MotF 95: Ab Urbe Condita

Like Singapore but not.

i'll kick this contest off then i guess.
Africaaaaaaaa.

In 1861, New York Mayor Fernando Wood created the Free City of Tri-Insula from the islands of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island. Seceding from the US to maintain cotton shipping revenues, as well as due to dissatisfaction with Albany, Tri-Insula lasted less than a year before being retaken by the United States. However, its legacy lives on in the US state of Hudson, as well as the fact that the distraction allowed the CSA to remain independent for almost two decades, before economic collapse and US-aided slave revolts forced it to rejoin the US in 1878.

City States Of Germany, Unite!

Do you remember Susano, one of the most notorious of our German members that eventually got banned in early 2011 for racist hate speech in Chat? I remember when we two discussed federal reform in a surviving Weimar Republic. One of his most remarkable stances was absorbing the Hanseatic city states with one another instead of neighboring bigger states. MotF 95 is the right opportunity to show it off.

Like its precedessors, the United Hanseatic Free State, or Hansestaat for short, is actually a constitutive state of the republican German Reich that IOTL is better known as the Weimar Republic and that ITTL somehow survived. In the late 1940s, Hamburg sought ways to expand its territory by incorporating suburbs in neighboring Prussia to make them pay their dues for the Hamburg treasury, therefore showing a sincere interest in a weaking or even disintegrating Prussia. On the other hand, Hamburg and the likewise states of Bremen and Lübeck could ultimately be on the losing side of process by simply getting absorbed by Prussia's successors.

So the three quintessential Free Hanseatic Cities had a common interest in cooperation, but the major problem would have been Hamburg being by far the biggest fish in the pond and turning into a mere borough of a Greater Hamburg was a big no-no to Bremen and Lübeck. On the other hand, a federation inside a federation would have been too complicated for a state of hardly 2 million people, so they took a third option and created a system of conditional majorities.

In the eventual arrangement, Hamburg indeed retains most of the seats in the Combined House of Burgesses correspondent to its population, but the two smaller cities still have, albeit only combined, veto powers against too egotistic moves made by the majoritarian Hamburgers, but not strong enough for resulting in an eternal deadlock if political majorities in the several cities ever became divergent. All of the three cities were SPD strongholds in the decades after 1955 when the state was created. But the guillotine of the combined city vetoes ensured that the smaller cities still had their fair share in the cabinets and the whole thing didn't turn into a greater Hamburg.

NB: The lack of Nazi Germany means that the centralist Greater Hamburg Act of 1937 enlarging Hamburg into its Prussian suburbs and absorbing Lübeck into Prussian Schleswig-Holstein never happened. Hamburg therefore retained its smaller pre-1937 size at least until a dissolution of Prussia when Hamburg would argue with Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover/Lower Saxony about just that. The date of the map is supposed to be somewhere in the 1960s.

The Stadtkantone of Switzerland

This is a world in which what we know as the Old Swiss Confederacy, though in this world that's not a distinction that tends to be made, by and large escaped the French Revolutionary Wars.
The Confederacy thus evolved more naturally into a modern confederal state, weathering the storms of the Revolutionary period of the 1793-1809, and then the increasingly turbulent 19th Century,
even gaining territory from Sardinia-Piedmont during the Italian Wars of the 1840s and 50s.

Matters were to come to a head, however, in 1863 when, inspired by the example of Lausanne, the Italians, the recent Brandenburg Revolution and the French 2nd Republic, the region of the Vaud
broke into widespread open revolt and revolutionary fervour against it's German rulers in Bern and the Sieben Zenden. The result was a 5 year Civil War- merging with an alt-Sonderbund War-
that saw a new Confederal constitution drawn up in a series of long-running Congresses throughout the late 1860s and 1870s. Vaud was admitted as a new Canton, the federal system
was reformed, the Condominiums dissolved- either through annexation to one of the cantons in the relevant partnership, or through creation of a new Canton where no agreement could be reached-
and cantonal constitutions reformed to become more democratic over the next couple of decades. Gradually, the Associate States and Protectorates of the Confederacy would join as full cantons
over the coming decades to create the modern Confederacy as shown below.

More information in the map. I'm supplying a smaller 'thumbnail' resolution as well as it's very page-stretchy.

Thumbnail:


Full Resolution

My first attempt. I hope it gets any votes ...

