The Lisbon Meridian

The equator's position is fixed and determined by geography and mathematics. The prime meridian's position is not only not fixed, it's utterly arbitrary. It took until 1851 for most of the world to establish the Greenwich meridian as their standard, and several nations (France most notably, but also the Empire of Brazil) didn't accept it for decades.

Andalusada, ever the disorganized one, has reduced its own mess of meridians to three. And unlike IRL, the dominant one is based not in England-Scotland but in Lisbon.

Korea and Cyrillization woes

I've mentioned, at various points, that Korea (whatever it's called) manages to pull a Meiji, modernizing in just under 40 years. I've also mentioned that Korea doesn't Westernize so much as it Russifies, consciously patterning itself off the Russian state under Evgeny IV.

Most of the early detailed maps of Korea are printed in Russia, with all the names written in Cyrillic. This is somewhat problematic because, early on, there are a few conflicting standards about how to Cyrillicize the Korean language, which includes a lot of sounds that Cyrillic represents poorly. Such as /w/, which in the end is rendered by the Cyrillic letter В в /v/.

Most of these maps are Latinized when they're passed off to neighboring states: Poland, Prussia, and Sweden mostly. Sweden continues to render в as "v"; Prussian and Polish both instead transliterate it with "w" /v/. And because it doesn't much matter to them (the Baltic states don't have a big stake in Korea), that mispronunciation continues to get passed along. As a result of this unfortunate transliteration, most of the world pronounces Wonju as "Von-ju."

Pretty quickly, this becomes part of Korean caricatures of foreigners: hypercorrecting all /w/ as /v/, sounding like a Nazi in a pulp action movie...

International perceptions of India

IRL, our perception of "India" is actually of north India. India is Aryan; "Indian" restaurants (at least in America; not sure how it works in the UK) are much closer to Punjabi than, say, Gujarati cuisine. This isn't "natural"; it evolved this way for historical reasons.

After a thousand years of divergence, Andalusada's Indian subcontinent has diverged in two ways, hinted at before but spelled out explicitly here:

• The colonial hegemon is French. England, Scotland, Portugal and a few other players all have their own presence on the subcontinent, but most of that looks disproportionately large on maps because otherwise it wouldn't be visible at all.
• Colonialism has been much less successful. Because of various trends that are still too far in the future for me to explain yet, the French Empire has not been able to build a united French Raj. While Paris controls much more of India than you might expect (especially given that unlike the United Kingdom IRL they have not had a solid century of domestic tranquility), Gujarat and points north have repeatedly fought the Firangis to a standstill, and Bengal has successfully played its French and Scottish (later Anglo-Scottish) neighbors off each other so long and so well that it's become an established buffer state.

So what are the consequences of this?

The UCNA, ash-Shamal and aboriginal politics

The UCNA has neither a manifest destiny nor a Wild West. It has ash-Shamal: "The North."

ash-Shamal is a concept that's as old as Moorish civilization itself. Spain stabilizes on the Tagus, with Christians to the north of it and Moors to the south. (And Toledo, which changes hands several times.) In  between is ash-Shamal,"the North" - the edge of the Moorish world, where the borders are permeable, fluctuate, and are defined by a certain amount of lawlessness. (Think of the Anglo-Scottish Border Marches and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it can be like.)

700 years later, that spatialization of the world is entrenched enough to transition to the New World. The heart of the Moorish New World, during the golden age of the empire, was in Mexico, defined by its northern border with France-Outremer and various aboriginal nations; after the fall of the empire, the UCNA (rising in what was formerly France-Outremer) has a clearly defined southern border (claimed by Mexico) and a very nebulous northern border.

The UCNA is extremely expansionist, but it claims no God-given mandate to do so. Also unlike America, its identity doesn't have a hugely ethnic national component; Moorish racial taxonomy is rather different from the historic Spanish casta, and even if it wasn't the experience of Maghrebi diversity left the Moors used to being a plurinational state. As long as they learn to speak Moorish and behave themselves in public, tribes are actually rather cute.

The one sticking point is the tribes in The North.

ash-Shamal in New Andalusia diverges from ash-Shamal in one critical respect: it's a lot less static. As far as the Moors are concerned, a certain amount of low-intensity warfare is typical and acceptable in The North; the only problem is that the location of The North is going to change over time, and the Shamali tribes aren't necessarily going to agree with changes in psychogeography.

There probably won't be a Trail of Tears in the UCNA. But a conscious collapsing of the southern bison herds? I wouldn't rule it out.