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What's the most Cringeworthy Alternate History you've ever read?

Teutonic_Thrash said:
Is that Patricia Crone's Pre-Industrial Societies? The argument you've outlined is one I associate with her.
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The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz. Like I said, it's mostly devoted to debunking other peoples' arguments about why Europe was special.

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.: Pomeranz, Kenneth: 9780691090108: Amazon.com: Books

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. [Pomeranz, Kenneth] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.
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EBR said:
Part of it may be that a world without those things risks being so different from our own that it becomes unrecognizable readers.
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A big part of why I enjoyed Seperated at Birth was that history completely went off the rails. Actually thinking about completely new ideologies, wars and cultures is pretty refreshing after the myriad of TLs where Germany loses WW2 5 months later or we have one different POTUS in the 60s. Sure, I'm exaggerating a bit but people tend to be fixated on OTL too much.

The Kaiserreich mod had the right idea by making Syndicalism into the dominant leftist ideology. I just think the execution is lacking because Syndicalism is functionally the same as Socialism/Communism IOTL. Coming up with something else to replace Fascism could make a really interesting. Sure, you have to take material conditions into consideration but even small ideological deviations can have large ripple effects.
 
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ToothMaker said:
I've read a few of his books - I found them kind of meh. Not as readable as Ringo, but nowhere near as offensive as Kratman.



What was the conclusion? Could China or Japan have been the center of an industrial revolution given the issues they had?
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The other alternate I can think of is a surviving Burgundy that becomes a more centralised state.
 
Anchises said:
A big part of why I enjoyed Seperated at Birth was that history completely went off the rails. Actually thinking about completely new ideologies, wars and cultures is pretty refreshing after the myriad of TLs where Germany loses WW2 5 months later or we have one different POTUS in the 60s. Sure, I'm exaggerating a bit but people tend to be fixated on OTL too much.

The Kaiserreich mod had the right idea by making Syndicalism into the dominant leftist ideology. I just think the execution is lacking because Syndicalism is functionally the same as Socialism/Communism IOTL. Coming up with something else to replace Fascism could make a really interesting. Sure, you have to take material conditions into consideration but even small ideological deviations can have large ripple effects.
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Thank you! :) One of my goals with SaB was to avoid the trap that a lot of AH falls into, where the political ideologies are all the same as OTL or just have different names. I also tried (with less success) to minimize the degree to which the major wars were directly analogous to OTL wars, and with more success to make technological advancement follow a different path than OTL.
 
EBR said:
The book was mostly dedicated to debunking explanations of why Europe did but they didn't (Europe didn't really have a freer market, technologically all three regions were roughly on par with each other even if they were ahead in different areas, Asian governments were not more authoritarian, philosophical and scientific discourse existed in all of these places, "Protestant work ethic" isn't really a thing, etc.) but it made the surprising argument that an industrial revolution happening at that point in time wasn't inevitable at all. The author advanced an argument that there were multiple places where an industrial revolution could have happened, and that it happened in Europe but not China, Japan, or (less likely) India was mostly but not entirely a product of lucky geography and Europe finding the New World first.

No discovery of the New World by Europeans, no European industrial revolution seemed to be this person's argument.
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[scratches head] I'd have argued that it was the competition to find new spice routes that caused the Industrial Revolution then, and in order for Asian countries to kick it off there would have had to be something in Europe they wanted as much as Europeans wanted spices.
 
ToothMaker said:
[scratches head] I'd have argued that it was the competition to find new spice routes that caused the Industrial Revolution then, and in order for Asian countries to kick it off there would have had to be something in Europe they wanted as much as Europeans wanted spices.
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That was my thought, that it was because you had European governments actively promoting voyages of exploration for the purpose of having more direct access to exotic goods like spices that Europe found the New World and everything followed from there. But the author didn't trace things that far back.
 
EBR said:
Thank you! :) One of my goals with SaB was to avoid the trap that a lot of AH falls into, where the political ideologies are all the same as OTL or just have different names. I also tried (with less success) to minimize the degree to which the major wars were directly analogous to OTL wars, and with more success to make technological advancement follow a different path than OTL.
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I really liked how 2nd wave Situationism is the vanguardist, interventionist and militarist version of Situationism ITTL. It makes sense to me that Situationism would develop like that after an apocalyptic war and ecological collapse. I think that was a fair treatment of this ideology that avoided the trope of "every popular leftist movement is inevitably devolving into an analogue of Stalinism without any appearant reason".