The mid-17th entury Anglo-Dutch Wars (or even the English Civil War) went differently and the Republic of the Seven Provinces kept the New Netherlands (OTL New York and New Jersey). The influence of the stadtholderly dynasty or Orange-Nassau is still strong, because different children being born to different wifes has greatly changed the charcter of the Oranges: They never tried to become quasi-monarchs, but had a more mercantile bent and eagerly participated in the colonial enterprizes.
Today, Oranje is one of the megacorporations os this TL, and the bugle-horn from the old coat of arms can be seen everywhere.

Refugees from war-torn Germany settled here and the millions of New Netherlanders speak and write a more conservative version of Dutch. Nominally the Gemeenebest (commonwealth or republic) is bigger, with settlements and trading posts further upriver on the Noort Rivier (Hudson River) and on the Zuydt Rivier (the Delaware), but the depicted area is where anything important happens. The Dutch have created much more artificial islands and additional land than in OTL. Nieuw Amsterdam and its sister cities are among the most important ports of the world; and the sibling rivalry between the sisters is fierce ...
The difference between "Steden" (cities/towns) and "Schoutambten" (bailiwicks/reevedoms) is mostly ceremonial but the latter mostly are not so densely settled.

Cantonalism was one of the main political factors during the Spanish revolutionary six-year period of 1868-1874. Disaffected with the First Republic, it was a radical federalist municipalism with proto-anarchist tones: it proposed to build the Federal Republic from below, as a commonwealth of freely associated cantons led by revolutionary juntas. Cantonalism had the most strength in the Southeast of the Peninsula, in the province of Murcia, where one of its main leaders, Antonio Gálvez, was born. Most Cantonalist insurrections were rapidly put down, but a sieged city of Cartagena held for six months. After his failure, Gálvez was exiled to Oran, to return in 1874, totally disillusioned. A couplet called him the tired lion during that time.

But ITTL, he came from exile with an idea, that was only reinforced by the cholera epidemics that was hitting the region. He wrote incendiary pamphlets with a pseudonym, and gathered a group of followers in clandestine meetings. Cantonalism was what his land needed, and what best suited the people of the Southeast (in his texts he interchanged the names of Murcia, Todmir and the Southeast, as a well defined geographical entity within the Peninsula), with centennial democratic and consetudinary institutions. The Southeastern people had been always ignored and abandoned, always being paid with indifference for its loyalty to the kingdom. In short, the Southeast would never reach its political plenty as long as it remained a part of Spain.

Although later it would be compared to the ethnonationalist Basque and Catalan movements, it grew precisely because its tenets were not ethnic, but political, and they answered to real problems such as caciquismo and poverty. When Antonio Gálvez was made prisoner during a Guardia Civil raid and executed in 1886, he acquired martyr status and sparked riots in many cities. The articulated bases of the new Cantonalism were written in a meeting in Archena that same year.

Decades passed, the movement grew outside the system, until it found its opportunity. ITTL, where Alfonso XIII died in the 1910's in a terrorist attack, the Second Republic came in 1933, but the Regent refused to accept the outcome and a multi-sided insurrection exploded. Carlists seized Navarra and parts of Aragon, a Basque and a Catalan Republic were proclaimed, and a syndicalist uprising proclaimed the commune of Asturias, while peasants revolted in Cordoba and Jaén. The Northern half of Spain ad the city of Seville fell to Monarchism. In the Southeast, many municipaities were seized by the Cantonalists, while others pledged loyalty to them. The insurrected cities and towns would set the confederal map of the Southeast. Needing a united front, the Spanish Republic reluctantly accepted free associated status for Catalonia, the Basque Country and the Southeast, in exchange for help to crush the Monarchists.

The regional map was redrawn. While Hellín and the lower meadow of the Segura river supported Cantonalism, the area of Lorca and the High Guadalentín was conservative and a bastion of Centralism, while the monicipality of Yecla was disaffected with the province and the region. The former would joing the provice of Almería, the latter the province of Alicante. Both are still claimed by the Confederacy.

Politically, the Confederacy is more of a league of quasi-independent associated municipalities than an actual country, though they are bound by their consciousness of being a common entity and the general Juntas of Defense with their headquarters in Cartagena.

Alright, so I'm throwing my hat into the ring once again. Since the entries by both Dr. Nodelescu and Alex Richards appear to fit the limits of the contest, I'm guessing this does too.

This is part of a science fantasy setting I've been working on in an on-and-off manner over the last few months. The gist of it is that an interstellar human civilisation (just below level 2 on the Kardashev scale) is nearly wiped out by some sort of apocalyptic event, but the one ship traversing an unexplored bit of the galaxy manages to survive it, and winds up on a dry, cold, partly-terraformed planet which its crew and passengers go on to settle. Fast forward a few thousand years and their descendants have settled large parts of the planet (this rate of colonisation is probably slightly ASB, but never mind), and they've developed several different religious establishments that argue over how said events took place.

