The Day the Aliens Took the Nukes Away

The day the aliens took the nukes away was a Tuesday in March. It was just past lunch in Europe. People on the U.S. East Coast were just waking up.

They didn't arrive in massive ships that hovered ominously over major cities, and appear on video screens announcing they wanted to make contact. They arrived as small, silver tic tacs, a few meters long, like the ones in all the US Navy videos. No one knows if that was their machines, or that was them. They formed a grid over the inhabited land surface of the Earth, hovering ten or so meters up. Some of them were over parking lots in cities, some over green rolling pastures, some among the trees in forests. Efforts to touch or damage or destroy them were futile; impossibly quickly they moved out of the way, and objects and energy went around them. Rocks, missiles, laser pointers, baseball bats - they jumped aside, or deflected it.

After a few minutes, radio stations, text apps, emails servers were overhwlemed, and flooded, and this message came across in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic:

"Habitable planets are vanishingly rare. You are now able to damage yours. We are intervening to protect you and your planet. Starting now, nuclear weapons will not explode. You should test this to verify it. We have no plans to return for the foreseeable future."

It repeated three more times. Then, they zipped away. They were seen on cameras and radar and infrared, zooming off in all directions from Earth at massive accelerations.

Many people thought it was a prank. Panicked meetings occurred across the world, discussing how to test it. Then, someone decided it was not a prank, and launched first.

Millions of people cried and screamed, hid in their homes or tried to drive home to their families on gridlocked roads, pounding the steering wheel wanting only to hold their children as the alerts blared from their phones and televisions.

The first missile struck twenty-eight minutes after the visitation: a Russian missile hitting Berlin. It missed downtown by three kilometers, crashing through the roof of a warehouse, scattered in tiny smoking fragments across the warehouse ruins. Others followed. You have probably already seen the video of the American one that hit the exact middle of Red Square, making a kinetic impact crater, but nothing else. Eighty-three people were killed in Washington when an apartment building collapsed from the impact of a Russian missile. There were radiation leaks from many of them, but not a single one exploded. There were less than a thousand deaths worldwide from kinetic impacts in populated areas.

By dinner in Europe and lunchtime on the American East Coast, lots of people believed: they were really aliens, and the nukes are really gone. People cried with joy that they'd just woken up from a nightmare: one that most people had been in necessary denial of for decades, just to function, that seemed about to come true. And power plants kept running. PET scans kept working. But somehow, the weapons wouldn't work.

But in capitals, there wasn't celebration, there were more panicked meetings. They realized: in hours, Earth had been thrust back into the era of great power politics. NATO issued an emergency summons for all its troops up to the age of 50. Russia's legions began to mass defensively on the Western side of Moscow. China immediately began fueling its China strait amphibious fleet. Cruise missiles with chemical munitions began to fly back and forth across Europe and Asia. Bombers took to the air.

In two weeks, Russia was pushed, stumbling, back out of Ukraine. Kaliningrad was Koenigsburg again, and Moscow looked much the worse for wear; Red Square was hardly the only crater. The few remaining middle- and long-range missiles were fitted with chemical and biological agents, in desperation; an anthrax outbreak began in Seattle. NATO crossed Belarus and offered Moscow terms for surrender.

In Asia, Chinese troops landed on Taiwan's west coast. Cruise missiles destroyed the Three Gorges dam and tens of thousands drowned. American ships sped across the Pacifc, engaged with thousands of nimble Chinese gunboats. This is where the worst of the fighting was - in the China Strait, South China Sea, and on Taiwan (with a flattened Taipei), not only are there massive "old-timey" fleet battles, but hunter-killer drones swarm ships and people. Exploding drones give way to "multi-use" personnel hunters, a euphemism for ones with poison needles that can take out ten or more people each. Going outside on deck on a ship in the South China Sea becomes a suicidal assignment. South Korea and Japan attack North Korea, and the Imperial Japanese Navy begins building the Yamato II. Australian and Vietnamese ships hastily arranged coordination protocols and approached from the south. The border between India and Pakistan caught on literal fire, visible from space. Russian troops crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska.

In the end, the nuclear nightmare that hid in the closet, like a real monster, was over - but once restraint was removed, a conventional World War III lasted five years and still cost a hundred million lives in warfare and famine. People still saw the tic tacs occasionally, but they haven't talked to us since.

Foundation, Empire, and Pennsylvania

If you like alternate history, there's more here.




The Central State's flag above, and the American flag below, with the lions of sacred Mount Nittany standing guard. At one time the American flag had thirteen stripes, prior to the absorption of the Northeast Extension, the Lower Counties, and The Shore (old style, Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey respectively.)



From fair Henlopen in the South, and Franklinton, New Reading and Long Island. From Toledo in the Northwest where the prairies begin, and the industrial river metropolis of Huntington, the Central State looms large in history and in our hearts. From the beginning it was a microcosm of all of America. The culture and government of the United States was not always so dominated as it is today by the Keystone Kingdom. Indeed it is sometimes difficult to separate discussions of national politics from those of "Pee-Ay". But it is instructive to revisit the events that led to such an arrangement.


On the eve of the Revolution, there was no sure sign that Pennsylvania would come to dominate the Union just as the original crown colony of Virginia had until then dominated the colonies. But there was already a hint during the Seven Years War, when British officers who came to fight the French in the North American theater recognized, in print, that Virginians promised everything and delivered nothing, while for the Pennsylvanians it was the contrary. No surprise that the opportunist Washington was the first to engage the French (illegally killing a surrendered officer), hunker down at Fort Necessity, and quickly lose.



The Grand Canyon. (Credit Bayjournal.com.)
It bears repeating what every American learns in school, but imagining that we were there, not knowing how things would turn out, making decisions in real time. In the spring of 1784, Pennsylvania had had enough from the treacherous Yankees of the Northeast Extension (then called Connecticut), who continued illegally squatting in the Wyoming Valley and dispossessing the Central State of its land based on deeds from King George - who the inbred Anglophiles may not have realized was no longer in charge of North America! Leading the charge were Alexander Patterson and Henry Shoemaker, low-level officials who would be catapulted into history as protectors and heroes of the young republic. In response to the mobs of Yankees rampaging through the valley attacking women and children, a militia was raised in July by order of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council. Outgoing president of Congress (a rather modest position with no hint of what was to come) Thomas Mifflin, after pleading with both sides to stop, visited the valley and saw the Yankee depradations with his own eyes.

In August the strengthened militia fully ejected the Yankees and pursued them across the border into New York. Mifflin returned to the Confederated States capital at Annapaolis and made his impassioned speech, demanding "Can only the Pennsylvanian reckon justice?" The call was heard back home, and as the Pennamite army pushed the weakening Yankees back to the Hudson River, reinforcements continued to pour in. (The story of a fleeing Yankee taunting now-General Shoemaker that Pennamites couldn't swim, while delicious, is likely apocryphal.) Thus began the Crossing near Newburgh, the Glorious March, and the Forty Great Days. The swollen Pennamite Army pursued the haggard Yankees, first to Hartford, then turned back to New Haven where the final resistance was met and crushed. The Burning of New Haven and subsequent salting of the soil caused the victorious Pennamites to name the town built on its ashes New Carthage. The first new piece of the Central State had been assembled.

The Death of New Haven, John Troutman. (Really Burning Village at Night by Johann Trautmann, 1716-1769.)


Fresh from their victory and with no serious organized opposition, Shoemaker made the then-controversial decision to continue along the coast to the harbor town of Franklinton (then called simply New York City; difficult though it is for us to believe today, Franklinton was at that time actually slightly larger than Philadelphia!) Of course, we were all shocked to learn based on recently discovered letters that Mifflin had essentially ordered him not to. Franklinton took a few days longer but finally fell; it is often simplistically imagined that the fighting stopped quickly and neatly, but for nearly two months the hunt-and-snipe naval warfare continued, with most of the guerilla fighting both in the streets of the main island Manhattan and in the forests of Staten Island, along with significant resistance from the converted commercial barges coming down the Hudson. At this point Mifflin issued demands to the Lower Counties (then, confusingly, called "Delaware" after a county in southeast Pennsylvania that always remained as part of the Central State) that they return to the fold, and they rejoined with a minimum of discussion. Getting New Jersey's delegates to agree was slightly harder but after the (now archaic-seeming) carve-outs were placed in the Act of Union, Pennsylvania now extended to the Atlantic. This is the basis for public wagering and the production of certain pork products being restricted to The Shore; a pig farmer at the negotiations named Charles Taylor insisted on the latter, and the pork rolls still bear his name. (It's a curiosity that The Shore's official name remains New Jersey, though mapmakers seem unconcerned with this.)