The same is true for technological developments. Space Guns, chemical weapons and orbital bombers are a logical extrapolation of how WMDs would develop in a world with rampant military spending. Nukes are not as inevitable as people portray them to be. Especially because people tend to overestimate how destructive early nukes were.

There were specific doctrinal and psychological reasons why nukes became the cornerstone of military arsenals IOTL. Pour as much funding and expertise into chemical weapons and you would probably get something that has just as much actual battlefield use as early nukes.
 
Anchises said:
There were specific doctrinal and psychological reasons why nukes became the cornerstone of military arsenals IOTL. Pour as much funding and expertise into chemical weapons and you would probably get something that has just as much actual battlefield use as early nukes.
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I'm a little scared to ask what sort of chemcial weapon would be necessary to have the same impact on the battlefield as using Little Boy tactically would.
 
General_Urist said:
I'm a little scared to ask what sort of chemcial weapon would be necessary to have the same impact on the battlefield as using Little Boy tactically would.
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I don't want to know what a Manhattan Project equivalent would come up with when tasked to make persistent chemical agents like VX easily useable on the battlefield.

Not to talk about getting more serious about anti-agriculture warfare. Imagine Agent Orange but on steroids....
 
Anchises said:
I don't want to know what a Manhattan Project equivalent would come up with when tasked to make persistent chemical agents like VX easily useable on the battlefield.

Not to talk about getting more serious about anti-agriculture warfare. Imagine Agent Orange but on steroids....
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I think you would run into problems with delivery. A nuke is one big kaboom. You just need one missile or one bomber, and one explosion, and the nuke has done its job. Whereas with chemical weapons, you need to somehow ensure their widespread dispersal. With Agent Orange that was easy, as the USA basically had total air superiority. But if it is your Cold War opponent two continents over, at the other side of the world?

Of course you could try to use an as big as possible explosion to disperse the chemicals, but at that point you basically just have a salted nuke. After all, explosive power is what nukes were developed for. The explosion is the actually destructive part, not the nuclear fallout afterwards. That has often been too hyped up by widespread public fears. First and foremost, nukes are simply especially big and destructive bombs, and as such they are a sort of natural further development from previous bombs.
 
Susano said:
I think you would run into problems with delivery. A nuke is one big kaboom. You just need one missile or one bomber, and one explosion, and the nuke has done its job. Whereas with chemical weapons, you need to somehow ensure their widespread dispersal. With Agent Orange that was easy, as the USA basically had total air superiority. But if it is your Cold War opponent two continents over, at the other side of the world?

Of course you could try to use an as big as possible explosion to disperse the chemicals, but at that point you basically just have a salted nuke. After all, explosive power is what nukes were developed for. The explosion is the actually destructive part, not the nuclear fallout afterwards. That has often been too hyped up by widespread public fears. First and foremost, nukes are simply especially big and destructive bombs, and as such they are a sort of natural further development from previous bombs.
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Sure, delivery is the big problem for chemical agents but they are much, much easier to produce on a large scale.

Producing a fuckton of VX shells and building big artillery guns is also a viable doctrinal conclusion from a WW1esque conflict. Maybe your superpower opponent isn't on a different continent and your doctrine isn't focused as much on aerial warfare as the US one. So your alternate military doctrine is more focused on cheap easily mass producable WMDs and area denial. Afterfall it was quite the struggle to actually construct delivery systems for nukes that didn't need air superiority. Or you need a WMD that has more useability in assymetric conflicts.

I fully agree that nukes were the logical WMD for our Cold War but in different circumstances...
 
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EBR said:
The book was mostly dedicated to debunking explanations of why Europe did but they didn't (Europe didn't really have a freer market, technologically all three regions were roughly on par with each other even if they were ahead in different areas, Asian governments were not more authoritarian, philosophical and scientific discourse existed in all of these places, "Protestant work ethic" isn't really a thing, etc.) but it made the surprising argument that an industrial revolution happening at that point in time wasn't inevitable at all. The author advanced an argument that there were multiple places where an industrial revolution could have happened, and that it happened in Europe but not China, Japan, or (less likely) India was mostly but not entirely a product of lucky geography and Europe finding the New World first.

No discovery of the New World by Europeans, no European industrial revolution seemed to be this person's argument.
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If the New World was the main distinction then it would stand to reason the industrial revolution was more likely to happen in Europe doesn't it? North America is closer to Europe than it is to Southeast Asia and there's even fewer compelling reasons to cross the Pacific than the Atlantic.
 
veteranMortal said:
I mean, empires collapse when they collapse for a reason, communist revolution was a pretty inevitable result of the industrial revolution.

