Great Russia

Seeing that the last two posts have been about details of modern Russian culture, it bears mentioning that Russia's finally gone revolutionist. And because of steampunk social science, it's not the USSR that you know and have feelings about.

Great Russia in a nutshell

Why? Because it's right there in GURPS Infinite Worlds, p. 118:

Other Muslim timelines include:

Andalus (Q4, current year 1930), in which the Muslims of Spain threw back the Reconquista and went on to discover America in 1484, achieving TL6 in rivalry with Japan, Saxony, and Russia.

 The timeline calls for a Russia that's on par with the Moors (albeit in a new interpretation), Japan, and Saxony, and so a great Russia it shall receive. (Honestly, the hard part is establishing a great Saxony.)

• Who? A whole hell of a lot of people. I'm not sure which peoples, but a lot of them anyways.
• What? A cabal of variously romantic, technocratic *Narodnik oligarchs, forcibly dieselpunking the entire world for arcane reasons. Under and around them is a coalition government that's unlikely to ever dissolve, because an entire branch of the military obeys its orders first and Supreme Command's only later.
• Where? Most of what we'd call the USSR, but not all of it.
• When? Celebrating its 25th birthday on the day after Pascha this year, when (with Japanese support) the riots in Tver first got going.

The bigger question, then, is why this Russia?

Commissars

Commissars. Huh. What are they good for?

It's pretty much inevitable that any alternate-history Russia will have commissars; as inevitable as it being called vodka instead of spirt. Why do they exist? Because Russia, that's why. And because Andalusada does use its share of clichés, Great Russia has its commissars too. The only problem is justifying them - and this is my basic idea.

Vodka and tea

Reading lots of history has taught me something important: it's basically a fluke of luck that America's political parties are called what they are.

"Whig" and "Tory" are both corruptions of Gaelic insults. Sweden during the Age of Liberty had Hats and Caps. And in 1848, the Germans assembled at the Frankfurt Parliament broke down into Fraktionen named after the places they went to drink. The revolutionists who topple Evgeny the Old fell somewhere in between.

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.

Dystopian Catholic France

Andalusada's France has had a different sets of ups and downs. It missed out on the revolutions, for one thing; as of the present day, under the House of Burgundy, it's a semi-constitutional monarchy struggling to recover from the Great War. The Hundred Years' War is called something different, and I know that it played out differently because I have some ideas for how the Black Death affects the British Isles. But you wouldn't know about that, because I haven't written about that stuff at all.

I write what I know, and at the moment this is primarily the early modern era. And since I like pithy names (mind you Hispano-Baltic Texas), and try to write about Andalusada the same way I talk about it, I'm gonna introduce early modern France by its working name. In French historiography, everything related to the period is tagged with the adjective très-chrétien; in the rest of Andalusada, early modern France is "the Most Christian Kingdom." But within this blog, it's what I've called it for at least a year: Dystopian Catholic France.

Messieurs, mesdames, it's time to stare into the abyss. Don't let it stare back into you.

Dystopian Catholic France 101

Alt-history writers have a bad rap for making history more awful. At its most ambitious we have Bruce Sterling's Draka series, and Harry Turtledove's TL-191 involving a surviving CSA, and any number of Nazi-victory timelines. One of my goals with Andalusada was to, as a general rule, make the world less awful - it's why the first thing I wrote about Great Russia's economy was two words long: "Not Stalinism."

Dystopian Catholic France makes the first question of the national 101 take on a new meaning: why? Why did I give one of the world powers over to a family that rips people's tongues out of their heads?

• Who? The House of Guise.
• What? IRL French royal absolutism, coupled with a Catholic hierarchy as independent as powerful as IRL Spain's. Coupled with a devoutly Catholic royal family that fears and hates the Farrellites for the harm they caused.
• Where? Most of what we'd call "France," but with some exceptions. Dystopian Catholic France, much like its successor, controls at the very least most of what we'd consider Belgium; the French empire-building that took place during the Hanseatic Wars lasted pretty well until the succession collapsed, so at various points it's controlled smatterings of the moribund Holy Roman Empire and enough coastline to threaten Denmark-Sweden.
• When? France makes the turn toward dystopia while the Wars of Religion are underway. It mellows out a bit, but never backs away from the institutional dystopianism until after the House of Guise is well and thoroughly displaced. So maybe ~1625 to ~1825, give or take a few years either way.

