risky, the French are currently busy trying to increase their influence in South America, in competition with the British.

The Austrian alliance is one of convenience: there’s no great love lost among the two powers. But both are interested in preventing any further expansion of North Germany, which has been brisky industrializing and even without the economic input of the south is rapidly leaving both France and Austria in the dust as an economic/industrial power. As long as Prussia is a mutual threat, they are tied together. (It’s certainly no odder than the anti-German empire alliance of Czarist Russia and Republican France in our world.) Italy is a bit of an uncertain ally: Latin and Catholic solidarity, sure, potential German and/or British colonial pelf, sure, but it has some serious irredenta when it comes to Austria, and while Italy has some gratitude for French support in the early stages of Italian unification, they haven’t forgotten that that France kept them from finishing the job until 1874, when in the aftermath of Napoleon III’s death France withdrew its protection from the Papal state.

North Germany is more liberal than our world’s German Empire. Ironically, this has made it more, not less, aggressive towards southern Germany and Austria. Many politicians make a point of German unification requiring not only Bavaria, Wuttenberg, etc., but also Austria and the Sudetenland if not all of OTLs Czech republic.(Rump Bohemia couldn’t make it as a country, clearly, says the German intelligentsia.) This does not do much to weaken the Austrian-French alliance.

As France in the Sahel OTL after the Franco-Prussian war, Germany has perhaps compensated by chasing after colonies more vigorously than OTL, triggering a slower and less thorough scramble for Africa (along with the still surviving south African states, much of the Sahel is still independent or at least ruled indirectly.)

Britain worries about France almost as much as it does about Russia. It’s sure that it’s usually up to something perfidious, and they’re sure the breakup of Belgium was engineered by the French (they did give support to walloon separatists, and the French government has long term ambitions to absorb Wallonia, but softly, softly catchee monkey.) It has therefore developed an “understanding” with the North Germans re a possible war with France. It’s not a full alliance - there’s room for them to back out if Germany attacks France unilaterally, and if Germany fights Austria but not France the British aren’t obliged to pitch in.

(It’s further complicated by Russia. Britain has made it clear they’d be very glad to help if North Germany gets into a war with Russia, but North Germany sees no real benefit to a war with Russia. Indeed, by diplomatic channels they’ve made it clear they would be quite pro-Russia if they got into a war that involved detaching the eastern bits of Austria.)

As OTL the Ottomans were largely driven from the Balkans with the aid of Russia, although the territories were divvied up a bit differently (alas, poor Albania). As OTL, they’re struggling to modernize, although with a quite different cast of characters. At least Britain’s in their corner (if only to block the Russians)

The Russians, meanwhile, aren’t really that interested in ruling more of Anatolia, but remain keen on Constantinople. Less worried about North Germany than our world’s German Empire, they so far see no need for an official alliance. They might go for (as OTL) an anti-British alliance with France, but French liberal opinion is hostile to an alliance with reactionary Russia, and Austria wouldn’t be in favor of it either, Russia being supportive of Slavic separatism and Serbian irredentism (the Austrians, who let Serbia and Montenegro take a nibble of Bosnia when that bit of Ottoman Europe was being carved up, feel outraged at their further demands.) In the meantime, Russia feel secure enough in the west and south to push hard in the east, arm-twisting the Chinese into giving them a massive sphere of influence in Mongolia and northern Manchuria, and puppetizing Korea. Internal problems remain, but the Russian establishment hasn’t had a “wakeup call” like OTL’s war with Japan and consequent ‘05 revolution.

(Japan as in our world was opened at gun’s point, and in the resultant turmoil the forces of reaction triumphed, which has had consequences: the hereditary Shoguns remain (theoretically) absolute rulers, but thanks to being less successful than the Meiji oligarchs at the modernization game, their ability to rule sans foreign intervention does not extend much beyond Edo).

The US civil war broke out somewhat later and was even bloodier than in our world, leaving at the end a north in a vengeful mood and with a much less south-friendly president than Andrew Johnson (no, not Lincoln, whose career peaked in this world as a Supreme Court justice.). To permanently reduce the political influence of the south, the number of southern states was reduced, with Arkansas merged with Louisiana, the same with the two Carolinas, and Alabama divided between Mississippi and Georgia. (As of 1911 there’s a strong movement to restore Arkansas and Mississippi, which may well succeed: the Carolinas have found solidarity in detesting the black territory to their south, while Georgians and Mississippians are a bit reluctant to lose territory to restore Alabama.)

