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France long had a presence in India, but it would only be following the Seven Years' War that it truly had an empire in it. With the decisive defeat of the British in that theatre (even as it lost outside India), France suddenly not only governed numerous ports, but also Bengal through a puppet...

That does make sense. I suspect from there they could take over Allahabad and Agra, and broadly speaking the Hindi belt west of Bihar and not including Rajasthan. In the remaining territory of the British Raj, I imagine there’d be some large consequences - opposition of any kind would be met...

He was already in British custody from 1849 and intentionally brought up within a strictly English atmosphere with heavy restrictions on who he would be allowed to meet, with the Governor-General having every intention to Anglicize him. To keep him in India, you really do need to go back to the...

No sort of Indian Mutiny is ever going to get international support due to the colonialist fear of race war that it would inevitably bring up, I suspect.

The claimant to the Punjabi throne, Duleep Singh was, under the terms of the treaty dissolving the Sikh Empire, taken to the UK and (as he was a kid) forcibly Anglicized and Christianized. If you want a rebellion in the name of restoring the Sikh Empire, you need to keep Duleep Singh in India...

Divide-and-rule is a policy that can work for a time, but most of the time it eventually results in a collapse of ethnic cleansing and mass murder as the divisions it generates become too massive for any empire to manage. Also, Abdulhamid viewed himself as a champion of Islam, and naturally such...

While there was involvement by Armenians within intercommunal conflicts in Anatolia, I think it's worth noting that it was not from the common Armenians, but specifically from a certain fraction of the Armenian population - the middle class, specifically the upper middle class of Armenians. The...

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proved to be periods of immense change for the Philippines. Long centred around the trade with China and the rest of East Asia, most famously the Manila Galleon between Manila and Acapulco, over the eighteenth century new crops were introduced to the...

A most horrific chapter, but one that must be written - you cannot talk about the late Ottoman Empire without talking about the Hamidian massacres. My thoughts on the Hamidian massacres is that, while it might be true that he did not directly order them, it was nevertheless state forces that...

The climate is bad for settler colonies in most India, and also there are much better locations for settler colonies across the British Empire. As a result anyone the Britishers were to attempt to settle in India would choose to move to one of them immediately. At best you could have British...

From the stuff in the text (i.e. Urabi being described like a proto-Nasser and the posthumous father of the Egyptian national awakening, the many references to Arab nationalism and the Turco-Circassian elite, etc.) it sounds like Egypt is an Arab nationalist independent state by the modern day...

You might see some of it, but it would take a while. Herzl was attempting with much difficulty to win over the support of the Ottomans for immigration, to the extent that the First Zionist Congress (which occurred during the Hamidian massacres) publicly honoured Abdulhamid II, and Herzl was even...

I mean, the Zionist movement was extremely focused on the Levant, for extremely obvious reasons. Attempting to establish “little Israels” in other parts of the Ottoman Empire would fail, for the simple reason that very few people would want to move to them.

Glad to see this timeline’s back. Considering how extremely tough the Aceh War was for the Dutch even in OTL, any amount of even secretive Ottoman aid probably hurts them a lot. But it still might not be enough for an Acehnese victory. A more cynical reading might be that Abdulhamid II wanted...

Fair, I should definitely delete the rails to Skardu and Leh. I tried to follow rivers, but as you say that doesn't account for the massive altitudes inherent to such projects. I tried to include them as the mandatory "great Punjabi rail achievement", but as you say that goes much too far - the...

Punjab was, at its origin, a country surrounded on one side by the expansionist British Raj, and on the other by Afghanistan; as such, the creation of a vast railway network was a necessity for military deployment, in addition to the benefits it brought for trade. As such, in 1867, the Punjabi...

Jan Smuts wanted the immigration of Eastern Europeans to increase the white minority. I’m not sure if it was a general United Party policy or anything like that, but it might have been indicative of a viewpoint - if it was, I suppose some sort of scenario including a United Party victory in 1948...

The roots of the Punjabi Revolution come in the unification of Punjab itself by Ranjit Singh, coronated as its Maharaja in 1801. The core was unified through his pure military conquest of the old Sikh theocratic republics, and he quickly pushed its borders further. He pushed into Peshawar and...

Palpatine. Taking this thread’s premise seriously, I’d say Lazaro Cardenas.

Really nice. What are the original pictures it’s based on?