Alternate History What PoDs Would Create An Unrecognizable World?

[The Unicorn]

Another good PoD: Not super-radical relative to the other PoDs, but still pretty radical by 20th century standards: Having Vladimir Lenin die or be assassinated sometime before 1917.

Actually I doubt that would have much if any effect. Lenin was one of several competent leaders of the Communist movement in Russia if he wasn't there to step forward one of the others would have, and while whoever replaces him might not be as competent as Lenin was, the difference wouldn't be all that great overall, and may even turn out that his replacement is better in some respects.

 

[Atarlost]

Y'all are thinking small.

Theia misses. Now you can't even recognize the continental outlines.

 

[Zyobot]

All of them. Any significant divergence would create a nearly unrecognizable world. We almost always explore the immediate aftermath of POD because the changes rapidly mount up. Take for example the American revolution, it not happening means in the short term Britain has a lot more power, but it doesn't make the social stresses disappear, it does mean they'll express themselves differently and with different political setups the French revolution and the Napolianic wars won't happen which will lead to further political divergence and different development of military technology.

By unrecognizable, I mean a totally alien set of languages, cultures, national identities, and ways of life developing that OTL observers wouldn't understand at all. At least in your example, Britain and France would still be somewhat identifiable as such, if clearly not the same as their OTL counterparts. That, I'd think that an 'Al Gore wins in 2000' TL would be way more recognizable to us than a 'Julius Caesar avoids assassination' TL, for example.

Having said that, the butterflies released by even recent PoDs would multiply over time to the extent where, about a thousand years later, the ATL world could seem totally bizarre and outlandish to an OTL observer. No Covid-19 leading to an exceedingly different history after a few dozen generations pass, for instance? That could very well be!

 

[The Unicorn]

By unrecognizable, I mean a totally alien set of languages, cultures, national identities, and ways of life developing that OTL observers wouldn't understand at all.

Culture and national identity might take a couple of centuries, languages would take longer, but my basic point remains the same - any divergence will, over time result in a completely unrecognizable society but none will produce that immediately.

 

[Zyobot]

Culture and national identity might take a couple of centuries, languages would take longer, but my basic point remains the same - any divergence will, over time result in a completely unrecognizable society but none will produce that immediately.

Which I agreed with in the second half of my post.

To clarify my OP, what I’m mainly concerned about is how recognizable (or unrecognizable) the ATL universes would be to OTL observers living in ~2022. Not so much OTL observers a hundred, a thousand, or a hundred-thousand years from now. (Granted, I suppose there will be many PoDs that are recent and small potatoes to us that’d be monumental divergences for them.)

 

[The Unicorn]

Which I agreed with in the second half of my post.

To clarify my OP, what I’m mainly concerned about is how recognizable (or unrecognizable) the ATL universes would be to OTL observers living in ~2022. Not so much OTL observers a hundred, a thousand, or a hundred-thousand years from now. (Granted, I suppose there will be many PoDs that are recent and small potatoes to us that’d be monumental divergences for them.)

And my point is that the OP could be summed up better as "Anyone have ideas for TL with a POD before the 18th century?"

 

[Zyobot]

And my point is that the OP could be summed up better as "Anyone have ideas for TL with a POD before the 18th century?"

Look, let’s not argue over this, okay? I’d like to return to the discussion at hand without nitpicking over semantics.

Thanks.

 

[Zyobot]

Anyhow, maybe a 'Song Dynasty Industrializes' TL would qualify? Even if Europe still retains the cultural and philosophical bedrock it first developed in Classical times, as @Skallagrim opines, it'd still be buried under many, many counterfactual layers that didn't materialize IOTL.

 

[Skallagrim]

Anyhow, maybe a 'Song Dynasty Industrializes' TL would qualify? Even if Europe still retains the cultural and philosophical bedrock it first developed in Classical times, as @Skallagrim opines, it'd still be buried under many, many counterfactual layers that didn't materialize IOTL.

You're still talking about a POD around c. AD 1000. By that time, the various nations of Europe are generally recognisable to our modern eyes. Causal effects from the industrialisation in China will not realistically arrive in time to alter the critical phase of Christianity around that time, so we may expect the Crusades to happen as we know them to have happened, and we may expect the scholastic revolution in intellectual matters to occur on schedule. So Europe is, for some time at least, going to go forward as we'd expect it to.