The dice have rolled a bit better for China in terms of leadership, and the rather messy series of events that started out with the Boxer Rebellion of our world have been avoided: the Manchu government’s self-strengthening programme has got further along, and although there are rumblings, there’s no imminent threat of a republican revolution. Britain and France are competing to try to take China “under their wing”: Britain to forestall the Russians from extending their influence further, France generally seeking to enhance their influence globally. (Currently the Chinese favor the French: although they’ve taken Taiwan, they have been less pushy on the mainland than in our world, and the new-model Chinese army is being trained with French help). The US also has put its oar in. Although China has managed to avoid some of OTLs humiliations (Japan not being a player has helped) things are reaching a crisis in Manchuria, where the Russians and their rail lines are getting intolerably bossy and arrogant in their treatment of the Chinese population: increasing popular outrage may soon force the Chinese to see how well their military modernization has actually succeeded (less than hoped for but substantially better than the Russians were expecting, as it will eventually turn out).

By 1911, the continued existence of native African states in South Africa had gone from butterflies to more direct effects. The view of sub-Saharan Africa as largely state-free barbarism has been slightly modified, to the extent that the French, British and Portuguese are more willing to rule through native client states and to allow such states some autonomy overall, while “scientific racism” is a bit less intellectually dominant, at least outside North Germany and the United States. Also, the fact that the largest gold mines in South Africa lie in native territory and so far have been rather less exploited than OTL (although that is changing) has had effects on the global money supply. With a gold-backed international economy, more expensive gold (there has been more effort put into gold sources in Australia and Russian Siberia, but extraction is more difficult) has had financial effects, and economic growth and stability has been affected. It’s not a massive change, but it has tilted politics a bit more to the left and radical: it’s hard to say whether the early success of republicanism in Spain is related, but there is more industrial unrest in north Italy, this world’s equivalent of the British labor party is further along in stealing the Liberal’s lunch, and Mexico’s new “Zapatista” populist regime has features our world would consider “socialist.”

This unnerves US capital, which has already been somewhat unnerved by the growth *Populist and *Wobbly movements in response to another round of financial panic in the late 00’s and a stubborn resistance to reform by the Gilded Age elite, the Unionists having as yet failed to find a Teddy Roosevelt to steal the Populists thunder. As the hot summer drags on, so do strikes and other forms of resistance in the Chicago area, the west Pennsylvania mining and industrial regions, West Virginia coal country, and the transport hub of the lower Mississippi. There’s no chance of an actual revolution - there’s nowhere near enough popular support for that - but there is a general feeling that some sort of change is desperately needed, and the 1912 election promises to be fiercely contested.

In South Africa itself, the situation is somewhat tense. There is a fairly traditional alliance between the Mosesh and Rolong kingdoms against British or Tlokwa expansion, and the monarchs of both states are trying to overcome traditional hostilities to create a united south African front with the Tlokwa Empire. This is not something the British, French, and Portuguese are keen on, and indeed they’re working to undermine the project: they’re all interested in destabilizing the African kingdoms and turn them against each other and their own subjects, so they can be eaten piecemeal. The situation is further complicated by the increasing number of non-Africans living in the Kingdoms (as they’re sometimes referred to in shorthand), engineers and skilled workers needed by the monarchies to modernize their countries, mercenaries, merchants (quite a few being Indians and Arabs coming by way of Portuguese Mozambique and the British Union of the Cape), missionaries, and Boer squatters on thinly inhabited land. Some are feared to be a white people’s fifth column, and some effectively are; Cecil Rhodes may have been butterflied, but there are no shortage of adventurer types in both Britain and France. The gold and other mineral wealth of the kingdoms may help pay for modernization, but simply extracting it in industrial quantity requires the import of European mining skills, which means European miners, which means European mining companies with ready-to-sign contracts, a great deal, you’ll never regret it…what the Kingdoms need is time, time to build up their militaries, time to establish themselves internationally, time to modernize and consolidate.

Meanwhile, things are getting tense again in Europe: while the failed Prussian effort to bring the south into union and the the considerable arm-twisting and use of popular pressure against local rulers involved in the creation of the North German reich may have put the south German states off on unification, it’s back on the agenda. The North Germans have pulled off several diplomatic successes lately, including the creation of a Free Trade zone that includes the southern states, in spite of Austrian hostility. (The North Germans invited the Austrians to join: Cisleithania less Galicia only, of course. The Austrians took it as being patronized.) What with increased popular support for the “big Germany” idea among the southern bourgeois in opposition to more conservative elements and local rulers wary of being reduced to “store opening” monarchs, North Germany may manage to pull off a union with the south sand military intervention: and this is really getting on the nerves of Paris and Vienna.