Like, the details being different means you're just describing "general trends stay basically the same" which is just pretty on the face of it obvious?
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I mean it might be less general trends, and more making the mainstream thought of Communism close to Marxist-Leninism, without a Red October Revolution, which would the epitome of laziness, especially if revolution happens in Western Europe, or even the Americas.
 
the atom said:
If the New World was the main distinction then it would stand to reason the industrial revolution was more likely to happen in Europe doesn't it? North America is closer to Europe than it is to Southeast Asia and there's even fewer compelling reasons to cross the Pacific than the Atlantic.
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I agree, but this guys focus was on disproving non-geographic arguments advanced for why the European industrial revolution was "inevitable".
 
veteranMortal said:
I mean, empires collapse when they collapse for a reason, communist revolution was a pretty inevitable result of the industrial revolution.

Like, the details being different means you're just describing "general trends stay basically the same" which is just pretty on the face of it obvious?
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That assumes an industrial revolution would look the same no matter where or when it happened though.
 
Anchises said:
There were specific doctrinal and psychological reasons why nukes became the cornerstone of military arsenals IOTL. Pour as much funding and expertise into chemical weapons and you would probably get something that has just as much actual battlefield use as early nukes.
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Er, maybe I'm missing your point, but nukes were used exactly twice and the consequences were so bad that despite all the dick-waving no one has dared use them again - chemical weapons on the other hand were used throughout the 20th century.
 
the atom said:
If the New World was the main distinction then it would stand to reason the industrial revolution was more likely to happen in Europe doesn't it? North America is closer to Europe than it is to Southeast Asia and there's even fewer compelling reasons to cross the Pacific than the Atlantic.
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Asia and North America almost literally touch, dude
 
AKuz said:
Asia and North America almost literally touch, dude
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The point here is, not many Asian polities are really in a position to go cross the Atlantic, at least politically. China you need a stable enough dynasty, and interested enough Emperor's and bureaucrats, you need this to a similar extent with Korea as well. Japan from the Muromachi period would be a feudal nightmare and assuming you can get a stable enough Shogunate, which is difficult since all Shogunates have an element of instability to them, you need a clan willing to take the risks to go explore. A Southeast Asian polity would need to be secure, which due to things like Taungoo, Portugal, and the Dutch just wrecking things is a problem.
 
AKuz said:
Asia and North America almost literally touch, dude
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At the farthest ends of northernmost Siberia, which China, Korea or Japan never even came close to IOTL, and an overland route through Siberia would in fact be considerably more cumbersome than a direct sea route, anyway. That is why Russian North America never saw much development. Plus, by the same token as what you say, you can island hop from Scandinavia to North America, which of course Leif Erikson did. But for direct sea routes, well, the Pacific being almost half the surface of the Earth, the distance from the East Asian countries to the American east coast is actually considerably larger than from Europe to the American west coast. It often doesn't appear that way on world maps because the Pacific is a convenient cut off point, but, yeah. World maps are also really bad at showing, due to the necessary distortions, just how large the Chukchi Peninsula and the area you need to cross to even get there is, nevermind then Alaska on the other side.

In addition, in the Atlantic, the winds are good for going to America in one season and back the other season, there are vast fish reservoirs that can lure boats out to go further westwards, and not only Iceland and Greenland but also the Canaries can serve as good foreward bases (though I suppose one could use Hawaii in a similar fashion in the Pacific).
 
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BBadolato said:
The point here is, not many Asian polities are really in a position to go cross the Atlantic, at least politically. China you need a stable enough dynasty, and interested enough Emperor's and bureaucrats, you need this to a similar extent with Korea as well. Japan from the Muromachi period would be a feudal nightmare and assuming you can get a stable enough Shogunate, which is difficult since all Shogunates have an element of instability to them, you need a clan willing to take the risks to go explore. A Southeast Asian polity would need to be secure, which due to things like Taungoo, Portugal, and the Dutch just wrecking things is a problem.
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I think such a development would require destabilizing China or Japan, actually, so that independent mercantile polities could develop that had an interest in establishing overseas empires. An independent Guangdong, Bengal or Kyushu would be much more interested in establishing an overseas presence, equivalent to Portugal or the Netherlands.
 
Vannifar said:
I think such a development would require destabilizing China or Japan, actually, so that independent mercantile polities could develop that had an interest in establishing overseas empires. An independent Guangdong, Bengal or Kyushu would be much more interested in establishing an overseas presence, equivalent to Portugal or the Netherlands.
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I thought all these places were independent for long periods of time?
 
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