- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
As I said, I don't buy that argument, either. And wasn't the Egyptian grain mainly shipped to the Italy and city of Rome (and later, Constantinople) instead of feeding the entire empire?
Alt History ideas, rec and general discussion thread
- Thread starter Teen Spirit
- Start date
- Discussion
- Location
- The Old Dominion
As I recall Sicily, Egypt and North Africa were the major sources of the grain for feeding the city of Rome after the long Second Punic war pretty much wiped out the Roman heartland's ability to feed the capital effectively while also swelling the city's population with refugees from the countryside as small holders fled and fields were left fallow or laid waste to though which locality was more important for grain depended on the time period.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Yeah, but the way it's written makes it look like the North African grain fed the entire Roman Empire, and that the provinces could not feed themselves without them.
Which, uh, doesn't make sense.
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- She/Her
You have to wonder how large-scale agriculture could even exist if small-scale agriculture was nonviable (so the population could never grow to the size large-scale agriculture could be possible), or how Rome even became the center of an Empire if its food supply had been dependent on Carthage and Egypt from the beginning. The causal relationships are all backwards!
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Yeah, the timeline itself is rather interesting (Native American and African centric TLs are rarities), but that POD is just implausible.
I would have instead made it something like 'with the introduction of potatoes, Germanic people beyond the border of the Roman Empire sees high population growths, starting the Migration Period earlier. The Roman Empire fell in the third century, torn by civil wars and challenged by the rising Sassanid Persia."
Not sure how plausible that is, but probably more than that POD.
Baron Steakpuncher
Hopeful Idealist
- Location
- Australia
It did feed the major cities of Italy, Greece and the Near East specifically.
The grain belt from Africa (the province) to Egypt was the most important section of the Empire for quite a while. To the extent that senators iirc in the early principate had to get permission to set foot in the latter which was the personal property of the Emperor.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It sounds plausible to me, with some adjustments to the exact POD of where the American crops are introduced. The first few centuries AD is early enough in my mind that, had the disparity between the two landmasses of the Americas and Afro-Eurasia been minimized, that the Americas could've dominated the world. The two continents certainly don't lack in resources in comparison to Europe.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Other PODs are all plausible enough. I just have a problem with the Potatoes and the Roman Empire bit, because it doesn't make sense to me.
Scrivener
The Femme In Yellow
- Location
- Don't Leave Me Here You Bastards
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They
Heyo, this is my first post here on this thread (or in SV at all). I moved here from AH.com like the rest of you (my handle there is Scrivener).
For my first proposed AH challenge here; is it at all possible for the Roman Empire to go through a series of dynastic cycles like China? Like after Rome's initial fragmentation it's brought back together again by some other successor state, then it breaks again, then it's whole again, then it breaks again, and so on. Could we at all see a phenomenon like this in Europe?
For my first proposed AH challenge here; is it at all possible for the Roman Empire to go through a series of dynastic cycles like China? Like after Rome's initial fragmentation it's brought back together again by some other successor state, then it breaks again, then it's whole again, then it breaks again, and so on. Could we at all see a phenomenon like this in Europe?
I dislike the fact that the Aztecs are a major power, considering the Triple Alliance hadn't formed until the 1400s and the Nahua people hadn't even migrated to Central Mexico yet. I like the idea of indigenous states surviving and thriving, but this feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse.
Now I'm not saying some tribe from the 5th century BCE should remain the same for centuries as a great power. Obviously people can migrate and cultures can change. Just feels a bit half assed to have such an early POD that ends up with easy recognizable cultures in power by the model day.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Terra Allias
World's only Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka fan
- Location
- Cheverly
- Pronouns
- She/Her
If more indigenous people survived the Columbia exchange and westward expansion how would that affect the US* politically, demographically and culturally?
*Or whatever country emerges from the east coast due to butterflies. Would westward expansion even be tenable if it's more like Africa?
Edit: Wait did I already ask this?
*Or whatever country emerges from the east coast due to butterflies. Would westward expansion even be tenable if it's more like Africa?
Edit: Wait did I already ask this?
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- Location
- The Old Dominion
Hmm in the Chesapeake region or the American northeast even before the epidemics the native populations were rather low density so I am not sure a too much would change but in but there might be a far more of a issue for the Europeans trying to expanding into the southeast and beyond the Appalachian mountains if the mound builder cultures in the southeast and along the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys are still going strong and not devastated by epidemics.
A larger, more organized population might have made a difference in North America - and almost certainly amongst the Inca - but a larger Aztec population would have been offset by the equally larger populations of their many enemies. So I suspect the Aztecs were likely doomed regardless.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
This has actually inspired me for a while now, but I've been trying to imagine what the like perfectly opposite Anti-Draka would look like.