By October, other states had begun organizing their own militias, with Massachusetts in particular preparing for all-out war. Mifflin unilaterally moved the capital back to Philadelphia, and appealed to the other states to quickly send delegates that the Articles of Confederation could be amended, as winter was approaching. Revisionists occasionally deride this as an illegal move, but the Republic as it stands is founded on the agreements subsequently drawn up. (The grumbling of James Montgomery, the Rhode Island delegate, that he was rubber-stamping something to give it an air of legitimacy, gives us the phrase "like a Rhode Islander at the convention" for those who decry pointless ceremonies.) Mifflin began with tweaks to the articles which subtly gave the Central State the "first among equals" status it now not so subtly enjoys. But the work continued into the winter, and once there was snow on the ground, he went full bore - in particular, in adding an article outlawing slavery, which Pennsylvania had already done within its own borders, in a law written by Mifflin himself. Mifflin knew what he was doing in bringing out these amendments to his captive audience when the weather turned - hence, where an Englishman might talk about crossing the Rubicon, an American would quote Mifflin: "When the first flake strikes the Schuylkill."

The First and Highest, Governor Mifflin. (Credit Pennsylvania House of Representatives.)
The agrarian states in the South obviously balked, but Mifflin had anticipated this. A militia composed of the willing - not only the Pennamites from the Central State's expanded realm but also New England abolitionists, had already been dispatched south, going plantation to plantation, intercepting riders bringing news of their approach, and most importantly - conducting rendition of slaveowners. This is the most difficult part of Thomas Mifflin's legacy, but the results are not in dispute. When the brigade officer met with the plantation owner, the owner would be asked to sign a document freeing his slaves, and a petition to be submitted to the Final Congress demanding the abolition of slavery throughout the nation. Of course, most refused; they were then brought north, themselves to work in the chilly fields of Lancaster and Berks County and building roads and digging canals, with the only condition required for their release - signing those two documents. By 1785 there were few enough holdouts that the Emancipation Act was passed, closing a stained chapter of our history.

The British were no idle spectators and indeed, had expected the experiment in self-government to fail from its first days. Caught by surprise, they had provided only nominal aid to the Yankees in the fall of 1784, but they were taken off guard; not so the following year. The wealthy plantation owners of Virginia met with the British naval officers who came up that state's rivers at night, and the Battle of Williamsburg was a narrow Pennamite victory, when a detachment of troops came upon a squadron of British ships at anchor. Of the owners who were sought and captured as a result of their foreign involvement, we mostly remember Washington, whose service to the cause of independence will be forever marred by his willingness to consort with the enemy to keep human beings in chains. One wonders how long, in some other world, some of our other Virginian First Fathers (Titan old gods to Mifflin, Patterson and Shoemaker's Greek pantheon) would have continued the institution of slavery without the example of Washington to encourage them to emancipate. This incident resulted in the transfer of Virginia's mountain counties and Trans-Ohio lands to Pennsylvania, a transaction encoded directly in the Charter, and the Central State took the final form it has today.



The High Governor's two official residences. Above, at Ocean City in The Shore and below, in South Mountain, Berks County.


In 1786 the Charter was finalized by Franklin and signed by Mifflin, and the Republic of America was born, with Pennsylvania at its heart. Governor Mifflin finally achieved his title, formally transferring his responsibilities to head of the Central State's government rather than that of the nation. As a result, legally, "Governor of Pennsylvania" is de facto interchangeable with leader of the Republic of America, with the American President having a mostly ceremonial role, much like the king in a constitutional monarchy. Mifflin was followed by Patterson and Shoemaker, and during the terms of the Great Three, America pushed in every direction, not only expanding beyond the Mississippi but also taking England's possessions in Canada and the Caribbean and adding them to the Republic. As the Republic expanded within the North American continent, it found itself in a complex arrangement, with the Pennsylvanian-founded states like Ollinger and Yoder having a status akin to a Republican version of those in Europe ruled directly by the Holy Roman Empire, and independent states like New Mexico and California as duchies and principalities. The Pennamites appeared to be unstoppable, and this era produced William Pitt the Younger's frustrated statement about finding England's sins, so she could be absolved and saved from this new race of devils.

A subsequent history of Pennsylvania is necessarily a history of the world, given its immediate industrial expansion and its people's close ties with the many progressive German states, usually considered to have started with an overseas victory by a combined force of European and Pennamite troops over the French despot Napoleon at Austerlitz, where Napoleon was captured and executed. These ties only deepened over the next century. Despite a brief clash between east and west nearly erupting into full civil war over the use of "soda" versus "pop", and "youse" vs "yinz", Americans continue to be greeted the world over as "pennies", and immigrants continue to arrive in Philadelphia and take a picture as they order their first sauerkraut and scrapple in the Central State. The ongoing Wawa-Sheetz controversy seems intractable, but Pennsylvania has always synthesized its extremes and risen above them.


BACK FROM ALTERNATE HISTORY: WHY DID NEW YORK AND NOT PENNSYLVANIA BECOME THE EMPIRE STATE?

New York didn't dominate the Union to nearly the same degree as our fun alternate history of "Imperial Pennsylvania." (I liked "Central State" better than "Keystone" because it echoes the literal translation of China's self-confident name for itself, the Central Kingdom.) But New York is to some extent the first among equals on the East Coast, even if de facto rather than de jure. Why? As usual, a combination of geography and demography being destiny, and historical happenstance.

First, what do we mean by "empire state"? The biggest wealthiest city, and the most famous people. Let's start with the second one there. It often sticks out to me that Pennsylvania had so many fewer presidents than the states that surround it. Virginia has eight, Ohio has eight, and New York has five. Pennsylvania finally has a second - in an ironic twist, the first was Buchanan, the worst president in American history until the twenty-first century, and the second president from PA unseated the only president who was even worse than Buchanan.[1] Again, why?

Pennsylvania was settled by people from the Midlands of England and Germans.[2] The German religious migrants and Midlanders were a group that valued equality and an overall "flat" social organization which was a major contributor to the informality and salt-of-the-Earth directness of the overall American character, and the religious tolerance that Penn espoused fit them well. New York had a heavy influence from the more rigid settlers of New England who valued education much more than Pennsylvania's farmers - and, in real life, came directly into armed conflict with them in the actually quite real Pennamite Wars[3], which formed the branchpoint in our exercise here.

As to the second factor - geography - New York was already slightly bigger during the time of the Revolution, but this obviously just begs the question.[4] Why was New York already bigger? You might think it's because it's a little closer to Europe, so it was easier for European migrants to arrive there. True, but then why isn't Massachusetts the Empire State? The real reason is that New York has the Hudson, a navigable river that crosses the Fall Line, which can be sailed all the way to Troy. It was easier to get raw materials and get to markets and then later, with canals, onto the Great Lakes. Similar reasons account for the origins of Detroit as the center of the automotive industry and Seattle as the headquarters of Boeing (wood for material, and water for transport for the early aerospace industry.) While Pennsylvania does have shoreline on Lake Erie, it's across the significant and little-discussed Eastern Continental Divide, that divides the watersheds of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Pennsylvania did build a canal later connecting the Delaware and Chesapeake but the Susquehanna (whose name, according to a humorous myth, means "mile wide, inch deep") is just not a useful river for transporting goods.

Years ago I was curious why Virginia, the cradle of presidents, ended up settling with the title of dominion rather than empire? You may have noticed that despite Jamestown being the oldest culturally ancestral settlement in America[5], our biggest densest cities are not in coastal Virginia. (We actually lost the location of Jamestown at one point!) But straight line extrapolation from single facts is always a fool's game. Virginia's first two centuries were strong ones - the military uniform Washington wore early in the Seven Years War actually implied Virginia was a equal part of the United Kingdom along with England, Scotland and Ireland (sorry Wales.) But after the Civil War, Virginia was relegated to partly a suburb of DC, and then, well, the rest of it. (I'm partial to Hampton Roads for reasons of childhood vacations, and Shenandoah National Park is cooler than you might realize, but the point is fair.) Virginia is a warmer Pennsylvania, but even worse, with a wider coastal plain between the Atlantic and the Fall Line. Why even worse? Because as the industrial age unfolded, its better climate and broader plains cursed it.[6] The first settlers were from the estates of southern England (Albion's Seed termed them Cavaliers) and served as the first Presidents, but the agrarian paradise that Jefferson envisioned (a chain of plantation mini-states that were either utopias or dystopias depending what color your skin was) was soon outcompeted in dollars, growth, and power by the industrial cities to the north. (I would be curious to look at a Gini calculation between Pennsylvania and Virginia landowners or a comparison of mean farm size between the two, but I'm going to call that the line where the professionals can take over.) And finally, if you think the Fall Line in Pennsylvania was hard to get over, try the Appalachians in Virginia. Some of those roads in Shenandoah wouldn't look out of place in the Sierras if not for the deciduousness of the forests.

Long live the Keystone State! May it ever shine in glory!


FOOTNOTES

[1] If you don't agree, I'm surprised that you were able to read this far, but surely it was slow going and you're likely mouthing your words as you read.

[2] Albion's Seed is an excellent book, which details how each region of colonial America was settled by people from specific parts of England. Similar things happened in the Spanish-speaking world, for example people from Andalusia to Mexico, people from the Canaries to the Caribbean.

[3] This was actually the second time Pennsylvanians fought with another colony or state. Suck it, Cresap.

