Line-based calibers

As an American, calibers come in two varieties: Imperial, and metric. While there are some irregularities with the Imperial system (some .44s are actually .43 because they originally used heeled bullets, and anything may or may not have an extra .008" to allow for rifling), the Imperial system is blessedly devoid of any such. (Except, of course, for 8mm Mauser, which is 8mmJ or 8mmS.) Those two systems of measure - one of which I grew up with, one of which is intuitive - are the only ones that matter. Not so in Andalusada.

Sans decimalizing revolutionaries, France doesn't adopt the metric system. Sans France, nobody else necessarily does either. Up until the French Revolution, the world had worked just fine without universal metrication; there's no reason to think it couldn't continue to do so. (Except for France, and even that Augean stable doesn't need metrication.) And that means two, three, many systems of measurement - making my beloved gun porn a nightmare to write about.

But today, poring over two, three, many obsolete customary measurements, something clicked - and after doing some math, I found a beautiful heuristic in which to express calibers: for most of the world, smokeless cartridges are measured not by any international norm, but in lines.

Service-based suffrage

One of the oldest notes on steampunk social science was written on my Samsung. It was last edited some time ago, but I'm fairly certain it dates back to December last year, before the Andalusada Scrapbook came into being.

Insert quotation here.

On the blog itself, I first mentioned it when I introduced Poland-Ruthenia, or if not then when I expanded it to its current form: "Following the Baltic republican lead, Poland-Ruthenia has been experimenting with service-based suffrage." - whence the name of this concept.

The Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth

I've mentioned it casually in the past. I've derped about it before. But since I've never actually said it yet, I may as well say it now: Poland exists.

It's a simple thing to say, because we're used to Poland existing - but for a long time IRL it didn't. Andalusada changes that; Poland survived the early-modern era, and has continued its existence uninterrupted to the present day. And even more importantly than that, it survived without significantly changing from the awesomeness of its IRL early-modern form.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth. Social science doesn't get much more steampunk than this, people.

Poland-Ruthenia 101

The big question for Poland-Ruthenia is "Why?" The answer to that is simple: Rule of Cool. Every allohistorian has their own pet nations, the lost causes and might-have-beens - and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is one of mine.

So with that rationale out of the way, let me summarize Poland-Ruthenia in a nutshell:

• Who: Poles and "Ruthenians," however so defined. (The definitions are pretty vague.)
• What: The most steampunk monarchy
• When: Not exactly sure when it starts off, or even if it has claims to Lithuania; but in the form of Poland-Ruthenia it definitely lasts to the present day.
• Where: Most of IRL Poland (possibly incorporating IRL's Ducal Prussia, possibly not), less a swathe of the Pomerelian region which has been Germanic since the Teutonic Ordensstaat and broke away during the Burning Thirties. "Ruthenia" is a bit harder to define, but it includes at least the Eastern Borderlands and Galicia, and probably some other assorted bits and pieces of what we'd call Belarus, Lithuania, and the northwest Ukraine.

Republican political titles

In republican politics, "President" is a very important term IRL, so much so that it's a normative one: the opposite of a parliamentary system is, for instance, a presidential system. And yet it's enormously contingent on the rise of the United States, and even more specifically on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 - which, just over 700 years after Andalusada's history is cut adrift from the anchor of IRL, is guaranteed not to happen. (And even that, according to Wikipedia, derives from the Commonwealth of England - which is pretty much guaranteed not to play out the same way either.)

This wouldn't be so much of an issue, except that a learnéd friend of mine, after reading about Cabralia's Three Wise Men last night, asked me a question about how republican governments work in Andalusada - and I didn't have a ready answer. After much derping, he pronounced my thoughts "a bit much to keep track of," which was my cue to blog about it today.

The CRC

Early on, I realized that on the map, ca. 1930, there was an enormous empty space with the words "South America" scratched out and replaced with "Cabralia." Given that nature, and alternate history, abhors a vacuum, I set out to fill it in with... what, exactly?

Cabralia is obviously going to be in there somewhere (a *Bonapartist empire, because the Empire of Brazil already exists, and it's called the UCNA.) But since Brazil is always the dominant power of alt-South America (because it's the biggest, see, and that means it's the most important), and I wanted something different, there's also going to be Gran Peru, the awesome republic that could. But that still leaves the entire Southern Cone unaccounted for.

