The B_Munro writeup

Over at AH.com, B_Munro is a poster that I admire (or did, alas, when I visited more regularly) for making truly superb maps. Enough so that I've been repeatedly moved to try and draw a map of my own that looked as good.

He's also got a really eloquent style for the writeups that go with his maps. This is my attempt at the same.

This is meant to be pulpy and slightly dieselpunk, and I have a better grasp of where the world is than how it got there. Some details are deliberately vague, because I don't know them yet; broad strokes are contingent and subject to change, and lots of butterflies died bringing you this map. (So why do I have it? Because it's a setting. Lots of history can come later; the map is necessary now.)

Without going into details that aren't set in stone, the 18th century was an Iberia-screw. The Portuguese empire hasn't recovered from it, and the Moorish empire didn't survive it. Seville's empire left a rather more colorful world behind; "Spanish culture" ends somewhere in the Atlas Mountains (either that, or "Moorish culture" ends on the Tagus), and the (two) New World racial-ethnolinguistic-religious taxonomies make OTL's casta hierarchy look simple and self-evident. The Iberian New World is, as a rule, also more involved in Old World politics than IOTL; the Carlist War analogues had lots of international participants.

About the time the Treaty of Westphalia was butterflied away, social science went steampunk: it's analogous, but in weird, wildly anachronistic ways. OTL Spain's regionalist-centralist political axis is a global standard here, and while politics is more authoritarian it's less centralized. Headachey complex conglomerated monarchies are unremarkable (less so than France's volatile unitary state, anyways), and republicanism (when it isn't naked despotism) usually draws more on early-modern models of self-government than anything post-1776 IRL. (Great Russia is a notable exception here, a tighter and better-organized federal system than anything the world's ever seen before.) Nationalism exists, but it's more likely to result in decentralization than nation-building (Poszony is now a sovereign statelet? Big fucking deal; Trencsen wants regional autonomy and Slovak taught in classrooms, and Bratislava be damned.)

The world's economy is a bit slower than ours, because the Great Powers simply aren't as great: the colonized of IRL have done a bit better at resisting the empires ITTL. None of the empires have been as bounteous as, say, the British Raj; with less raw resources beaten out of the Third World, the metropoles haven't been able to make the wealth disparities quite as stark. That doesn't mean they aren't stark already, though, and while Marxism (as we know it, anyways) was butterflied away there's a fair number of radical dissident ideologies bouncing around, most of which (oddly) have ties to avant-garde art movements. (Morris, Marinetti and André Breton would be instantly recognizable here.)

Despite the craziness, capitalism's doing pretty well; political consolidation may not be quite so successful, but economic consolidation has more than made up for it. The Germans are starting to talk about a Markverein half the size of the Eurozone, and the UCNA has finally risen clearly above its rival Mexico. Counting in the ongoing dieselpunk industrialization of Great Russia, the Japanese getting ready to replicate the Korean Miracle, and even China coming out of its population crash, it looks like this world's economic horizon may finally be seeing a new dawn...

 And so forth.