Recent content by Flocculencio

See, but to do this you have to come from a position of some power. In the scenario you posit, you've got some guy who's already lost a succession struggle back in Arabia. How is this any sort of power base to launch a takeover? It's not as if Al Numan has machineguns or dragons.

Fair enough :D The trouble is that limiting yourself to the Suriani means you have extremely limited numbers to work with.

These local actors are still relatively organised trading kingdoms. How do the Lakhmids manage to come in and take over?

Hello! My gut feeling is that this isn't particularly practical. Catholicism did have a genuine base among the lower castes (as testified by the large numbers who converted to it- Roman Catholics in Kerala outnumber all the St Thomas Christian factions put together), and the Portuguese were...

The Portuguese weren't at all on board with the St Thomas Christians, though, and treated them as heretics. Any possibility for a Christian kingdom in Kerala would come with the much larger group of lower-caste Hindu communities who converted to Catholicism. Perhaps a more protracted struggle...

Yup, while in the West the image of the "typical" Muslim is an Arab (or Arabised Maghrebi) a plurality of Muslims are South Asian (31%).

Handwaving the exact method of their introduction, I'd like to point out that historically the introduction of potatoes led to massive increases of population all across temperate Eurasia. I remember reading about how in the 16th C, enthusiastic tobacco cultivation in parts of China led to soil...

S.M. Stirling wanted to come up with a society that was the total opposite of American enlightenment democratic ideals so he came up with a scenario where confederate exiles emigrate to the Cape and somehow turn it into a totalitarian superpower with a caste system that somehow conquers the rest...

This is fascinating, thanks. Re water flow, yes, while Kerala isn't dry, it's weather is very much monsoonal.

It's the 1920s. There's quite a lot of support for Communism in Western Europe.

Kerala doesn't have particularly strong tides, though. Rather than definite river estuaries, the coast is dominated by massive chains of brackish lakes and lagoons, connected by a myriad of canals, both natural and manmade. The main port cities (Kochi, followed by Alapuzzha, and Kollam) are...

As for my "Meiji" pick, the South Indian state of Travancore might be interesting. Spice, cash crop, and other agricultural resources. Also huge potential for hydropower, perhaps giving potential for a (very) late 19th C upsurge based on electricity.

It's not this simple. Remember, with regard to Dutch Indonesia, the Dutch didn't have anywhere near the hegemony the British Raj had in India. The Dutch were fighting serious brushfire wars all the way through their occupation if the archipelago. They simply didn't have the resources to...

In that specific scenario, sure, but once the printing press is loose in 11th C Mesopotamia, it's surely going to get into the hands of other sects. Who's to say that non-Arabising power factions might not be more successful if they choose to adopt the press and the Arabisers don't. In fact if...

But this is as per OTL with the printing press as a foreign innovation from a European culture that us directly threatening the Islamic world. ITTL, with the press being an indigenous innovation, couldn't there be a very different reaction to it? And the very presence and potential of printing...