So, from early on, I created the CRC, which I've been remiss in ignoring up to this point.

The Great Translation

At its broadest, "the Renaissance" IRL means the economic and political upheaval caused by the Black Death and the end of the Medieval Warm Period, the changing power dynamics between Rome and the kingdoms caused by the Avignon Schism, linguistic changes caused by the rise of vernaculars and the rediscovery of classics (beginning with the Greek texts brought home from the Latin Empire, and accelerated as Byzantine civilization declined in its aftermath.)

And that's a problem for me. Because there's no guarantee that the Fourth Crusade (and there will be a Fourth Crusade) will result in the Latin Empire; there's no guarantee that church-state power dynamics will change because there may not be an Avignon Papacy; the Black Death could very well evolve in a different way. (Vernaculars and the end of the Medieval Warm Period, well, there's only so much that can be done about those.) Between that and a generally different intellectual landscape, there's no reason to think that the 13th century is going to play the same way, or indeed that it's going to be called "the Renaissance."

There is, however, going to be the Great Translation

The Farrellite dynasties

For the first 1500 years, Christianity was made of episcopal hierarchies, all of whom agreed that they were the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, rightwise heirs to the upper room on Pentecost. The Reformation did a bit to disrupt that, but the attitude was still there, and contributed in no small part to the Thirty Years' War. As far as I can tell, denominationalism only really arises in America, where none of the colonial state churches became hegemonic in the federal period - forcing the churches to coexist, compete as equals, and acknowledge that they don't have exclusive monopolies.

This complicates things a bit, because Andalusada's religious history is different enough (for one thing, England and Scotland are still Catholic...) that the "I'm okay, you're okay" consensus of American religious life won't evolve. And yet the world would be a somewhat less interesting place if the variety of religious experience was less varied, no?

So, in a leap of logic a month or so back, I blurted out a solution: the Farrellite dynasties.

(Re)introducing Karl Marx

Myth: Karl Marx was Prussian.
Fact: Karl Marx is most famous for being Prussian, and established his name in public consciousness during the rebellions that rocked the Baltic to its core during the 1830s. The first person to write under the name "Karl Marx," however, was demonstrably Genevan, and may have been writing in other parts of Switzerland anonymously from as early as 1824. By 1841 two other authors had adopted the pseudonym, one Bavarian and one writing in Provence (infamous for his shaky grasp of the German language); these four authors are universally agreed to have formed the core of first-generation Marxian economic writing.

Moorish scientific Hermeticism

One night, in the plausibly near future of the verse, an Andalusian observatory will discover the planet that we know by the name of Pluto.

A few nights later, a bunch of astronomers will gather in their jamia, bringing with them an enormous set of odd paraphernalia. They will bring with them bottles of wine, and bottles of cider, and bottles of other liquors, and plenty of water for tea and chocolate. They will bring whatever it is that they smoke, and whatever it is that they need to smoke it with. They will bring stacks of books - maps of the night sky, and biographies, mostly.

They will sit down and plot out, over glasses of drinks, important questions, like "What was Pluto doing when all these people were born? What college was it in? What was it occluding? Where was it relatively to all else?" And they will work this out, and account for this in the horoscopes of the great men of history. (And some great women too.)

And when they have established this, they will then ask the ensuing question: "What are the differences between what the original uncorrected horoscope would suggest, and what actually happened?" And they will observe this, and record it for the record.

And over the course of many such questions, they will ask a third question: "All of these horoscopes, across centuries and continents - what trends do we observe about the ways the horoscopes failed to account for the lives that fell under them? What is constant when Pluto is on the cusp of this, or occluding that?"

Bit by bit, scouring the archives of the world, they will theorize the astrological significance of Pluto to a very high standard of rigor. And if you tell them that what they're doing isn't science at all, they'll stare blankly.

And then put their cigars out in your eye.

What is Güntheritism?

"Güntheritism is the functional analogue of Lutheranism IRL."

That's the short answer. Theologically, though, it's a case study in steampunk social science.