[4] I suspect we don't talk as much about New York during the Revolution as we do Philadelphia and Boston because we mostly got our asses kicked there. The British abandoned Boston early in the war, Philly was occupied only after a fight but both the Declaration and Constitution were written there, and the interior was never occupied, with the pesky insurgents brazenly camping right up the Schuylkill in Valley Forge.

[5] The roundabout language of "culturally ancestral" disqualifies St. Augustine, Roanoke, along with Cahokia and every Native American city, since there isn't an unbroken cultural chain from any of them to us today in modern America.

[6] There's a great statistic cited in Zakaria's Post-American World that I will give in the abstract here, to maximize impact. Country 1 has a sound lead in industry X; Country 2 in industry Y. Sales in industry X are at least an order of magnitude bigger than Y. So you want to be Country 1 right? Filling in the blanks: the year was 1900, Country 1 was the UK, industry X was bicycles, Country 2 was the US, and industry Y was automobiles. Extending this to Virginia (and the South in general), its better climate made it over-reliant on agriculture, and the industrial revolution arrived late and weakly.

The Roots of Universal Moral Authority in Medieval European Christendom - Benefits to States and Individuals

Reading about many conflicts in medieval European history - especially bitter protracted ones - you're often struck by the appeal to legal proceedings. Take this example about Joan of Arc's experience after being captured during the Hundred Years War:

The trial for heresy was politically motivated. The tribunal was composed entirely of pro-English and Burgundian clerics, and overseen by English commanders including the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Warwick. In the words of the British medievalist Beverly Boyd, the trial was meant by the English Crown to be "a ploy to get rid of a bizarre prisoner of war with maximum embarrassment to their enemies". Legal proceedings commenced on 9 January 1431 at Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government. The procedure was suspect on a number of points, which would later provoke criticism of the tribunal by the chief inquisitor who investigated the trial after the war.

Under ecclesiastical law, Bishop Cauchon lacked jurisdiction over the case. Cauchon owed his appointment to his partisan support of the English Crown, which financed the trial. The low standard of evidence used in the trial also violated inquisitorial rules. Clerical notary Nicolas Bailly, who was commissioned to collect testimony against Joan, could find no adverse evidence. Without such evidence the court lacked grounds to initiate a trial. Opening a trial anyway, the court also violated ecclesiastical law by denying Joan the right to a legal adviser. In addition, stacking the tribunal entirely with pro-English clergy violated the medieval Church's requirement that heresy trials be judged by an impartial or balanced group of clerics.

From this excerpt you can clearly see that her trial was hardly a model of justice and impartiality. But the very idea of a trial, and an appeal to fairness and an authority beyond the people with the most swords, is what is remarkable. Yes, the English bent rules, but there were rules to follow and they had to give at least a minimal appearance of following them. They didn't just immediately and gleefully execute her with no explanation beyond "she frustrated our goals and we don't like her."

Compare: confronted with the victorious army of Kublai Khan, the last Song emperor jumped to his death along with other high-ranking officials, rightly fearing their fates should they fall into the Mongols' hands. Was there a court they could appeal to for release or at least better treatment? An argument they could make to Kublai from universal moral authority, about what was the right and fair principle to obey? How could these concepts even make sense? For China and the Mongols, there could be no appeal, indeed no idea of an appeal beyond either's physical authority as it stemmed from each mans' desires - that is to say, force.

The benefit of an organization whose authority was mostly moral is something that those of us who are secular-minded may ignore, as it stemmed from supernatural claims. We are often tempted to write off medieval Europe as a thousand-year failure mode, an Iron Age Orwellianism, or a Mad Max dystopia from the standpoint of ancient Roman citizens. While it was all those things, the seeds of Europe's positive divergence were being sown, and having a superimposed moral authority, separate and acknowledged by all as above Earthly concerns, was a unique arrangement and seems likely to have been part of it. There are many ways to think about this - two might be that warring parties both respecting the Church's authority created an in-theory neutral arbiter; another is just that more players makes a richer political ecosystem that is less zero-sum. This ultimately made possible rule of law and not of men, the possibility of service to principle rather than person. The destructiveness of rational warfare in eg East Asia was possibly part of why Europe was able to pull ahead.

It may have been quite fortunate that the church was based in one city that fell to barbarians (Rome) and another that saw its territory shrink until it was overwhelmed by infidels. The Western Church then was a kind of virtual state that could coexist with the others fighting for survival in Western Europe. It was a fortunate accident of timing, with Europe's isolating geography (mountains near the coast and indented coastlines) favoring continued separation. In an alternate history where Belisarius succeeded in reuniting the Roman Empire, European religious history might look much more similar to that of the Middle East, where religious and political authority were inseparable (or Chinese history where it was clearly peripheral) and there was no chance for mediation to calm wars and allow the concept of rule of law to emerge.

This 2018 paper by Hill, recently covered on MR argues in more detail about why the concept of the rule of law emerged when it did, though I disagree that it's the ideology itself that was more disposed to resulting in such a concept, rather than the geographical, political and military context of each. That is to say, if we re-ran history with the holy books switched, eg Mohammed in a cave writing the Bible, and the Qu'ran getting vetted and adopted at the Council of Nicea, I think the result would have been largely the same.

In the twentieth century, the U.N. has clearly appealed to a sense of universal rights much more than previous international forums did - the League of Nations and the Concert of Europe before it were both practical negotiation venues, but the U.N. makes claims to mediating universal morality. I can't help but wonder to what extent that has been intentional, and can't help but worry even as an atheist that it's easy to for states and peoples to reject non-supernatural moral claims as being made up by human beings, only and always for pragmatic self-interest.

Trust and Progress

Tyler Cowen talks with Paul Romer about social norms that encourage scientific advancement, or don't. Romer refers to the actually very puzzling question about why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China and (embellishing) it was one of this cacophony of squabbling medieval kingdoms that eventually did it. Romer says,

One of my predecessors at the World Bank as chief economist, Justin Lin, has a very interesting paper on this puzzle of why didn’t China develop the industrial revolution. His argument is basically that China — because there were so many people looking and discovering; they discovered a lot of things, like gunpowder, steel, printing, and so forth — but what China didn’t do was invent the social system we call science. They had some knowledge and some technology. They didn’t invent science. And what was different in Europe was the invention of science.

I found that argument really compelling, and I’ve taken it one step further and think that part of what the West benefited from were notions about integrity and individual responsibility for what we say that fostered trust, and that science indirectly gave us those things.

For any country around the world, it’s worth thinking about — if you’re short on that, if there’s a tendency for a lot of people to cheat on their taxes, to lie about what’s true, if there’s norms that hold a society back in those ways, I think it would be good to think about, how do we rebuild a system where we respect and admire people who consistently tell the truth, and where we look down on, disapprove of people who are found to have intentionally misled us?

There's a section near the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (the best alternate history book ever written hands-down) where an alchemist - actually a shady huckster who is aware that what he is doing is just a con - gets caught "transmuting" lead into gold in a demonstration for a local potentate in some Persianate Central Asian state when his hollow, gold-containing ladle is discovered.

He gets his hands cut off in punishment, then swears that he will only work to advance knowledge from then on. This ends up being the start of something like what we recognize as science. Of note, the divergence point in this world is that the Black Plague wiped out all of Europe, turning history into a zero-sum contest between the Islamic world and China)* Because of the reformed con man, science advances much as it did in our history, except with different names (ie, qi for electricity.)

That said, while many hucksters have been caught at their game, few have so dramatically changed their internal incentive structure in response - though this passage highlights the importance of trust and an earnest search for knowledge that may better the world in general. The importance of developing a general background of trust is difficult to overstate.


*Interestingly enough, in Stirling's Conquistador, Alexander the Great lives to a ripe old age and succeeds in his dream of uniting the lands from Europe to the Indus into a macro-state; the resulting world is one of unity and stability, therefore stagnancy, where by what would have been the 20th century of the Christian era they are barely medieval, and China appears to have been overrun by the Tocharians.

The Benefit of Joining the United States Comes from Becoming More Like New England

In an SSRN paper, Maseland and Spruk look at an interesting counterfactual: how would territories have performed that did in reality join the US, if they had not? Also, how might some countries had performed if they had joined the US, when in actual fact they never (fully) did? For this second question the countries are Puerto Rico, Cuba, Greenland and the Philippines. (Newfoundland strongly considered it, mid-20th century.) They find that joining the US is beneficial. However, and more interesting, they find that this effect is in part mediated by the states that actually did join, importing institutional values which are most similar to those of New England states.

This is interesting, because a) there is an overrepresentation of New England-bred and -educated people in America's cultural elites; b) the book Albion's Seed notes the different values brought by settlers from different parts of England to the New World, and as New England Puritans were literally breeding for intelligence, it's not a surprise they had such an outsize impact; c) this may relate to the "law of the Canadian border", which prompts one to ask d) if the benefit of joining the US decreases as one moves south - i.e., since Wyoming was much more likely to receive New England institutional norms than say, Mississippi (based on the country's predominantly east-west migration patterns), does that mean Mississippi did not benefit as much?