I didn't answer why? at the top, because it would've taken too long. And the truth is: I still don't have a satisfying explanation. All I have is a true one.

The rise and fall of the Ryal Kirk

IRL, the medieval Church in Scotland was corrupt. And by corrupt I mean "corrupt by the standards of medieval Catholicism." Come the 16th century Scotland swept away almost every trace of it converting to Presbyterianism, and there were compelling reasons why.

This poses a problem for me, because in Andalusada England doesn't break with Rome. And before the Great Realignment gets underway, before the Imperial Union of England-Scotland, there is Scotland-Norway - and Norway, in Andalusada as per IRL, does break with Rome and become Güntherite.

I know enough about Stuart England to know that the marriage of Reformed Scotland and Anglican England was volatile already, and they were both Protestant. A marriage of Catholic Scotland and Güntherite Norway during the *Reformation period itself is unimaginable - but the Imperial Union is foreordained. And given how recent and contingent ecumenism has been IRL, would the union of *Protestant Scotland and Catholic England really be any more plausible, or functional, than that of Catholic Scotland and Güntherite Norway? I don't think so.

Last night, I found a solution, which I'm going to derp out here. You heard it first, Engel.

A Scottish New World glossary

Andalusada loves dynastic unions, so you heard it here first: before there was England-Scotland, there was... well... medieval England-Scotland. (I'm not sure how it starts or ends - although I'm thinking that Scottish Semi-Salic inheritance leads to a split in the dynasty - just that it's there.)

But after it ends, at around the dawn of the age of exploration, there's another dynastic union: Scotland-Norway. By the time it breaks up (after yet another instance of Scotland's Semi-Salic inheritance passing the throne to somebody the Norwegians wouldn't get), both of them have some holdings in the New World, with Scotland having more and better of them.

New World beer styles

When I want to waste time writing about Andalusada, I don't write about wars, or countries, or heroes; I write about food, guns, and theology. This particular article, about New World beer, is one that I've been meaning to write for quite some time.

Beer isn't beer isn't beer. Czech beer is different from Austrian beer is different from German beer is different from Dutch beer is different from English beer. And those styles are going to
As a basic rule of thumb, the taxonomy looks something like this:

• Latin American beer styles (and this includes those of Hispano-Baltic Texas) are based primarily on north German/Polish beer styles, with some later adjustments in Mexico and Brazil based on royal marriages and the like.
• North American beer styles are based primarily on Scottish styles, with some crossovers from Scandinavia and other parts of the British Isles (due in no small part to the presence of New Ireland.)
• Atlantic coastal beer styles are primarily Anglo-Dutch, with a bit of crossover from Scottish and Irish styles from North America.
• The UCNA's beer styles are a melting pot of its neighbors, with the exact details varying by region.

Having said that, let's unpack how this stuff plays out.

The Grand Principality of Cabralia

On Saturday, I'm going to finally post something that's been haunting me for a few weeks, about Iberian-American beer styles. But before I do that, I'm going to have to introduce a country: the Grand Principality of Cabralia.

The G.P. of Cabralia 101

Why? Butterflies were vague concepts when I started writing Andalusada. Once I became aware of them (and washed my hands of the idea of a Bonapartist Brazil descended from Lucien), the notion of a *Bonapartist *Brazil tied to Mexico lingered on; once I read "The Great Powers" and made the fateful decision to wank Bolivar-Peru, the course was set for Brazil to get demoted a bit.