Maybe just the right change in circumstances leaves Hernando de Soto's Conquistadors just a bit slower on the draw and Tuskaloosa's soldiers just a bit quicker in cutting off the Spanish retreat halfway through Mabila's gates, and though still a bloody slog in the end the Amerindians are able to successfully see the expedition off without enough Conquistadors to breach the palisade and burn the town like they eventually did after hours and hours of back and forth in the OTL Battle of Mabila?
Thus the Mississippian/proto-Muskogee paramount chieftaincy is left with nearly all of de Soto's baggage and loot inside the town walls, all the arms and armor of the fallen Spaniards, plenty of Amerindian "guides" and "porters" from neighboring Mississippian peoples that have been enslaved on the expedition's march, and a couple dozen Spanish prisoners that would be bargaining for their lives in exchange for teaching Tuskaloosa horse-riding. This could lead to the follow-up expeditions trying to avenge de Soto and continue the quest to those golden cities that have to be around here somewhere exhausting Spanish military resources for a such a backwater as the Floridas and Carolinas regardless of success or failure, and furthering along the deterioration/transformation off all the nearby paramount chieftaincies like Tuskaloosa's into leagues of fortified city-states and armed hegemonies able to militarily resist the Conquistadors.
Thus the attempts of the exiled French Huguenots to settle in modern Florida/Georgia nearby could survive with Spain's murderous reaction stymied by the butterfly effect's nasty Caribbean storms and by the military resources devoted to garrisoning Mobile Bay and the Florida Panhandle, and the initial promise of the Huguenot friendships with Timucua- and Hitchiti- speaking chieftaincies fully blossoms into decades of a "least shitty colonial partner" kinda situation. At least using the rule of cool protagonist powers of the Anti-Draka, we could have the Huguenots basically take the same view as their Calvinist brethren in New Netherlands with the Haudenosaunee and freely trade with the townships of the Sea Islands and the great Southeast rivers without any evangelizing urges, as all non-Calvinists are equally damned to hell pagan and Catholic and Lutheran alike, especially as the slowly expanding colony transitions into less hand-to-mouth circumstances by raiding the shit out the Spanish Main and becoming a nest of French Boucaniers just like the English Puritans in the Bahamas opening the way to Nassau and the pirate's republic (and just like some French privateers did OTL).
This could likewise promote big changes back inside those French allied chieftaincies as the old Mississippian mound-complex based lifestyles morph into new practices with Spanish raids and French trade. But because the Huguenots won't be doing the mass reorganization along European missions and posts like the Spanish those chieftaincies can reorganize their new towns and trade centers more along their own choices. Instead of the like post-apocalyptic ethnogenesis of the Yamasee and Seminole in the banding together and assimilation of scattered Timucua, Hitchiti-Mikasuki, Muskogee, and Gaule survivors, you could have the semi-voluntary state development of new city-states based on the intermingling of different Amerindian nations in the camps and entrepots where French trade goods are collected and exchanged, and the still kinda shitty support of smaller and closer French allies against older hegemons like the Gaule and Coosa chieftaincies. With this you could also have the rise of new creoles and metis groups as formally Spanish and English slaves form Maroon peoples under the shadow of the Muskogee *Yamassee and French *Carolana and new classes of mixed-race free people of color grow inside the towns themselves (and also to keep down their own slaves like New Orleans),
By the time our protagonists are more than halfway through the 17th century, the French colony would have reached pretty hard limits to development thanks to the off and on militarized frontiers with the Spanish and English, the sudden starts and fits of any French colonial endeavor thanks to the Wars of Religion, and its treatment by the French Crown which would almost certainly keep trying to freeze and even roll back Huguenot colonization and keep sending official Catholic clergy and civil servants to rule in the name of Catholic lord proprietors and Catholic royal governors. Again using rule of cool protagonist powers this could result in the development of a significant counter-culture of backwoodsmen and fur traders a la the Coureurs des Boise to freely worship out of the colonial government's sight and make a shitton of untaxed money, and thus further integrate Carolana settlers with the new multi-racial environment of the upcountry against the new coastal settlers of stoutly royalist French-Canadiens and Sant-Domingue smallholders pushed out by the slave plantation system.