Alternative History #8: Ancient East Indian Settlement of Australia

For the previous installment, see Alternative History #7: German-Led Native Shock Troops in California.

For the next installment, see The Mongols Were Good For Europe, an exercise in what Eurasia would look like if the Mongols invasions had never occurred.

I've often wondered why Australia wasn't colonized by Chinese, or Indonesians, or Maori, prior to Europeans. Approaching from the north, Chinese and Indonesians would have encountered horrendous impenetrable swamps crawling with saltwater crocodiles. The Maoris might have had an easier time landing in what is now Victoria or New South Wales, but they only arrived in Aotearoa five centuries before Europeans. But why not Indian explorers or traders? Even in that early era it's likely the Asians would have had substantially more advanced stone tools and stoneworking techniques than the Australians, which they would have introduced and which would have quickly spread through trade and warfare. Australia might also have been colonized by non-native fauna that they brought with them - non-marsupial mammals that would stick out against the evolutionary background of the isolated continent.

Once again, this isn't alternate history. I recently ran across a paper by Irina Pugach, working in Mark Stoneking's lab at Max Planck, showing genetic evidence of contact around four to five thousand years ago. Most intriguing, this is nearly simultaneous with a change in aboriginal stone tools and the introduction of dingoes to the continent. It's very hard to believe that's a coincidence. (Disclosure, for a year I worked for Stoneking as an undergrad, on a project showing the mtDNA evidence supporting a Polynesian origin for the settlers of Madagascar. This was with radioactive sequencing. If you could get 200 clean bp every 2 days, you were a wizard. I got a Howard Hughes monetary award for it in a research fair, not a grant.)

REFERENCE Pugach I, Delfin F, Gunnarsdóttir E, Kayser M, Stoneking M. Genome-wide data substantiate Holocene gene flow from India to Australia. PNAS January 29, 2013 110 (5) 1803-1808; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211927110

Alternative History #7: German-Led Native Shock Troops in California

For the previous installment, see Alternative History #6: A Buddhist Colony in Ptolemy's Egypt.

For the next installment, see Alternative History #8: Ancient East Indian Settlement of Australia.

Imagine a more Habsburg-involved colonization of the New World (at least before the very late French-driven attempt that inspired the Cinco de Mayo holiday.) Charles V (Carlos Quinto) was, after all, both the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor - and you might imagine that the settlement of California especially would have gone very differently.

The Spanish, thinking more in practical imperial terms rather than as conquistadors eager to repeat the glories of the recent Reconquista of Iberia from the Moors, would gather and train troops from the native nations up and down the West Coast of the New World. Picture an army of Miwok, Nisenan, and Mission natives, complete with cavalry and infantry units, with German-speaking white officers - wearing Czarist uniforms from the nearby Russian colonies on the northern coast. They would be the elite men of the empire, the Holy Roman Empire's answer to Britain's Gurkhas, dispatched from a central location to defend the imperial governor in the event of a revolt.

Outlandish? There's this from Wikipedia, about New Helvetia, which would later become Sacramento:

The settlement was defended by an army of Miwok, Nisenan, and Mission Indians, all consisting of 150 infantry, 50 cavalry, and German-speaking white officers. This group, wearing Russian uniforms purchased from Fort Ross, marched to the Pueblo of Los Angeles area and briefly defended Governor Manuel Micheltorena from the revolt of the Californios.

The difference is that the German-speakers were Swiss and not Austrian, as John Sutter founded New Helvetia and named it after his ancestral homeland. Perhaps most unlikely of all, Sutter is today buried in Lititz, Pennsylvania, in good old Pennsylvania Dutch country. More on strange north European involvement in the Pacific - Russian Hawai'i here, and an almost-war in Samoa between American and Germany in the late 1800s.

Review of Journey to Fusang, and Some Problems with Alternate History

This is cross-posted at Speculative Nonfiction.

Added later: this account of Chinese settlers in Old West/Gold Rush era California reads very much like a real-history (alternate alternate history?) version of the novel. Highly recommended, read it!)

I'd had William Sanders's Journey to Fusang on my to-read list for years, and I finally got around to it. As much as I enjoyed the book, it exposes some of the problems common to the alternate history genre and even those specific to what-if-the-Mongols-invaded-Europe stories. It also made me wonder which historical branchpoints are most valued by "the academy". Each of these is covered herein.


Part I: Review of Journey to Fusang

After five centuries of European cultural domination of the world, it's difficult not to be fascinated by the now almost fantastic idea of non-Christian non-Europeans conquering parts of Europe. Of course this did happen in three corners of Europe - the Moors in Spain, the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans, and of course the Mongols. And if there were an award for depth of impression per years occupying European territory, the Mongols would win hands-down. Their advance beyond Russia lasted just a few years. And in the territory they actually held onto, modern Russia, they were there for a scant two centuries. Even in the East the dynasty they established (the Yuan) fell apart in about the same length of time, despite some useful innovations - among them, the world's first adoption of paper money, not to mention an honest attempt to change the Chinese writing system to a sensible phonetic one.

The Mongols' western high water mark was Poland and the Balkans, where they achieved several characteristically cunning and blitzkrieg-like victories before making winter camp. In the spring of 1242 they decamped just as suddenly and faded back into Central Eurasia. The reason typically cited for their withdrawal is the death of Ogedei Khan; in the Mongol institution of selecting a new khan, the kuriltai, you get a vote only if you're physically present at the succession talks, and the sub-Khans leading the European campaign did not want to be left out of the decision. As with most things in history, the reality is probably more multicausal and complicated. For example, Europe was littered with well fortified castles that were frustratingly well-designed against sieges, and what's more Mongols were not all-weather super-men and they didn't do well in cold, wet, marshy areas, e.g. Europe.

But simplifying history for the sake of a good story (this is after all a novel, not a textbook), in Journey to Fusang, Ogedei's sickness does not lead to his death, and the spring of 1242 sees the Mongols conquer Europe from the Vistula to the North Sea and the Mediterranean. England and Ireland are spared the ravages of the grim horsemen, as there is apparently no western Khan ("khan of all the Germanies") as enterprising as Kublai (or there is, but England is protected by the same divine winds that defend Japan.) In the late 1600s when the action takes place, England and Ireland both call themselves Catholic though each has its own Pope. Milton is a gambler in London, and Shakespeare escaped to Ireland and wrote light comedy. Though, as a result of the conquest, nothing like the Renaissance happens in Europe, nor any Reformation, and there is certainly no European discovery of America. The European continent remains a cultural backwater stuck in a Malthusian trap of subsistence agriculture and ignorance, leading the protagonist at one point to make a comment about French women rearing litters of children named Pierre and Temujin. The East Coast of North America is being colonized by Moors and various other Islamic people, and the West Coast by the Chinese - the crown jewel of whose possessions is sunny Fusang and its colonial capital, a hilly metropolis by a bay. Somehow amidst all this the Aztecs not only survived but prospered, accumulating guns from Muslim traders, and they're a constant concern along the colonists' borders.

The protagonist is Finn, an Irishman, and a trickster and con-man extraordinaire, who finds himself captured by a Moorish slaving ship, which he escapes with a similarly-minded Hebrew indentured crew member. They find themselves in the great city of Dar Al Islam (New Orleans). The book does rely on incredible turns of fortune (in one moment the protagonist is in deep, the next he's on top of the world) and the plot is rarely predictable. Eventually our hero makes his way to the interior where we meet Comanches with names like Muhammad Ten-Bears. The large, dull, fair-haired English slave whose dumb luck brings him along for the adventure is a clear parallel to Lewis and Clarke's black slave York (the natives are amazed at his size and complexion and, as York did, the fellow takes advantage of their fascination by fornicating with scores of their women.) Eventually the group of Islamic frontiersmen end up in Taos, where they encounter Chinese colonists for the first time. I particularly liked the description of the strange energy of Taos - I'm about as un-spiritual as they come but I find the place oddly unsettling. They also hole up in Acoma for a siege. In the real world, Acoma Pueblo is a cliff dwelling that's been continuously occupied since well before Columbus, and would be as good a place as any to wait out a siege. I should point out that the breathless description of the ninja they encounter is one of the few things in the book which ages it poorly and marks it as a work of the eighties.

Tension builds as both the Chinese and Muslims discuss nameless troubles in the north, which turns out to be a Russian Khan and his horde that crossed the North Pacific and invaded from - not the soft underbelly, but the undefended top half of North America. What results is very much a recapitulation of Mongol sieges and brutality, but in the American heartland. (Among other towns, Taos is completely destroyed.) The Russian khan's ultimate goal is the conquest of the Aztec empire from which he can invade the settled parts of the continent, which would precipitate a kind of world war. Of course through a combination of cunning and luck, our hero is able to stop the invasion, and after recovering from the injuries he sustains in doing so, he migrates to Fusang.