Elsewhere, Chinese sentiments in Manchuria approach the boiling point, French troops are getting a bit too close to territory claimed by North Germany in the Sudan, an election looms in Italy, the French navy orders a lot more submarines (a fight with both the British and North German navies, even with Italian and Austrian help, won’t go well if play if fair) and the Bulgarians are wondering if the Russians will back them if they pick a fight with the Ottomans (they really want an Aegean coastline). Crap’s trajectory is getting dangerously close to that of fan, and the Kingdoms may get their time.

Description

OK, someone commissioned me to do a world map for ReagentAH's "Last Straw". www.deviantart.com/reagentah/a… This is a South Africa where the Zulu empire never arises, and the horrendous period of warfare and mass population movements known as the "Mfecane" never take place, preventing the depopulation of much of the south African interior. As a result, the Boer migrations face a much denser and better organized native population, and their expansion stalls out in what in our world would the south of the Orange free state, although there's some compensatory expansion into what in our world would become Botswana and Namibia.Some sizable native states emerge in the interior of south Africa, and have managed to retain their independence till 1911, in part due to the British cape dominion preferring trade than a war of conquest they'll probably be corralled into fighting in.

Now, we are given a map of South Africa, but we really don't know much about the rest of the world. The POD is around 1819, and so Britain already holds the cape, Napoleon is a gone goose, and Latin America is pretty much guaranteed at this point to go independent. What follows and how it differs is unclear. As of 1911 it seems conflict may be in the offing in Europe, and maaaybe France doesn't get along with Britain as well?

The simplest would be to assume that the failure of the Boer Trek has very little effect on the rest of the world, and everything is pretty much identical to OTL (Our Timeline)outside of south Africa. But what's the fun in that?

(I am, personally, a big believer in butterflies. Not just Boer Trekkers and indigenous Africans will have different experiences: so will British officials, Portuguese traders, French explorers and sailors, businessmen, missionaries, etc., etc., and they will in turn interact with other people, whether they themselves return to Europe or not, and people who did end up in South Africa for one reason or another don't go there, and so on, and so forth. I expect it will be only a few decades before nobody identical to OTL is born after a few decades: do you have any idea how spectacularly unlikely that that one specific sperm out of hundreds of billions a human male produces in a lifetime will show up at the exact time and place to keep its OTL rendezvous with the correct egg?)

So, I have felt free to just mess around once we get past mid-century. I am aware that the US Mexican cession was less 30 years after the POD, but the border we got was pretty contingent, and there was strong pressure (from the south in particular) for taking more.

So. Bismarck was still born and became a person of some importance in Prussian politics, but never became as powerful as OTL or a Kaiser’s right hand man, and was unavailable to steer the unification of the German state. Prussia did manage to detach Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark and managed by the end of the 19th century to turn an alt-North German confederation into a genuine federal state, but efforts to bring in the Catholic south led to a late 70s war in which Prussia fought both Austria and France and got its nose bloody: it suffered only minor losses, but it put back efforts to unify all of Germany for a generation.

Napoleon III managed to grab the brass ring in this world, and without the defeat of the Franco-Prussian war his son still rules France as Napoleon IV (although the French Parliament has gained the upper hand, a process already underway in Napoleon III’s declining years.) A more confident France has stuck to its traditional habit of twitting the British, and has sought to increase its influence globally in the traditional pursuit of Glorie. The French have worked to create an alliance under their leadership and have created a sort of latin bloc with the Italians and the fairly recently minted Spanish Republic, or possibly a sort of Catholic bloc with those countries and Austria (it’s a bit unclear). Having been forced to accept that competing with the US in Mexico and central America is just too risky, the French are currently busy trying to increase their influence in South America, in competition with the British.

The Austrian alliance is one of convenience: there’s no great love lost among the two powers. But both are interested in preventing any further expansion of North Germany, which has been brisky industrializing and even without the economic input of the south is rapidly leaving both France and Austria in the dust as an economic/industrial power. As long as Prussia is a mutual threat, they are tied together. (It’s certainly no odder than the anti-German empire alliance of Czarist Russia and Republican France in our world.) Italy is a bit of an uncertain ally: Latin and Catholic solidarity, sure, potential German and/or British colonial pelf, sure, but it has some serious irredenta when it comes to Austria, and while Italy has some gratitude for French support in the early stages of Italian unification, they haven’t forgotten that that France kept them from finishing the job until 1874, when in the aftermath of Napoleon III’s death France withdrew its protection from the Papal state.