If and almost certainly when the English conquer Carolana from France (probably finalized close to the 18th century), the indifference and occasional outright aid of many local Francophones against the royal government and the complete clusterfuck that was the multiple sometimes contradictory proprietorships and charters for the English Carolinas, plus later English schemes to use Huguenots as settlers actually being implemented ITTL thanks to merely unfreezing it for an already present community, could result in a general state of benign neglect for Anglo-French Carolana. With the spreading raids by the nascent Muskogee polities and its Black Seminole style subsidiary Maroon groups for fresh deerskins and enemy captives to sell to those hungry English settlers and the depopulation effects of both the imposition and then the destruction of Spanish missions and colonial rule, what would become the Seminole in central Florida instead become integrated into the Muskogee trade and diplomatic systems. Add in for flavor the addition of Scottish Covenanters that OTL went to the Spanish-destroyed colony of Stuart's Town instead serving as an alternative source of European trade goods to play against the others traders, and you have enough juice to kickstart things that OTL would have gone on to lead to the Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Choctaw Confederacies also leading to a very big Muskogee/Yamasee Confederacy trying to monopolize trade under itself.
My thought is that with all the prior developments the Confederacy has ended up like a southern Haudenosaunee by this point and actually ends up somewhat succeeding in their monopolization of trade and holding of English merchants to their treaties (or at least not being genocidally evicted from their lands) thanks to the resources provided by the *Maroons and *Creoles, the *Metis traders, and ruthlessly double-crossing the English to negotiate with the Spanish. With this as we get more and more into the 18th century the stressors put on Carolana by the delayed but nevertheless steady growth of chattel plantation slavery leads to an equivalent to Cato's Rebellion within Franco-English slavery that succeeds in fleeing into Amerindian country (spreading West African inoculation techniques against smallpox), within the Muskogee Confederacy and the Nations opposed to its domineering alike. Followed by further and further encroachments and disputes and escapes ending the benign neglect of the now English royal colony of Carolana, there's now a situation set up for a further final breach with colonial authorities and the development of more generalizable and universal conceptions of the rights and freedoms of the Muskogee Confederacy and the Metis and Maroons into a Pan-Indian struggle like OTL's Pontiac/Obwaandi'eyaag and Joseph Bryant/Thayendanegea and Tecumseh. Thus the perfect Anti-Draka of the Creek Confederacy which is also the State of Muskogee + the Nassau Republic of Pirates + the Fore Mose and Negro Fort freedmen states + the Red River Rebellion + Christian Gottlieb Priber's "Kingdom of Paradise". And then from there it's just a matter of creating a ITTL Confederation of United Indian Nations with alliances with the Five 'Civilized' Tribes and the Haudenosaunee Six Nations and the Northwestern/Tecumseh's Confederacy and conquering most of North America like how the Draka somehow conquered all of Africa.
Any thoughts?
Maybe just the right change in circumstances leaves Hernando de Soto's Conquistadors just a bit slower on the draw and Tuskaloosa's soldiers just a bit quicker in cutting off the Spanish retreat halfway through Mabila's gates, and though still a bloody slog in the end the Amerindians are able to successfully see the expedition off without enough Conquistadors to breach the palisade and burn the town like they eventually did after hours and hours of back and forth in the OTL Battle of Mabila?
Thus the Mississippian/proto-Muskogee paramount chieftaincy is left with nearly all of de Soto's baggage and loot inside the town walls, all the arms and armor of the fallen Spaniards, plenty of Amerindian "guides" and "porters" from neighboring Mississippian peoples that have been enslaved on the expedition's march, and a couple dozen Spanish prisoners that would be bargaining for their lives in exchange for teaching Tuskaloosa horse-riding. This could lead to the follow-up expeditions trying to avenge de Soto and continue the quest to those golden cities that have to be around here somewhere exhausting Spanish military resources for a such a backwater as the Floridas and Carolinas regardless of success or failure, and furthering along the deterioration/transformation off all the nearby paramount chieftaincies like Tuskaloosa's into leagues of fortified city-states and armed hegemonies able to militarily resist the Conquistadors.
Thus the attempts of the exiled French Huguenots to settle in modern Florida/Georgia nearby could survive with Spain's murderous reaction stymied by the butterfly effect's nasty Caribbean storms and by the military resources devoted to garrisoning Mobile Bay and the Florida Panhandle, and the initial promise of the Huguenot friendships with Timucua- and Hitchiti- speaking chieftaincies fully blossoms into decades of a "least shitty colonial partner" kinda situation. At least using the rule of cool protagonist powers of the Anti-Draka, we could have the Huguenots basically take the same view as their Calvinist brethren in New Netherlands with the Haudenosaunee and freely trade with the townships of the Sea Islands and the great Southeast rivers without any evangelizing urges, as all non-Calvinists are equally damned to hell pagan and Catholic and Lutheran alike, especially as the slowly expanding colony transitions into less hand-to-mouth circumstances by raiding the shit out the Spanish Main and becoming a nest of French Boucaniers just like the English Puritans in the Bahamas opening the way to Nassau and the pirate's republic (and just like some French privateers did OTL).