For me, what really sets this apart from other alternate histories was the scoundrel protagonist's cynicism, insulting descriptions and occasional misleading narration. For instance, as he and his Hebrew companion are traveling up the Mississippi to their frontier outpost (and not helping with the work at all - remember, these are escaped slaves that people are tolerating!) the manager of the expedition has finally had it with their shiftlessness:

Ibrahim had discovered Yusuf and myself standing in the shade of a cypress tree, overseeing the work and occasionally calling out useful suggestions, and had delivered a lengthy and surprisingly emotional speech in which he listed various discrepancies and points of dissatisfaction with our general performance to date. It worried me to see a man his age and weight get so worked up in that hot climate.

The Irishman abounds with politically incorrect observations of the many people he meets, although usually not without self deprecation. Even the people in whose colony he finds himself are not safe:

Arabs, on the whole, are an amazingly mendacious people; they will lie even when the truth would serve their purposes better, and show no shame even when caught at it. Among themselves this does not harm, since they never believe each other anyway; but it can be annoying for a man brought up in a scrupulously truthful country such as Ireland.

And near the end of the novel in Fusang, the protagonist and his sidekick, having made the acquaintance of a member of a shady Fusang organization, are recommended to one of the city's underground bosses, who deals with them thus:

He said, "Lu Hsu says you wish to work for us. He says," he said, rattling the letter, "that you are a pair of liars, cheats, seducers, and thieves, and cold-blooded killers if need be. He says that one of you would steal a hot stove and the other would sell it to a man dying of sunstroke. He says only a fool would trust either of you within a thousand li of his cash box, his stable, or his wife, and that even for Europeans you have set new marks in treachery, fraud, and deceit. Gentlemen," he cried warmly, "I have never seen a finer letter of reference. I am prepared to offer you immediate employment, early promotion, and full benefits."

In short, the book works as a historical thought experiment about the impact of Europe on North American cultures, the protagonist is hilarious, and it's a solid adventure novel to boot. Highly recommended.


Part II: Problems of Alternate History, and of Mongols-Conquered-Europe Stories Specifically

There are really three main problems (or assumptions) that alternate history novels have to address to succeed, and this novel is an excellent vehicle for exploring them. But it's useful to compare to three other alternate history novels, because you'll see some repeated motifs.

Book, Author	Branchpoint and Changes
Lion's Blood, Stephen Barnes	Hannibal defeats Rome; North America colonized by Egypt in north and Ethiopia in south using European slaves, with Aztecs getting guns and flourishing
Conquistador, S.M. Stirling	Alexander the Great does not die young; Europe and Middle East merge into millennia-long superstate, scientific progress retarded
Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson	Black Plague kills all Europeans; Americas settled by China and Islamic world, history becomes a struggle between the two
Journey to Fusang	Mongols conquer Europe , leaving it a backwater; Americas settled by China and Islamic world, with Aztecs getting guns and flourishing

Alternate History Problem #1: What is the point? Why would you read a book about a history that never happened? Do you just want to be shocked by strange people in familiar places (mosques in frontier-era Arkansas, and Native Americans named Muhammad Ten-Bears), or are you trying to isolate historical cause and effect (did Chinese and African colonization of North America only fail to occur because of European domination?) I couldn't shake the feeling that Sanders wanted a Mongol-like horde in the American plains just for the sake of it. Granted, a Mongol horde on the American prairie is kind of cool, but that could not have carried a whole novel. At the same time, even the shocking reversal of oppressors and slaves here or in Lion's Blood was clearly written in the service of a thought experiment. Was there something about various human cultures that predisposed one people to enslave, or be enslaved by, another? Or is this something we would've all done to each other given the chance, and it's all just random, and history really is just one damn thing after another? (These days we get very uncomfortable saying that one culture might somehow be "better" than another, but here's a fact: either culture has some impact on human flourishing, or it's meaningless background noise. There's no middle ground; we have to pick one of those, and being uncomfortable with the choice doesn't make it go away.)

Alternate History Problem #2: Is warfare really the only thing that makes a difference in history? Most alternate history is about what would have happened if some episode of mass violence had transpired differently. Is everything else we do really so meaningless? In the four novels cited here, the branchpoints for two out of four is a war, one out of four is a change in the life of someone who's famous because of war, and one is from a plague. What if the steam engine were developed earlier? What about antibiotics, or intensive agriculture, or monotheism, or electricity? (For example: why no Byzantine industrial revolution? People have asked the same question of China but it should count for something that China developed intensive agriculture, centralized state bureaucracy, literacy, paper money, and gunpowder, some of which happened after getting sacked by the Mongols.)

These questions are far from useless. Economists are constantly asking questions of how developing nations can improve themselves, which invariably become questions about why certain advances occurred certain places, and not elsewhere. You might argue that it's not the wars themselves where the future is set; that Sun Tzu was right, and the outcomes of battles are determined long before they begin, by the culture and technology of the countries that produce the armies. Case in point: a normally clear-thinking friend once asked me seriously about the possibility of Mexico having won the Mexican-American War. Once the American military of the day was fully engaged with its Mexican counterpart, there was no question of the outcome. One question at least implied by many alternate histories is the impact of culture and political situation on the advance of science. Conquistador assumes that a unified Greece-Egypt-Persia would have halted progress, where Robinson assumes it would have advanced essentially the same in the absence of Europeans, merely with name substitutions (qi for electricity for example.) (I would argue the contrary in both cases.)

And here we come to some of the problems specific to Mongols-conquering-Europe stories. It's assumed that a Mongol sack of Europe would have flattened the West and removed it from the world stage. No doubt it would have been an unpleasant time to live in Paris or Rome. But in China, a Mongol conquest is not alternate history. The town of Yamen, a coastal town two hours' driving time from the metropolis of Guangzhou, was the site of the last surrender (or suicide) of Song officials to Kublai Khan, who then established the heavily occupied and directly administered khanate. If you haven't noticed, China did not collapse into a permanent dark age. You could argue that without the Mongol conquest, China might today be even further ahead (maybe it's time for an alternate history where the Great Wall was a little higher and kept the Mongols out, and by 2017 China has colonized the solar system.) A further puzzle is this:  in two novels, Europe is eliminated as a serious contender for founder of global civilization (whether due to Mongols or plague), but automatically China and the Arab world - both also sacked by the Mongols! - end up colonizing the Americas.  Why?  Even in real history, there was nothing stopping the Chinese or Arabs from such voyages, and in fact the famous Chinese treasure fleet was sailing before Columbus, and less than two centuries after Kublai's conquest. It was not because of European oppression or Mongol depradations that they were brought home, but domestic Chinese politics. (Arguments for an age of discovery driven by the Islamic world are even more obscure; despite this, three of the four novels cited feature Arabs colonizing North America's Atlantic coast, with only two novels showing Chinese colonization from the Pacific.)

Finally, there seems a strange urge to describe an armed modern Aztec nation-state, flourishing unmolested by non-European colonial powers who give them guns. In both novels cited above that contain an armed modern Aztec nation-state, their colonizing neighbors came from the Islamic world. The Spanish were not famous for their tolerance of Aztecs or their culture, but it's absurd to argue that Islamic conquistadors would have been more progressive. On the other hand, I freely admit that Barnes's Aztec knights were extremely cool, almost like an alternate history answer to Niven's kzin. In Journey to Fusang, Yusuf describes Tenochtitlan thusly:

He sat down on a coil of rope. "How can I describe it to you? What's the biggest, finest city you've ever seen?"

"Tangier," I confessed. "By a great margin."

"Tanger?" He made a scornful snorting sound. "Tangier wouldn't make a minor suburb of Tenochtitlan. It's bigger than Rome or Constantinople or even Baghdad - why, there are independent kingdoms in Europe and Africa that cover less area than Tenochtitlan alone. And all of it laid out carefully with long straight streets, even canals in some parts like those of Venice, and market squares bigger than most European towns. Flowers growing everywhere, and the people looking so clean and well-fed, even the poor...and in the center, dominating the whole city from wherever you stand, that great pyramid, with its two temples on top - the blue one for Tlaloc the rain god, the red one for Huizilopochtli, he's the really nasty one - with a whole city-within-a-city of lesser temples and palaces clustered at its base. Finn, I've seen the ancient buildings of Greece and Rome and Egypt, and I'd put these people's work up against any of it.

"And then," he said, still in that quiet, almost toneless voice, "while you stand there trying to take it all in, trying to grasp the wonder and the beauty of it all, like St. John seeing the New Jerusalem - just then you glance across the street and see a priest striding along in his black cloak, face painted black, hair hanging to his knees and matted solid with years of accumulated dried blood, and the stink of rotting blood coming off him like a walking slaughterhouse - and then you remember, and you can't believe it, and yet there it is. The same people. How can it be?"

Note again: in the real world Baghdad was sacked quite badly by Hulagu Khan; while not today the center of global learning that it once was, it was hardly reduced to an irrelevant backwater.

