Recent content by Alon

Okay, now I'm trying to shoehorn it into an Early Modern POD in which the Protestants win the alt-Thirty Years' War and the archbishoprics turn into major states with dynasties established by notable generals. Same POD also prevents the centripetal force leading to the growth of Berlin in the...

Are there interesting timelines in which Cologne stays something like the primate city of Germany? It was the biggest city in the Holy Roman Empire until well into the 16th century. It was too far inland to ever be a maritime entrepot like Antwerp or Amsterdam - IIRC the main competitors to...

If they manage to avoid the ARW in the 1770s, it means they have sufficient buy-in from local elites, e.g. by getting rid of the Appalachian settlement line, that they can enforce the will of the metropole on other matters, provided the colonists are at least somewhat divided. The Louisiana...

Without the ARW, territory along the lines of The Two Georges is at the outer edge of feasibility. Most likely it's smaller, not because of less expansion elsewhere, but because of less expansion in North America. In OTL, the US doubled in size in the Louisiana Purchase. In a no-ARW ATL, France...

Basically any good location for a city has a settlement of some sort. The question is just size. So we can ask why (say) Port Said is not as big as Panama and why neither is as big as Singapore, or why the main Lake Michigan city and American railroad junction is Chicago and not Gary, or why the...

If there's no Lincoln, then Seward's face goes on the $5 bill and on Mount Rushmore.

Some helpful readings, all freely available online: - The papers of Bob Allen, re the high-wage economy hypothesis (tl;dr: Britain and the Low Countries had high wages in the 17c due to their position as the center of a global maritime trading system, stimulating labor-saving inventions...

Is there a good TL, or discussion (here or elsewhere), about what would have happened if Alexander hadn't died young? Could a Hellenistic empire covering his entire territory have survived for a couple generations?

Can you explain what you count as Mizrahi identity? European Sephardi Jews identified that way very strongly throughout the Early Modern era, for example Sephardi Jews who'd made it not to North Africa but to England or the Netherlands (e.g. Benjamin Cardozo's ancestors). MENA Jews strongly...

Yeah, I meant Taiwan is in East Asia, not Southeast Asia. Yeah, so my point is that because people in Western countries don't think about Malaysia much, their ideas of it are filtered through people who think about it more, i.e. Chinese people.

1. Ireland was part of the UK in OTL. 2. There was extensive immigration into OTL's Canada from all over Europe - less from Germany than to the US, but more from other parts, including Britain itself and I think also Scandinavia.

Spain managed to remain neutral because Hitler liked it as an ally and wasn't going to invade; Franco wanted to join the Axis, he just had conflicting conditions with Pétain (he wanted France's North African colonies), and Hitler ruled in favor of Pétain hoping for Vichy France to be a more...

The fact that I bring up Eastern Europe as an example of stasis should suggest I'm not talking about literally not having any changes, but rather about social relations, technology as seen by the average person, etc. evolving very slowly, so that a development level that lasted maybe 100 years...

"I have traveled through Europe" makes you sound profound to Americans and buffoonish to people who actually live in Europe.

Taiwan did take off, and is also not in East Asia. Malaysia was as rich as South Korea in the 1980s; it's not as rich now because it's had some really bad economic policy, like overinvesting in roads in order to encourage people to buy cars from the state-owned automakers where South Korea kept...