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.

Prestige languages of the world, ca. 1930

I am a linguistics nerd, and I totally sweat the details on this stuff.

The languages of the empires

There are a few languages that are obvious to want to learn: the languages of the great empires.

The Great Powers, ca. 1930

Andalusada's arbitrarily defined present day, as set down by GURPS canon, is 1930. This is what the world looks like then.

France 

For most of the early modern era, France was a Catholic dystopia, using the power of the Sodality and the weakness of its neighbors to horrifying effect. In the aftermath of the War of the French Succession, it's become significantly less dystopian (and slightly less Catholic), but as of the present day it's a large, powerful unitary state in a world that's convinced they aren't going to last.

• Has a slightly different core territory (missing some of the east and southeast, but including more in the north, including Alsace, Lorraine, and a fair chunk of the Low Countries.)
• Imperial holdings: India. All of Dravidian India is basically under French control; so is most of its coastline, stalled firmly by little Bengal (and its international allies.)

 England-Scotland

 England and Scotland are sort of two separate countries. During the

• Imperial holdings: Almost all of North America between them (most notably New Ireland), "Guinea" (a lot of sub-Saharan West Africa), and some chunks of southeast Asia.
• Alliances: A close alliance with Bengal, to act as a check on French expansion out of India. Historically, Japan's been a close ally of England-Scotland, but since the breakdown of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance a decade ago it's nothing quite as secure.

"Great Russia"

A *Narodnik republic with a needlessly wordy name (the Autocephalous Revolutionary National Sobor of All the Russias, or something like that. It changes every few years.)

• Capital: Tver, because it's never Tver.
• Core territories: Russia and Siberia.
• Imperial holdings: A loudly complaining *Alaska, most notably.
• Alliances: Propping up proxy states in Karelia, Anatolia, and some parts of Central Asia. Great Russia has a nonaggression pact with Japan that's older than Great Russia itself; it used to have close ties to Korea, but those have waned since what happened to Evgeny the Old.

Saxony

• Along with the Kingdom of Bavaria, one of the two vicars of the Holy Roman Empire (which is defunct but hasn't been abolished.)
• The smallest of the Great Powers; not so much a power on its own, but the keystone of the alliance that tips the balance in almost every European land war.
• Core territories: Electoral Saxony, along with most of what we'd call the Duchy of Saxony, the better part of Thuringia, and some scattered others.
• Imperial holdings: The Suez* Canal. After some rearrangements, Saxony wound up with almost controlling ownership of it, and has made itself a bit of a broker. Quixotically, they've also colonized Port Sudan, which they're trying to build into a respectable international harbor.
• Alliances: At the moment, Poland-Ruthenia and the Baltic states in the east, which it's trying to cement into a central European military bloc against Russian expansionism. Egypt and Abyssinia have some relatively equal treaties too, as a check against Anglo-French adventurism.