A summary of the motifs across these novels:

Book, Author	Blacks Enslave Whites	Muslims Colonize Eastern N.Am.	China Colonizes Western N.Am.	Modern Aztecs w/ Guns	Back-ward Europe
Lion's Blood	X	X		X	X
Conquistador					X
Years of Rice and Salt		X	X		X
Journey to Fusang	X	X	X	X	X

Alternate History Problem #3: Balancing realism with entertainment. This is fiction. It can usefully explore ideas, but ultimately it has to be carried by a narrative, and if that is lost, the medium fails. If Hannibal had won the Second Punic War, the map of Europe (or whatever it would be called) would look completely different and be populated by people who looked and spoke and worshiped completely differently from how they do today. If a branchpoint is set long ago and still faithfully followed through, it would result in a world so bewildering and unfamiliar to us that its people would be uninteresting. Conquistador's branchpoint was Alexander's surviving his fever in Babylon, but Stirling mostly used that as a way to produce a mostly-empty North America to be settled from our timeline. Of the four novels here, Lion's Blood is the worst offender, but neither is Fusang innocent. In the case of Lion's Blood, there's a fourth century B.C. branchpoint, but Christ - the same Christ - is still born 250 years later, and founds the same religion? And Mohammed more than 800 years later? Of course, a modern world without Christianity or Islam would essentially be invented out of a whole cloth - so such a degree of honesty is inadvisable, unless it's directly relevant to your thought experiment; e.g., whether evangelical monotheism would still inevitably have appeared. Sanders peripherally mentions Shakespeare and Milton but has the good form at least to make their output different.

There is also the problem that people with a different viewpoint would not use the same names for the same places (obviously) or imbue them with the same significance. By putting cities in recognizable locales (the mouth of the Great River, or the hilly city by the bay) you can cheat to some degree. Rice and Salt opens with a Central Asian horseman riding alone through an oppressively silent city of white bone-like monuments under the moonlight, and ascends a hill to inspect the most prominent. Ignorant of European history as you would expect such a person to be, he can only describe it in terms of pure sense experience, and it takes a few pages before the reader realizes he is plodding through the Acropolis. I respect Robinson for this opening, because it risks the unobservant reader's missing the symbolism, but there's a substantial reward to the reader who recognizes the landmarks. (Many writers would have succumbed to the temptation of exposition, with the rider mumbling to himself "Well you know, these structures symbolize the foundational philosophy of this continent...")


Part III: Branchpoints Favored By the Academy

I compiled some stats for the Sidewise Awards. Uchronia's overall list would be a more accurate measure of what people are writing, but this is a better approximation to what people value. Order is by number of entries in category in the novel awards.




The distribution between short- and long-form is clearly different. Possibly, people are more likely to explore new territory in shorter form. Interestingly, from the novels, the post-WWII awards all went to stories set in the Kennedy or early Johnson administration - two of which are about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which terrifyingly could easily have gone differently, and not nearly as well. Also note that the short form pieces were more likely not about war or tragedy, with 5 of 21 titles being about some form of science or technology that developed differently (as opposed to 0 out of 21 of the novels.) Notably, of the ~42 titles I went through, there was a one triple winner author (Ian MacLeod), then two each for Stephen Baxter, Harry Turtledove, Chris Roberson, and William Sanders.

Also notable - the closest any of the branchpoints was to the release of a novel was about 50 years; for short stories, 38 years. Is that because if we don't wait a generation to write our alternate history - until all the stakeholders are dead or out of power - it's mere polemic?

Without the World Wars, Would the U.S. Have Played the Role of a Bigger Canada?

A good way to eclipse your economic competition is for their industrial centers to be flattened by wars twice, within a few decades, and for your own country to be on another continent entirely that is not directly involved in the war (excepting one attack). I've always been curious about the extent to which WWII could explain the eclipse of the UK's role as world police and bankers by the US. As I've traveled around the Commonwealth I can't help but imagine an alternative U.S.: a kinder, gentler, less exceptional Anglosphere nation that retained more of the isolationist flair of pre-WWII politics. If the Archduke had survived that summer day in 1914, and Europe had moved rationally and peacefully into an E.U. with Habsburgs...would not the U.K. have retained its economic, cultural and military dominance?

So I checked the numbers. Perhaps London would have remained the undisputed capital of the world for longer, but it's hard to ignore the already-evident economic trend that pre-dated the wars. In terms of the size of its economy (absolute GDP), the U.S. had already outgrown Britain by 1870. In terms of per capita income, the U.S. was neck and neck with the U.K. from shortly after the turn of the last cenutry until WWII, when it pulled away. The wars no doubt accelerated this process, in particular after WWII when there was an obvious incentive to move toward the American sphere and away from the Soviet, allowing international law and finance to move in discrete steps toward the U.S. But the underlying economic process was already underway. Now that China is eclipsing the U.S. as the absolute largest economy, we should expect that this process will repeat itself, particularly if the country escapes the middle income trap and the PCI of the interior rises as well.

What Do the Patterns in Alternate Histories Say About Us?

For the most recent alternate history (a Buddhist Colony in Ptolemy's Alexandria) go here. This post is also cross-posted to my speculative fiction blog.

Added later: information about why the border between post-Mexican-War Mexico ended up where it did, and what an alternate "lesser" Mexico would have been like if the border had ended up even further south - and what the American Civil War might have been like if Sonora, Coahuila, and Chihuahua had been absorbed and admitted as states.

Alternative histories have tended so far to be about events in European (or Western) history, because they're written mostly by European-descended people, and mostly by English-speakers at that.

But that's kind of obvious. So even forgetting the (so far) Western focus of what-if fiction, there are two clear patterns that betray some of our assumptions. And the first obvious pattern is: alternate histories are about violence transpiring differently. How many alternate histories involve policy decisions or inventions happening out of order? It's not usually: what if Newton and Leibniz had not developed calculus, or antibiotics had never been invented (or been invented in pre-Mongol-sack Baghdad)? No, the large majority of what we see are the effects of different outcomes of battles and wars. What if Hitler won, what if the North lost Gettysburg, what if Alexander or Jenghiz had not turned around at India and Austria. And this is depressing; because it means either that history is mostly determined by violence, or (even if it's not true) it means that we at least believe that history is mostly determined by violence.

Yes, there are a few stories about political decisions (what if the Ming had not called back the treasure fleets is a favorite) but it's really mostly about if people had killed and dominated each other in a different way.

You could also argue that what we see commercially is not an accurate reflection of our beliefs about history. It's the same answer for why in speculative fiction, dystopias far outnumber utopias. There's clear conflict and thus they're easier to write.

The test at Sitio Trinidad, 1845, Jornada de Muerte, Nueva Mexico. The test was witnessed by governor Manuel Armijo and president Santa Ana, both of whom lost their vision as a result. (It seems both fission and high speed cameras were developed in nineteenth century Mexico but not dark glasses, go figure.) Despite this setback, the dreaded bomba santabarbara was smuggled in wagons and assembled in Austin and San Antonio and led to the end of the decade-long revuelta tejana and ultimately, the conquest of Alto México (previously the "United States".) Sure it did.

The second pattern, or really observation that students of history can make about this sub-genre: even with battles won or lost differently, it's very hard to find believable changes that affect the outcomes. Sun Tzu was right, the battle usually is won or lost before it begins, and even if the tide on one battlefield had turned, the currents were running one direction or another. For example, so what if Lee won at Gettysburg? A big setback for the Union to be sure, but the Confederacy was screwed from the start in terms of their population and economy. To really get big changes, you have to make major shifts long before the obvious change - the kinds of changes that would have given the South a fighting chance would have had to begin many years before the actual war. Case in point: someone once asked me what might have happened if, in the Mexican War, the Mexican factions had unified against the U.S. as an external threat, and the U.S. lost its first major foreign war and gained no territory. (Or if the U.S. had decided to actually press its 54'40" claim.) A suddenly unified and organized 1840s Mexico is (unfortunately for patriotic Mexicans) only marginally easier to imagine than the first atomic bomb being engineered a hundred years early at Los Alamos by Mexican scientists. Such a story might actually make for some really interesting Latino steampunk fiction, but might as well also include unicorns.

If Africa Had Never Been Colonized

Go here for more alternate history; go here for more weird geography.

If Every U.S. State That Tried to Secede From Another State Became a State

It would look like this. I'm now living in Reagan (I might actually be if the current petition to divide California succeeds). As for the place of my birth, it didn't change names although the lower three counties succeeded in seceding and are now called Delaware. Jerks. (Full on alternate history here; cool alternate geography here, here or here.)

Pancho Villa's Death: Or, Parallel Histories in Different Languages

If you're here for the alternate history part, skip to the last two paragraphs. If you want "legitimate" alternate histories, here's the most recent one.

History often seems to have gone differently, when you read accounts of the same events in different languages, especially (obviously) when the people who speak these languages are on opposite sides of the events in question. Even on Wikipedia the differences between articles are often striking. A shining example is the article about Pancho Villa, and in particular the section about his death, in Spanish and English. In particular, the less a detail supports national identity, the more likely it is to be glossed over (how many Japanese can talk in detail about Pearl Harbor; how many Americans can talk about the causal events of the War of 1812 or the Mexican War?) Do note in the English version (later) Villa's self-conscious and self-referential last words, among the best in history. But first, the Spanish version:

Álvaro Obregón became president of Mexico and when he had consolidated his position, he promoted and openly tolerated some plans to rid himself of Pancho Villa. During Huerta's rebellion that sought to prevent the imposition of General Calles, fearing that Pancho Villa again took up arms, he decided to kill Villa.