North Germany is more liberal than our world’s German Empire. Ironically, this has made it more, not less, aggressive towards southern Germany and Austria. Many politicians make a point of German unification requiring not only Bavaria, Wuttenberg, etc., but also Austria and the Sudetenland if not all of OTLs Czech republic.(Rump Bohemia couldn’t make it as a country, clearly, says the German intelligentsia.) This does not do much to weaken the Austrian-French alliance.

As France in the Sahel OTL after the Franco-Prussian war, Germany has perhaps compensated by chasing after colonies more vigorously than OTL, triggering a slower and less thorough scramble for Africa (along with the still surviving south African states, much of the Sahel is still independent or at least ruled indirectly.)

Britain worries about France almost as much as it does about Russia. It’s sure that it’s usually up to something perfidious, and they’re sure the breakup of Belgium was engineered by the French (they did give support to walloon separatists, and the French government has long term ambitions to absorb Wallonia, but softly, softly catchee monkey.) It has therefore developed an “understanding” with the North Germans re a possible war with France. It’s not a full alliance - there’s room for them to back out if Germany attacks France unilaterally, and if Germany fights Austria but not France the British aren’t obliged to pitch in.

(It’s further complicated by Russia. Britain has made it clear they’d be very glad to help if North Germany gets into a war with Russia, but North Germany sees no real benefit to a war with Russia. Indeed, by diplomatic channels they’ve made it clear they would be quite pro-Russia if they got into a war that involved detaching the eastern bits of Austria.)

As OTL the Ottomans were largely driven from the Balkans with the aid of Russia, although the territories were divvied up a bit differently (alas, poor Albania). As OTL, they’re struggling to modernize, although with a quite different cast of characters. At least Britain’s in their corner (if only to block the Russians)

The Russians, meanwhile, aren’t really that interested in ruling more of Anatolia, but remain keen on Constantinople. Less worried about North Germany than our world’s German Empire, they so far see no need for an official alliance. They might go for (as OTL) an anti-British alliance with France, but French liberal opinion is hostile to an alliance with reactionary Russia, and Austria wouldn’t be in favor of it either, Russia being supportive of Slavic separatism and Serbian irredentism (the Austrians, who let Serbia and Montenegro take a nibble of Bosnia when that bit of Ottoman Europe was being carved up, feel outraged at their further demands.) In the meantime, Russia feel secure enough in the west and south to push hard in the east, arm-twisting the Chinese into giving them a massive sphere of influence in Mongolia and northern Manchuria, and puppetizing Korea. Internal problems remain, but the Russian establishment hasn’t had a “wakeup call” like OTL’s war with Japan and consequent ‘05 revolution.

(Japan as in our world was opened at gun’s point, and in the resultant turmoil the forces of reaction triumphed, which has had consequences: the hereditary Shoguns remain (theoretically) absolute rulers, but thanks to being less successful than the Meiji oligarchs at the modernization game, their ability to rule sans foreign intervention does not extend much beyond Edo).

The US civil war broke out somewhat later and was even bloodier than in our world, leaving at the end a north in a vengeful mood and with a much less south-friendly president than Andrew Johnson (no, not Lincoln, whose career peaked in this world as a Supreme Court justice.). To permanently reduce the political influence of the south, the number of southern states was reduced, with Arkansas merged with Louisiana, the same with the two Carolinas, and Alabama divided between Mississippi and Georgia. (As of 1911 there’s a strong movement to restore Arkansas and Mississippi, which may well succeed: the Carolinas have found solidarity in detesting the black territory to their south, while Georgians and Mississippians are a bit reluctant to lose territory to restore Alabama.)

The dice have rolled a bit better for China in terms of leadership, and the rather messy series of events that started out with the Boxer Rebellion of our world have been avoided: the Manchu government’s self-strengthening programme has got further along, and although there are rumblings, there’s no imminent threat of a republican revolution. Britain and France are competing to try to take China “under their wing”: Britain to forestall the Russians from extending their influence further, France generally seeking to enhance their influence globally. (Currently the Chinese favor the French: although they’ve taken Taiwan, they have been less pushy on the mainland than in our world, and the new-model Chinese army is being trained with French help). The US also has put its oar in. Although China has managed to avoid some of OTLs humiliations (Japan not being a player has helped) things are reaching a crisis in Manchuria, where the Russians and their rail lines are getting intolerably bossy and arrogant in their treatment of the Chinese population: increasing popular outrage may soon force the Chinese to see how well their military modernization has actually succeeded (less than hoped for but substantially better than the Russians were expecting, as it will eventually turn out).

