Gran Peru

I've seriously thought about regulating the writing of my other blog. This one? Not so much.

This blog is a place for me to do all my spontaneous writing and get it into a format that other people can read. If it's disorganized, it's because I'm disorganized; 850 years of universe to completely rewrite is a long, long time. I write the stuff that's interesting to me (which is why there's a lot of theology and food), I ignore the stuff I don't know anything about, and nobody complains because nobody even comments here. This is a vanity project; I have all the time in the world to get this stuff hammered out.

But it does mean that I can go months at a time without acknowledging really big things. It's why Taiping China gets a lot of love, but the 3-4 dynasties that precede it (all the way back to the Song, actually) are completely unaccounted for. Or why I just now started writing about stuff that I knew from the very beginning of the blogging, like the CRC's existence.

Or, for that matter, the existence of Cabralia's big regional power: Gran Peru. In a continent dominated by the G.P. of Cabralia and the endless cascade of juntas and caudillos just to their south, Gran Peru is an anomaly: a stable, safe island of accountable government and honest elections. This is where it's introduced.

Gran Peru 101

Why Gran Peru? At its heart, Gran Peru is a space-filling empire.

...so that's the why and wherefore. Now for the rest of it:

• Who? A bunch of mestizos, even more pure Andean aborigines (Quechua and Aymara are both recognized Peruvian languages), and some Swiss in there for good measure.
• What? "The little republic that could," say my oldest notes; "more cocaine and less banking, but 'Andean Switzerland' is still frighteningly accurate." The only part about it that doesn't fit the bill is "little," because going by Wikipedia Gran Peru is definitely one of the ten largest countries on the planet, jealously either rivaled or rivaling Argentina Patagonia.
• Where? Obviously, the Peru-Bolivian Commonwealth. It also pushes north a fair bit, encompassing most of Ecuador and stray bits of Colombia and Brazil. (The exact extent of it is a bit unclear; the southernmost parts of Gran Peru are contested with the CRC, and there are a few lowland jungles in the easternmost extent that are claimed by both Cabralia and the CRC.)
• When? Not sure about the beginnings; different parts conglomerate at different times. But it does survive to the present day.

I'm not sure if it was even part of the original plan; I was thinking way too much about the idea of the Empire of Brazil, and to be honest I didn't know jack shit about alternate history when I started writing Andalusada. What gave Gran Peru its impetus was, first of all, the realization that the CRC needed a nemesis: a scrappy democratic state that it couldn't crush, so that the world wouldn't be dystopian. What gave it its modern form and style was, in part, some reading about the Inca Empire, and (most of all) Grey Wolf's "Great Powers in Alternate History":

Peru is more complicated as the requirement for its great power status comes in one of several ways – either that Bolivar and San Martin agree a unity of all ex-Spanish possessions, or that the Argentine/Chilean/Peruvian rebel alliance remains strong enough to create a federal state under San Martin, or that Peru-Bolivia in union is able to stabilise, defend its borders and prosper.

The first two options would give you a power the same size as Brazil, though in one Peru would be a Southern aspect, and in the other a Northern one. The Peru-Bolivian state (and it would have no such confusing name since Bolivia was viewed as Alta, or High, Peru) would require time and good management.

The idea of superpower Peru was alien to me; I'd never even heard of the Peru-Bolivian state before. And for what it's worth? "Time and good management" aren't problems in this context, they're virtues: it means that Gran Peru's not only the best part of Cabralia, but has been for some time

The (modern) history of Gran Peru

The butterflies start hitting Peruvian history in the 1500s, when the exact territories claimed by Portugal and Seville are rather hotly contested and Tawantinsuyu fares better as a result. (It doesn't escape colonization, but it does manage to retain much more autonomy and pre-colonial culture than would otherwise have been the case.) By playing its cards just so, the Quechua elite wind up being one of the odd parts of the Moorish Empire: more Roman than Isidoran, with only a small, overwhelmingly biladi colonial administration and a number of scattered muladi minorities.