This could likewise promote big changes back inside those French allied chieftaincies as the old Mississippian mound-complex based lifestyles morph into new practices with Spanish raids and French trade. But because the Huguenots won't be doing the mass reorganization along European missions and posts like the Spanish those chieftaincies can reorganize their new towns and trade centers more along their own choices. Instead of the like post-apocalyptic ethnogenesis of the Yamasee and Seminole in the banding together and assimilation of scattered Timucua, Hitchiti-Mikasuki, Muskogee, and Gaule survivors, you could have the semi-voluntary state development of new city-states based on the intermingling of different Amerindian nations in the camps and entrepots where French trade goods are collected and exchanged, and the still kinda shitty support of smaller and closer French allies against older hegemons like the Gaule and Coosa chieftaincies. With this you could also have the rise of new creoles and metis groups as formally Spanish and English slaves form Maroon peoples under the shadow of the Muskogee *Yamassee and French *Carolana and new classes of mixed-race free people of color grow inside the towns themselves (and also to keep down their own slaves like New Orleans),
By the time our protagonists are more than halfway through the 17th century, the French colony would have reached pretty hard limits to development thanks to the off and on militarized frontiers with the Spanish and English, the sudden starts and fits of any French colonial endeavor thanks to the Wars of Religion, and its treatment by the French Crown which would almost certainly keep trying to freeze and even roll back Huguenot colonization and keep sending official Catholic clergy and civil servants to rule in the name of Catholic lord proprietors and Catholic royal governors. Again using rule of cool protagonist powers this could result in the development of a significant counter-culture of backwoodsmen and fur traders a la the Coureurs des Boise to freely worship out of the colonial government's sight and make a shitton of untaxed money, and thus further integrate Carolana settlers with the new multi-racial environment of the upcountry against the new coastal settlers of stoutly royalist French-Canadiens and Sant-Domingue smallholders pushed out by the slave plantation system.
If and almost certainly when the English conquer Carolana from France (probably finalized close to the 18th century), the indifference and occasional outright aid of many local Francophones against the royal government and the complete clusterfuck that was the multiple sometimes contradictory proprietorships and charters for the English Carolinas, plus later English schemes to use Huguenots as settlers actually being implemented ITTL thanks to merely unfreezing it for an already present community, could result in a general state of benign neglect for Anglo-French Carolana. With the spreading raids by the nascent Muskogee polities and its Black Seminole style subsidiary Maroon groups for fresh deerskins and enemy captives to sell to those hungry English settlers and the depopulation effects of both the imposition and then the destruction of Spanish missions and colonial rule, what would become the Seminole in central Florida instead become integrated into the Muskogee trade and diplomatic systems. Add in for flavor the addition of Scottish Covenanters that OTL went to the Spanish-destroyed colony of Stuart's Town instead serving as an alternative source of European trade goods to play against the others traders, and you have enough juice to kickstart things that OTL would have gone on to lead to the Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Choctaw Confederacies also leading to a very big Muskogee/Yamasee Confederacy trying to monopolize trade under itself.
My thought is that with all the prior developments the Confederacy has ended up like a southern Haudenosaunee by this point and actually ends up somewhat succeeding in their monopolization of trade and holding of English merchants to their treaties (or at least not being genocidally evicted from their lands) thanks to the resources provided by the *Maroons and *Creoles, the *Metis traders, and ruthlessly double-crossing the English to negotiate with the Spanish. With this as we get more and more into the 18th century the stressors put on Carolana by the delayed but nevertheless steady growth of chattel plantation slavery leads to an equivalent to Cato's Rebellion within Franco-English slavery that succeeds in fleeing into Amerindian country (spreading West African inoculation techniques against smallpox), within the Muskogee Confederacy and the Nations opposed to its domineering alike. Followed by further and further encroachments and disputes and escapes ending the benign neglect of the now English royal colony of Carolana, there's now a situation set up for a further final breach with colonial authorities and the development of more generalizable and universal conceptions of the rights and freedoms of the Muskogee Confederacy and the Metis and Maroons into a Pan-Indian struggle like OTL's Pontiac/Obwaandi'eyaag and Joseph Bryant/Thayendanegea and Tecumseh. Thus the perfect Anti-Draka of the Creek Confederacy which is also the State of Muskogee + the Nassau Republic of Pirates + the Fore Mose and Negro Fort freedmen states + the Red River Rebellion + Christian Gottlieb Priber's "Kingdom of Paradise". And then from there it's just a matter of creating a ITTL Confederation of United Indian Nations with alliances with the Five 'Civilized' Tribes and the Haudenosaunee Six Nations and the Northwestern/Tecumseh's Confederacy and conquering most of North America like how the Draka somehow conquered all of Africa.