• Who? Overwhelmingly Lusophone and Catholic, but that's as much as you can say about the population; it's really racially mixed.
• What? A war-scarred, militaristic Lusophone regime, locked in an endless on-and-off war with the CRC and a lot of dick-waving and posturing with the Lusophone states up north.
• Where? When it began, the G.P. stretched from French Guyana to Argentina. At this point, though, it probably comprises less than Brazil proper - definitely the eastern half, but Gran Peru claims bits of Acre, the CRC's revanchist claims stretch as far as Santa Catarina, and north of the Amazon the jungle lines are almost meaningless.
• When? Officially, the Grand Principality dates its history from the 1790s. In its modern form, though, the GP dates back to the mid-1830s, when Kaspar Sansinger remarried, setting in motion the Second Baltazarist War.

So why this way? Because, very simply, Mexico's filling the bad cop role.

The Meammosiran Cossack Host

It's hard to believe, but three months ago I introduced the first of Andalusada's new ethnicities, the Montagnards. Last month, on the 13th (well, almost...), I added the second (and much older), the Takasagonese, and wrote this:

Afterward: Because ethnicities take work, I'm not gonna write another one until August 13th, at which point I'm going to introduce another part of the Japonic diaspora: the Meammosiran Cossack Host, first mentioned in the Russo-Japanese War.

I'm not sure if I was that disciplined (these words were written in 7/21) as to not write another one, but ladies and gentlemen, it's August 13th, and as foretold by David and the Sybil I am introducing the Meammosiran Cossack Host. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, because this is gonna get weird.

The Mexican Liturgical War

Timeframe: 1739-1741; reprisals continue into the 1740s
Belligerents:

• Rebels in the Moorish New World, supported by France and Sodalites
• Umayyad Caliphate of Seville

Outcome: Tactical defeat of the rebellion; strategic defeat for Umayyad Seville

By 1738, dystopian Catholic France was pretty clearly losing the war for France-Outremer. The Montagnards were up in arms, the Cubans had finally come around and started cooperating, and Umayyad Seville had far more manpower in the New World than France did. The solution? Find a way to strike at the seat of the Bilad al-Aqsa itself.

Thus was born a doomed peasant revolt with far-reaching consequences.

The UCNA

A lot of my posts have horrible, wordy introductions. A lot of it's because I'm a horrible, wordy writer. A lot more is because most of my posts are spontaneous, arbitrary, and completely unforeshadowed, so I have to assume that nobody else knows what I'm talking about. We'll have none of that today. This is the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia. It shouldn't need any more introduction than that.

But for you, dear readers, who haven't been with me from the beginning, I'm going to spell this out anyways.

The UCNA 101

Why? Because this is the point. GURPS Infinite Worlds specified that in the Andalus timeline, Moorish Spain threw off the Reconquista and discovered the New World in 1484, building an empire that today (ca. 1930) competes against Saxony, Russia, and Japan. The timeline needed a Moorish great power; ladies and gentlemen, this is that great power.

• Who? EVERYONE. A scattering of aborigines in ash-Shamal. Moorish-speaking Muslims from everywhere that Moorish is spoken. A lot of French Farrellites living on its old frontiers, and a lot of French Catholics living all over the place. Lots of West Africans bought as slaves for the frontier plantations. Andalusi Arabs, Maghribi Arabs, Aqsi Arabs. A dynasty of Sephardi Jews who run half the show behind the scenes. This is a mosaic society the likes of which we haven't seen since the Ottoman Empire. Güntherites from down south, and Gaels from up north. And, above it all, a caliph from the House of Umayya - the first, last, and best leaders the House of Islam will ever know.
• And two Jews.
• What? An Islamic Empire of Brazil (my first and biggest inspiration for it.)
• Where? The continental French New World, and most of the Moorish New World as well (although ironically almost none of the Sevillan New World.) Cuba, through some tangled marital politics, and a scattering of islands in the Caribbean (though not the bigger ones.) What was once France-Outremer, north to the Great Lakes and beyond (not too much north, though, and the northern border with England-Scotland is actually a bit lower than the USA's because it's more prone to following the curves of rivers.) The UCNA also owns some land in Cabralia too, specifically enough to prop up the Transcabralia Canal.
• When? The actual groundwork is at least 15 years older - but it all starts on April 5.