Villa was assassinated in an ambush on the afternoon of July 20, 1923 on his way to a family party in Parral. Calles asked Col. Lara to carry out the killings, and as a result, he was promoted to general and received fifty thousand dollars. No doubt American elements intervened in the elimination of Villa.

Neither did they let Pancho Villa rest at death. They beheaded his desecrated corpse and local helpers intervened with necrophilia, and the American Handal was paid five thousand dollars by the king of the American press Hearst for Villa's head, changed into a gruesome trophy.

From freedomarchives.org

Somehow the necrophilia and Hearst head-collecting are missing from the English version, which is a lot heavier on the type of mundane and sordid details that often turn out to explain much of history:

On Friday, 20 July 1923, Villa was killed while visiting Parral. Usually accompanied by his entourage of Dorados (his bodyguards) Pancho Villa frequently made trips from his ranch to Parral for banking and other errands. This day, however, Villa had gone into the town without them, taking only a few associates with him. He went to pick up a consignment of gold from the local bank with which to pay his Canutillo ranch staff. While driving back through the city in his black 1919 Dodge roadster, Villa passed by a school and a pumpkinseed vendor ran toward Villa's car and shouted "Viva Villa!" - a signal for a group of seven riflemen who then appeared in the middle of the road and fired over 40 shots into the automobile. In the fusillade of shots, nine Dumdum bullets hit Villa in the head and upper chest, killing him instantly.

One of Villa's bodyguards, Ramon Contreras, was also badly wounded but managed to kill at least one of the assassins before he escaped; he would be the only person who accompanied Villa during this assassination who survived. Two other bodyguards, Claro Huertado and Villa's main personal bodyguard Rafael Madreno, who were with him also died, as did his personal secretary Daniel Tamayo and his high-ranking Colonel Miguel Trillo, who served as his chauffeur. Villa is sometimes reported to have died saying: "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something." However, there is no contemporary evidence he survived his shooting even momentarily, and his biographer, Katz, confirms that Villa died instantly; Time Magazine also reported in 1951 that both Villa and his aide (Tamayo) were killed instantly. The next day, Villa's funeral was held and thousands of his grieving supporters in Parral followed his casket to his burial site while Villa's men and his closest friends remained at the hacienda in the Canitullo armed and ready for an attack by the government troops. The six surviving assassins hid out in the desert and were soon captured, but only two of them served a few months in jail, and the rest were commissioned into the military.

...

While it has never been completely proven who was responsible for the assassination, most historians attribute Villa's death to a well planned conspiracy, most likely initiated by Plutarco Elías Calles and Joaquin Amaro with at least tacit approval of the then president of Mexico, Obregon. At the time, a state legislator from Durango, Jesus Salas Barraza, whom Villa once whipped during a quarrel over a woman, claimed sole responsibility for the plot. Barraza admitted that he told his friend Gabriel Chavez, who worked as a dealer for General Motors, that he would kill Villa if he were paid 50,000 pesos. Chavez, who wasn't wealthy and didn't have 50,000 pesos on hand, then collected money from enemies of Villa and managed to collect a total of 100,000 pesos for Barraza and his other co-conspirators. Barraza also admitted that he and his co-conspirators watched Villa's daily car-rides and paid the pumpkinseed vendor at the scene of Villa's assassination to shout "Viva Villa!" either once if Villa was sitting in the front part of the car or twice if he was sitting in the back.

Despite the fact that he did not want to have a sitting politician arrested, Obregon gave into the people's demands and had Barraza arrested. Barraza was originally sentenced to 20 years in prison, The following month, however, Barraza's sentence was commuted to three months by the Governor of Chihuahua; Barraza eventually became a colonel in the Mexican Army. In a letter to the governor of Durango, Jesus Castro, Barraza agreed to be the "fall guy" and the same arrangement is mentioned in letters exchanged between Castro and Amaro. Others involved in the conspiracy were Felix Lara, the commander of federal troops in Parral, who was paid 50,000 pesos by Calles to remove his soldiers and policemen from the town on the day of the assassination, and Meliton Lozoya, the former owner of Villa's hacienda whom Villa was demanding pay back funds he had embezzled. It was Lozoya who planned the details of the assassination and found the men who carried it out. It was reported that before Barraza died of a stroke in his Mexico City home in 1951, his last words were "I'm not a murderer. I rid humanity of a monster."

Here's something you might not have known: that at the time he died, Villa had intentions of running for president of Mexico, or attaining the office by other means. Just imagine how just and peaceful a Villa administration would have been! And think also of all the people who said that with a time machine they would go back and kill Hitler (a unique take on that here). Maybe Barraza was a time traveler, but instead wiped out someone who was even worse than Hitler - that is to say, in the future Barraza came from, he wiped out someone who had been even worse, but in the future we're now living in, was eliminated. The question is, once you go back in time and successfully kill the genocidal dictator before they ever do their thing, and you survive - then what? Try to convince everyone that actually, you're from the future and this guy you murdered was going to turn out to be absolute evil? Or just keep things down to a dull roar and enjoy your life in an increasingly divergent alternate history, and maybe mention it in passing later in life? In any event I recommend we check Barraza's later bets and stock picks for uncanny accuracy.

Strange But True Naval Battles

It turns out that Japan was not the only place the Yuan Mongol Navy lost (more here); but perhaps even stranger than that, there was a World War I battle between the British and German navies - off the coast of a Chilean island in the Pacific. This was the mechanism through which British naval advantage erased the late-starting German ambitions in the Pacific and East Asia. (The U.S. and German navies had almost come to blows in Samoa several decades before, during the Samoan Civil War.)

More familiar to Americans, there was also a battle between Union and Confederate vessels off the coast of France.

European Invaders from the Future

For the previous Alternative History installment (#5) go here.

Gregory Cochran asks an alternative history favorite question: what period of Old World history did the New World civilizations correspond to at time of contact? Cochran's answer: about 2,400 BCE. In his estimation, Europeans were effectively invaders from the far future.



Above: the pyramid of Cheops, ca. 2560 BCE. Below: the great pyramid at Teotihuacan just outside Mexico City, built ca. 200 CE.

Colonial Japan: Alternate History #5

For the previous installment, check out Alternate History #4, Colonial Megafauna.

For the next instalment, check out Alternate History #6, A Buddhist Colony in Ptolemy's Alexandria.

The Pieties, 2012.

Why does anyone care about alternative history? Why does it matter? Of course it's fun to be an imaginary tourist, and see what Buddhist Africa would look like. But more importantly, we care because the world is a small enough place that coincidences have consequences, and world history is always local history somewhere. There is a quiet little town in the Greek countryside that used to be called Sparta; there is a field in Shropshire where a boy named Charles developed his love of nature by collecting beetles; and furthermore reading biographies, it's most rewarding to find out everyone who came before us was just a mortal mammal. Can you be sure that there won't be people or events where you're sitting right now with macrohistorical echoes? Would a meteor hitting your town have more or less impact than one in the New Guinea Highlands, or downtown Seoul? There are places around the world that haven't yet mattered that much to everyone else. Japan is not one of them or I wouldn't have written a post about it.

So we care because coincidences have consequences - but to care, those consequences have to effect a world that we recognize - unlike much of the last post, where the description of the change's consequences are abbreviated for this very reason. And that's a second question in alternative history, that if the change is far enough back, it would necessarily create a planet so bizarre to us that it might as well be made from whole cloth. (Hence the framing of the Homo erectus nation in this post as isolated in Australia - sorry Aussies.) If I were to pick a novel where this problem was best demonstrated it would be Lion's Blood (and its sequel Zulu Heart) by Stephen Barnes, where the the change began with Socrates, twenty-five centuries ago. And still we get Christianity and Islam! (The same people with the same names would still be getting born a thousand years after the change? What, fate doesn't apply to historical events but somehow still applies to which sperm and eggs meet each other?) I'd wager Barnes would say that yes he knows things would have been a lot more different than that, but then people would be less invested in the stories.

Alexander the Great's conquest is another favorite place to change history. In S.M. Stirling's Conquistador, Alexandros o Megas survives his fever in Babylon and lives to a ripe old age, becoming a god-king and binding together east and west Eurasia "before their time"; apparently this religio-political cult retards progress so that when people from our timeline enter "modern-day" California in the other timeline, it's still populated solely by Native Americans. Expanding on Alexandrian divergences, I've always wanted a story where a time traveler with a poor grasp of history travels to early 3rd century B.C. China, not noticing anything amiss - until he is granted an audience with the emperor and finds himself before an old white man with thinning blonde hair. Alexander rallied his troops at the Indus and then passed through Bengal and Burma to strike at the heart of China - right in the middle of the Warring States period, just like Pizarro wandered into Peru at exactly the right time in Inca history, after a protracted civil war. I wager Alexander would have taken one look at Chinese culture and "gone native" far more than he ever did in Egypt or Babylon.