By 1911, the continued existence of native African states in South Africa had gone from butterflies to more direct effects. The view of sub-Saharan Africa as largely state-free barbarism has been slightly modified, to the extent that the French, British and Portuguese are more willing to rule through native client states and to allow such states some autonomy overall, while “scientific racism” is a bit less intellectually dominant, at least outside North Germany and the United States. Also, the fact that the largest gold mines in South Africa lie in native territory and so far have been rather less exploited than OTL (although that is changing) has had effects on the global money supply. With a gold-backed international economy, more expensive gold (there has been more effort put into gold sources in Australia and Russian Siberia, but extraction is more difficult) has had financial effects, and economic growth and stability has been affected. It’s not a massive change, but it has tilted politics a bit more to the left and radical: it’s hard to say whether the early success of republicanism in Spain is related, but there is more industrial unrest in north Italy, this world’s equivalent of the British labor party is further along in stealing the Liberal’s lunch, and Mexico’s new “Zapatista” populist regime has features our world would consider “socialist.”

This unnerves US capital, which has already been somewhat unnerved by the growth *Populist and *Wobbly movements in response to another round of financial panic in the late 00’s and a stubborn resistance to reform by the Gilded Age elite, the Unionists having as yet failed to find a Teddy Roosevelt to steal the Populists thunder. As the hot summer drags on, so do strikes and other forms of resistance in the Chicago area, the west Pennsylvania mining and industrial regions, West Virginia coal country, and the transport hub of the lower Mississippi. There’s no chance of an actual revolution - there’s nowhere near enough popular support for that - but there is a general feeling that some sort of change is desperately needed, and the 1912 election promises to be fiercely contested.

In South Africa itself, the situation is somewhat tense. There is a fairly traditional alliance between the Mosesh and Rolong kingdoms against British or Tlokwa expansion, and the monarchs of both states are trying to overcome traditional hostilities to create a united south African front with the Tlokwa Empire. This is not something the British, French, and Portuguese are keen on, and indeed they’re working to undermine the project: they’re all interested in destabilizing the African kingdoms and turn them against each other and their own subjects, so they can be eaten piecemeal. The situation is further complicated by the increasing number of non-Africans living in the Kingdoms (as they’re sometimes referred to in shorthand), engineers and skilled workers needed by the monarchies to modernize their countries, mercenaries, merchants (quite a few being Indians and Arabs coming by way of Portuguese Mozambique and the British Union of the Cape), missionaries, and Boer squatters on thinly inhabited land. Some are feared to be a white people’s fifth column, and some effectively are; Cecil Rhodes may have been butterflied, but there are no shortage of adventurer types in both Britain and France. The gold and other mineral wealth of the kingdoms may help pay for modernization, but simply extracting it in industrial quantity requires the import of European mining skills, which means European miners, which means European mining companies with ready-to-sign contracts, a great deal, you’ll never regret it…what the Kingdoms need is time, time to build up their militaries, time to establish themselves internationally, time to modernize and consolidate.

Meanwhile, things are getting tense again in Europe: while the failed Prussian effort to bring the south into union and the the considerable arm-twisting and use of popular pressure against local rulers involved in the creation of the North German reich may have put the south German states off on unification, it’s back on the agenda. The North Germans have pulled off several diplomatic successes lately, including the creation of a Free Trade zone that includes the southern states, in spite of Austrian hostility. (The North Germans invited the Austrians to join: Cisleithania less Galicia only, of course. The Austrians took it as being patronized.) What with increased popular support for the “big Germany” idea among the southern bourgeois in opposition to more conservative elements and local rulers wary of being reduced to “store opening” monarchs, North Germany may manage to pull off a union with the south sand military intervention: and this is really getting on the nerves of Paris and Vienna.

Elsewhere, Chinese sentiments in Manchuria approach the boiling point, French troops are getting a bit too close to territory claimed by North Germany in the Sudan, an election looms in Italy, the French navy orders a lot more submarines (a fight with both the British and North German navies, even with Italian and Austrian help, won’t go well if play if fair) and the Bulgarians are wondering if the Russians will back them if they pick a fight with the Ottomans (they really want an Aegean coastline). Crap’s trajectory is getting dangerously close to that of fan, and the Kingdoms may get their time.