• "Odd part of the empire" usually means "first part to be at odds with the empire," and when the Iberian crises hit at the turn of the 19th century, the Peruvians obligingly shook off the Moorish yoke - and immediately ran into a problem: nothing else held the region together. There was no common language, the population was still largely illiterate and rural, there wasn't much of a local economy because Imperial Seville had focused primarily on extracting any mineral resources they could get their hands on. By all rights Gran Peru should have Balkanized, and one of the reasons it didn't was a Swabian dude named Melchior.
• Although Melchior's one of Cabralia's Three Wise Men, I can't say much about the Swiss connection itself; but it's through that Melchior that the idea of confederating the Andes, rather than consolidating them, came to be. Thus was born Gran Peru - and Switzerland. (In the same way that the CRC pioneered the military-economic bloc, Gran Peru pioneered confederal republicanism. By the mid-19th century, Gran Peru was more centralized than the Swiss were; the continuing survival, against all odds, of Andean democracy influenced the formation of modern Switzerland, which in turn shaped the ambiguous success of statesmanship that is Italy ca. 1930.)
• Gran Peru during the Tonic Wars: Gran Peru may control most of the Andes, but it'd still have all the disadvantages of a pure extraction economy (no incentive to invest in the long term) without one important detail being completely outside of its control: the Imperial Union of England-Scotland, fighting a number of world-spanning wars against France, badly needed medicine at about the same time that quinine was found to be an anti-malarial.
  
  Thus was born the Anglo-Peruvian friendship, based on two key features: a total ban on cinchona seeds, enforced in part by the Imperial Navies in exchange for preferential pricing of quinine in bulk. For most of the 19th century, cinchona plantation provided a steady, stable revenue for Gran Peru.

There is, of course, more - the endless wars against Patagonian militarism, the normalization of relations with the Mahdists on the borders, and so forth...

Gran Peru today

So yeah, with that written out...

• Languages: Officially, there are three languages: Quechua, Aymara, and Sevillan.
• Peru was unusual in not developing a Mozarabized elite; most of the satraps were Arabs. The Sevillan spoken in Gran Peru is literary Sevillan, and more proper than the Moorish spoken in Seville itself.
• Religion: Gran Peru is overwhelmingly and officially Catholic.
• Because the Inca elites were initially converted by Portuguese missionaries, Roman-Isidoran relations are rather complicated. In the interests of peacefulness, and not tearing a sprawl of Andean city-states apart over petty shit like God, both of them are co-official.
• It should be noted that Gran Peru's officially accepted Farrellites from the beginning; over time, a fair number of its European immigrants have converted to Farrellitism rather than the hegemonically native Isidoran hierarchy.
• Government: If the leadership positions of the Inca Empire were collectivized, it would look more than a bit like the government of Gran Peru.
• Economy: Peru's economy is rather schizophrenic. On the one hand, an enormous chunk of the population has next to no purchasing power, and barter supplements cash in the countryside. On the other hand, it's managed to retain a lot of Inca-style corporatism, so it's been incredibly stable for such a devolved state.
• Every quarter and most of the metro areas still has the right to circulate its own currency, but by confederal law they're all minted to the same weight and purity. At this point, the numerous currencies have been reduced to the equivalent of state quarters. (They're still occasionally prone to bubbles, though. Every once in awhile numismatists collectively decide that Antisuyu's newest coin is mandatory and the price of limited-mint coins explodes.) 
• Cocaine: The quinine monopoly may have been broken, but Gran Peru still has an almost-perfect cocaine monopoly. Nobody else has been able to transplant it - and this being 1930, the rest of the world hasn't become progressive enough to outlaw it either.
• Gran Peru has extraordinarily loose patent laws. Bootlegging is a national (sometimes cottage) industry; profit-minded inventors design things to require more precision machining than a Peruvian village can manufacture of its own.
• Foreign Relations: Gran Peru's foreign relations are basically set by the Southern Cone states, especially Patagonia. As can be expected between officially Good and Evil republics, relationships between them are rather poor.
• Gran Peru's entered into a very close union with a Mahdist state that it's propping up on the southern border. Think Switzerland and Liechtenstein in Islamic Latin microcosm, and you've got a decent idea of how it works.
• The Anglo-Peruvian Alliance lasted for a fair bit of time, but the alliance broke with the quinine monopoly.