Any thoughts?
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- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Not so much an Alt. History question as an Alt. Science question (so er, magic basically), but when Johannes Kepler worked out the planets' orbits, he attributed them to magnetism since gravity hadn't been worked out yet. This got me wondering what it'd be like if the planets actually did revolve via magnetism instead of gravity (er, I don't know what Kepler's idea for how we all stayed on Earth was)?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I like the idea, though I am rather biased towards AH that involves Native American states rising on the continent and staying independent from/striking back at the colonizers. I don't think the backwoods culture would be too hard to develop, though. The Appalachians, while dominated by Scots-Irish settlers, was a huge area of intermingling, to the point that the term "Melungeon" IOTL was invented for the mix of White, Black, and Native Americans that occurred around the Cumberland Gap. If that happened with all the outright genocide and slavery IOTL, if there were stronger native states, I don't doubt a backwoods culture could develop easily.
That's essentially the plot of Eric Flint's Rivers of War series.
Neal Caffrey
Watch White Collar.
- Location
- Colombia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hii so I come to recommend a great TL by the name of If You Can Keep It: A Revolutionary Timeline it's really great and it's about a united South America and it has a pretty cool format.
Coiler
ROURKE
I've seen several levels of research in TLs that I think is worth formally classifying:
The best is obviously where there's some level of outright simulation and/or a truly deep understanding of the subject matter. This can degenerate into rivet-counting and nitpicking excess, but, especially compared to popular fiction with very little research, it's still better than the alternative. The stereotypical World War/ACW TL is this.
The worst is what I call wiki-plucking, where it's just going onto a basic reference site, grabbing names and very, very general details, and plopping them in. This gives a broad answer to every question that commenters love to ask, and it can feel deep to the unaware, but to those who are knowledgeable, it clearly isn't. Something like "November Delta Charlie Romeo"'s World War III is that.
There's always work in the middle, and that actually feels the most jarring. Military TLs in conflicts that don't have a paper trail like historical wars or Fuldapocalypses, even if well-intentioned, have frequently felt this way to me. I think my bigger go-to example is "bomb bomb bomb Iran", which had the IRIAF being far more capable than it likely would be, yet having the forcing of Hormuz be too easy and simple. It doesn't help that research frequently goes in the direction of tokens, what I call "learning more about the exact designation of a Scud TEL than its actual capabilities."
The best is obviously where there's some level of outright simulation and/or a truly deep understanding of the subject matter. This can degenerate into rivet-counting and nitpicking excess, but, especially compared to popular fiction with very little research, it's still better than the alternative. The stereotypical World War/ACW TL is this.
The worst is what I call wiki-plucking, where it's just going onto a basic reference site, grabbing names and very, very general details, and plopping them in. This gives a broad answer to every question that commenters love to ask, and it can feel deep to the unaware, but to those who are knowledgeable, it clearly isn't. Something like "November Delta Charlie Romeo"'s World War III is that.
There's always work in the middle, and that actually feels the most jarring. Military TLs in conflicts that don't have a paper trail like historical wars or Fuldapocalypses, even if well-intentioned, have frequently felt this way to me. I think my bigger go-to example is "bomb bomb bomb Iran", which had the IRIAF being far more capable than it likely would be, yet having the forcing of Hormuz be too easy and simple. It doesn't help that research frequently goes in the direction of tokens, what I call "learning more about the exact designation of a Scud TEL than its actual capabilities."
Terra Allias
World's only Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka fan
- Location
- Cheverly
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Not sure if it belongs here but I'm curious about what the faction balance in a hypothetical The New Order/The Red Order RTS game would be?
EBR
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- Khazaria
I feel like I proceeded through these stages as my knowledge of history improved. I was definitely guilty of wiki-plucking in my early days.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Honestly I'd say that it depends on what details are being done and what kind of TL it is. If it's a TL about a war that you've extensively researched and you're like, "Hey, I wonder how this outcome would effect sports" then throwing in an aside based on some basic research is fine.
And of course, the larger the scope of the TL, the more you're going to have to rely on a degree of broad-strokes knowledge.
And of course, the larger the scope of the TL, the more you're going to have to rely on a degree of broad-strokes knowledge.