The planet is divided into different endorrheic lake basins, in between which is a vast, icy desert wasteland. The largest of these basins is governed by the United Provinces, a loose confederacy of eighteen provinces of various sizes, with a weak federal government that mostly settles disputes between the provinces and establishes rules of commerce and diplomacy that all provinces have to abide by. The trade centre of the United Provinces is Haumünd, which is located at the mouth of the great River Hau, and along with a large but sparsely populated hinterland it makes up the most populous of the eighteen provinces.

Haumünd's government is inspired in part by the City of London and the early Roman Republic, and consists of a Lord Mayor, who is elected by an incredibly byzantine electoral college system (entire books have been written in an effort to make sense of it, but to sum it up you could say Bureaucrats, Religions and Guilds, Oh My!), and the Common Council, which is made up of three Courts: the Court of Burgesses, which is elected by the inhabitants of geographical wards (wealth qualifications take away the vote from a large number of people), the Court of Liverymen, which is made up of representatives from the various guilds (the Great Seven guilds - that is, the Mercers, the Fishers, the Grocers, the Chandlers, the Goldsmiths, the Blacksmiths, and the Tailors - have two votes, the other fourteen guilds have only one), and the Court of Aldermen, which is partly elected by the two other courts and partly appointed by the Lord Mayor. There's also a large number of senior magistrates of various kinds, who are chosen by the same electoral college that elects the Lord Mayor.

The Most Serene Republic of Genoa had a long and varied history. After being founded in 1005 it became one of the most important centres of commerce in the Mediterrean Sea. However the Republic suffered multiple humiliations from the French, most notably the occupation from 1458 to 1522 and the annexation by the First French Republic in 1797.

But in April 1814, with Napoleon's defeat a certainty, the Republic was re-established and it sent delegates to the Congress of Vienna, in which they wanted to confirm their new status. However many European countries were opposed to this, instead wanting to bulk up the Kingdom of Sardinia as the shield of the Italian peninsular. Luckily a compromise was reached, which resulted in Genoa ceding the region of Savona to Sardinia and Genoa being proclaimed a neutral republic similiar to the Swiss Confederation.

Neutrality benefitted the Genoan economy greatly, establishing the city state once again as a major European banking centre. However the new Republic only lasted for 48 years until 1866, when it joined the Italian Republic, which was founded by popular uprisings initiated by a revolutionary named Giuseppe Garibaldi. starting in Two Sicilies in 1862 and later spreading to the other conservative Italian states, toppeling the Papal States, Tuscany, Modena, Parma and even the Habsburg-ruled Lombardy-Venetia.



Link to the full-sized image (the map above is just 75 percent of that)

During the 1840’s the French supported the Irish in yet another bid for independence, (And Often considered the first Revolution in the Second Age of Revolution.) Through sheer luck, the French Republic led by Napoleon III was able to overwhelm the British and their allies the Dutch navies and land an invasion force on Great Britain. At the same time, the Dutch were completely overwhelmed on land; and the monarchy fled to the East Indies with a Republic being instated in the metropole.

During this time of French Invasion, the Scottish, Welsh and of course the Irish rose up en masse against the forces of Conservatism, The English. With the British Army smashed by the French, both the Scottish and Irish Revolutions succeeded, with only the Welsh failing due to a lack of local support, the surviving Welsh revolutionaries fleeing to the Isle of Man. Mann became the Fourth British Revolutionary Republic, and the Third to succeed.

Following gaining independence, The Republics began a process of De-Anglicization with the various republics forming their own churches separate from the Church of England. All English place names were renamed to appropriate Gaelic names, and English was phased out of use by the government.

But the English would not sit idly by, they were planning revenge…

Here's my entry.

After the Fall of Grenada, the Castilians did not make haste to get rid of all the Moors left in Spain, leaving many to flee to the southern coast of the Peninsula, forming small, independent city-states there, and uniting with each other and African allies to give Spain a headache for a couple of centuries. With the Treaty of Valencia (1632), they are finally dealt with, and given high levels of autonomy in exchange for surrendering to the Spanish.

Today, they continue to exist, under Spanish authority, with the exception of Sebta (OTL Ceuta) who was always independent, and the Green Island, who claims independence, but is still de facto under Spanish authority. Their history for the past 400 years includes various unions among different city-states, but today, they are all independent, but united in the Moorish Council, which is based on the Turkic Council.



(click image for full size)

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