You'll notice a pattern in the last two versions of "What if things had gone differently in relations between Europeans and the rest of the world?" The most common way this question is put in alternative histories is what-ifs about the Mongol invasions of Eurasia. The Mongols were just the last of what were many pulses out of the central Eurasian steppes, which are called either migrations or invasions depending on whether your ancestors were already settled when then next one came. Those migrations began earlier with several waves of Indo-Europeans (Celts, then the centum-speaking Mediterranean settlers and proto-Germanic speakers, and then satem-speaking Slavs), followed by waves of Altaic-speakers (Huns, then Turks and Mongols.) As time went on the nomads had to become successively better organized to defeat the agriculturalists they encountered, and the Mongols were the last hurrah. The economics (and technology, and population numbers) of non-nomadism finally favored the cities by the Middle Ages. Hence today Poles and Chinese no longer have to worry about waking up tomorrow with, say, Kazakh armies ravaging their cities.
(Of note: outside Asia, the nomads lasted longer. By adopting modern weapons, the Comanches arguably hold the title of "last nomads to wreck agriculturalists", in early nineteenth-century northern Mexico.)
Which finally brings us to the alternative history in the title. Focusing on Alexander or the Mongols (or even the spread of the Plague as Kim Stanely Robinson did in the outstanding Years of Rice and Salt) assumes that the important contacts between East and West Eurasia was mediated over land - and beginning in the age of discovery, this was no longer the case. When European ships began pushing trade routes up coastal East Asia, Japan was in the throes of civil wars that ended up unifying it under the Tokugawa shoguns at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Interestingly, the Western export of which the shoguns became most wary was not guns or printed books, but Christianity. Having seen what was happening in the Philippines - that the Spanish used the conversion of locals to Catholicism to advance their political interests - local daimyos became increasingly hostile to Christians, beginning in earnest with a massacre in Nagasaki at the end of the sixteenth century. Without accurate records it is difficult to estimate today how many converts had been made and how many were killed in the persecutions that followed but many estimates run into the hundreds of thousands; in case the converts hadn't taken the hint, Christianity was formally outlawed in 1632.

The first shogun unified Japan in 1603, and a few years later the second sent a Spanish-style galleon to make the daunting voyage across the Pacific, to Mexico. (Yes, that already seems like alternative history! More on this here, in the list of links.) Mystifyingly to modern minds, the Japanese government chose not to continue its new naval activities. The second shogun, Hidetada, began limiting contact with the West but it was the third, Iemitsu, who not only formally outlawed Christianity, but closed Japan to the outside world. Again, to modern classical liberal minds this seems stupid and/or cruel, but from the standpoint of a rationally self-interested dictator, there are two things you don't want: contact with the outside world, and the opportunity for subjects to enrich themselves. Foreign trade necessarily meant both, and though he didn't realize it, Iemitsu's point was already proven by European history: in the late Middle Ages foreign trade after the Crusades ultimately brought an end to the Church's monopoly on power in the northern half of Europe. Economic growth is an unquestioned end in a democracy but seems positively dangerous to a tyrant who thinks only in terms of self-preservation, and in those days no one yet grasped the link between advancing economies and advancing military technology. One thing that is inescapably obvious about the Tokugawa shoguns is their extremely clear-thinking and unsentimental focus on preserving their power.

Bolstering Iemitsu's case, the history of economic development in Asia right down to the present day provides excellent, if redundant, arguments against colonization. What were the two countries in Asia that were not colonized? Japan and Thailand, both of which have been very successful relative to neighbors. Interestingly, Thailand had a similar dalliance with a growing European footprint in the seventeenth century, until the king threw them out of his court.


What if the Third Tokugawa Shogun Had Not Been So Suspicious?

What might have happened if the third Tokugawa shogun had been less paranoid, and remained open to foreign influence? Catholic and Spanish influence would have continued unabated, and it's difficult to argue that Iemitsu's fears were not justified; Japan would likely have become a colony like the Philippines, although with a centralized government this would eventually have led to large war between colonizers and the central government. In actual history, the Japanese permitted the Dutch (the Dutch East India Company) limited contact from an island near Nagasaki, although if the Spanish had still been present in the same numbers it's unlikely such an arrangement would have continued. The Dutch even tried to militarily dislodge the Spanish elsewhere in the Pacific, from Manila, but failed; maybe they would have tried and succeeded in Japan?

Here's how things might have gone if things went differently in Japan, in terms of macrohistorical importance. I think we'd see the biggest impact in three areas: 1) those events having to do with early-to-mid 20th century China, 2) most obviously, with World War II (there would only have been one real Axis power) and 3) with the development of technology in the twentieth century. Of course the Japonisme influence in art in the nineteenth century would not have happened, because Japanese civilization would not have had the good fortune to touch European civilization at a time when Europeans put any value on the exotic, non-Christian world.


1613 - the Pietish galleon San Buena Ventura returns from Mexico with Spanish priests to minister to the growing Japanese Christian population, and a military escort with several garrisons-worth of Spanish troops for "protection" of the Pietish military chief (the "chogan"); persecution of Pietish Catholics in Cuchu ceases.

1623 - the Dutch East India Company begins building forts along the bay near what the natives called Edo; this would later become New Rotterdam. The following year a small Spanish fleet attempts to enter the bay and is repulsed by the Dutch. Spanish appeals to the Pietish chief are ignored.

1630 - the Dutch found the New Hague on the site of old Zendij in the north. The Spanish found colonies on the west coast of Greater Piety; by this point there are Spanish towns throughout the two Minor Pieties (there is a campaign to restore the native names, Cuchu and Chicocu).

1644 - attempted rebellion by now-majority-Christian Nacasaqui chief against the central chief in New Rotterdam, with surrepetitious Spanish help. The revolt is crushed with Dutch help.


A traditional Pietish dancer. (Here's who it is really, and guess why I picked her.)

1670-1677 - the Spanish conquest of the Pieties (named after previous Spanish king Philip the Pious). With Spanish help boats and warriors from the Lesser Pieties revolt against the central chiefs, and in three years have taken most of the west coast of Greater Piety and the east coast up to the Chubu region. The native chief in their head village of Choto is killed and the military chief in New Rotterdam is exiled. Spain now administers all but the northeast quarter of the Pieties.


The Virgin of Sasebo. A native in the hills of Cuchu claimed to have found it on the paper wall of his hut after a flash of light at dawn on New Years Day.

1787 - Vladimir Tartarov maps Alexander Island, to the north of Great Piety, and returns two years later to build the fort that would become Alexandrograd. This was the first of three, the first two of which were destroyed by the Emitchee natives.


River mouth, Alexander Island. The island became very popular with British hunters and since the detente tourism from Americans has increased. (Really, Sakhalin.)

1799 - the brief Battle of Black Strait between a British survey ship and two Russian vessels. This was the ship that later brought George Granville to Olivertown in British Columbia.

1867 - Alexander Island almost becomes American territory, along with Russian America (the far-northern area between the Yukon and the Bering Strait) in a purchase transaction between American Secretary of State Seward and the Russian Empire. Discussions called off; President Fremont decides territories could not be realistically defended against the British.

1879 - French-educated Jesuit priest Carlos Nacallama begins the "Cherry Blossom" revolt against Spanish colonial authorities. He is eventually captured and executed, but revolts continue in springtime for two decades.


Carlos Nacallama, ca. 1883. Really, philosopher Kitaro Nishida.

1898 - The Spanish Pieties come into American possession along with the Philippines at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. The underdeveloped northeast ("Free Piety") remains officially not part of the territory; the Dutch only retain official claim to New Rotterdam and New Hague.

1926 - The Soviet invasion of Korea begins the Russo-Korean War.

1938 - Taking advantage of the Chinese Civil War, Soviet forces invade China.

1939 - Germany invades Poland. The USSR declares war on Germany. The nominally neutral U.S. begins to sell weapons to Germany to distract the Soviets from their campaigns in the Orient.

1941 - U.S. takes Free Piety, pays Netherlands a nominal fee. This is condemned by non-German Europe but war is not declared.

1943 - The end of the German War in Europe means that Soviet forces can focus fully on East Asia. The British-Soviet alliance divides China into north and south, and quickly ends American ambitions elsewhere in Asia or the Pacific.


The Old Dutch Church in New Rotterdam.

1977 - Sustainable nuclear fission developed by Esteban Curosaqui, a Pietish physicist working in England.

1988 - After a decade of detente between the U.S. and the Commonwealth-Soviet Alliance, the U.S. grants official home-rule in the Pieties, but U.S. military bases remain in Santa Fausta and Nacasaqui despite protests. Still-developing Pietish economy based on agriculture and tourism; some Pietish scientists trained in the U.S.

1992 - First semiconductors developed.

2012 - economic outlook for Pietish economy considered positive. U.S., Korea and China are moving unskilled manufacturing to the Pieties, especially printing, textiles and heavy industry.

Thanks to Motoo for corrections and further insights.