After all, Chinese industrialisation isn't to happen overnight. The Song dynasty is, qua development, more akin to late mediaeval or renaissance Europe than to 18th century Europe. Developing towards true industrialisation will be a process of centuries, with the big effect being that it's far enough along to beat back the Mongols when the time comes. But after that, it'll still be some 200 years at least before China could realistically be truly industrialising in the way that Europe did in the 18th century.

This means China in the period 1600-1900 could plausibly be on the rough developmental level of OTL Europe in the period 1700-present.

In OTL, the Europeans traveled to China and found a civilisation that had been ahead of Europe for all of known history, but which the Europeans -- by chance or providence -- had recently overtaken, developmentally. And the Europeans kept up the quick development, while China lagged behind. This led to an era of humiliation for China.

In the ATL, there are two options.

Possibly, Europeans travel to China and encounter a civilisation that's still a century ahead of them. China is also in the midst of rapid development, and its technological "edge" in relation to Europe will only increase over the coming period. A China like his may still retain its aversion to overseas exploration and settlement. It will presumably expand to subdue Japan, Mongolia, Manchuria and the (OTL) Russian Far East, as well as Indochina. But unless Chinese attitudes change dramatically, that would be about it. This giant Chinese realm could be autarkic, and would be a world unto itself. They would avoid contact with the inferior barbarians. So the big effect on Europe would be "no access to East Asia, there's a giant superpower there and they want us to stay out".

Alternatively, China turns towards exploration as it continues to develop technologically. The Song dynasty was already terminal by the time the Mongols invaded in OTL. Even with proto-industrialisation that allows the ATL Song to beat back the Mongols, I still see China fracturing shortly thereafter. Presumably, the subsequent period of division and competing states would actually be good for technological advances. This period would be comparable to Europe in the period 1500-1700, and may well involve a lot of colonialism, just as this period did for OTL Europe. This would in OTL have been the age of Zheng He, but in the ATL, there would be no court bureaucrats to screw over men like him.

Europe would still be far away, and would be relatively close to China itself qua technology. In fact, the situation would be reversed compared to OTL. Instead of European explorers arriving in China, it would be the other way around!

Without the Mongol "interruption of history", I'd expect China to fall back together again around 1600. Just in time for the new Emperor to preside over a true industrial revolution. If the new universal empire sweeps up the colonies of its constituent states (which I expect it would), it instantly turns into the most powerful empire in all of history. Around 1750, with a tech level akin to the West in OTL 1850, it ultimately forces its will on the squabbling states of Europe. The islands of Britain are forced to accept Chinese trade via gunboat diplomacy, and unequal treaties are imposed on France and other continental nations.

The world now belongs to China.

Yes, I'd say that if things go that way, the world would be fairly unrecognisable by the present day. (Compared to our on-the-ground experience, at least. It would still be a relatively slight difference from OTL when compared, from a bird's-eye view, to way more drastic PODs thousands of years back.)

 

[Agent23]

Imperial Russia opts for less executions and internal exile and more external exile and property seizure where some troublemakers, like one Aleksandr Ulyanov, are concerned.
Exile would also impact the relatives of the perpetrators, not just themselves, with all of them being rendered penniless and shipped off to the Americas or some British colony.

 

[Zyobot]

Thanks for the write up.

With regard to your last paragraph:

Yes, I'd say that if things go that way, the world would be fairly unrecognisable by the present day. (Compared to our on-the-ground experience, at least. It would still be a relatively slight difference from OTL when compared, from a bird's-eye view, to way more drastic PODs thousands of years back.)

I don't suppose you have some ideas as to the general trajectory that your "multiple centuries BCE" PoDs might take on? You've certainly proposed some interesting ones, but I'm wondering if you've thought more about their possible knock-on effects, centuries or millennia down the line.

 

[Skallagrim]

I don't suppose you have some ideas as to the general trajectory that your "multiple centuries BCE" PoDs might take on? You've certainly proposed some interesting ones, but I'm wondering if you've thought more about their possible knock-on effects, centuries or millennia down the line.

As far as my sugestions in this thread go:

There's little I can say about a world where Homo Neanderthalensis survives instead of Homo Sapiens. Increasingly greater understanding of the Neaderthals has, by now, demonstrated quite clearly that they were not brutes and that they did not walk like stooped quasi-apes. They had art, they had rituals, they had ceremonies for the dead, and they seem to have had music (going by the remains of what is almost certainly a bone flute). Given time, I don't doubt they'd have ultimately developed civilisations. But what those would be like, we truly cannot say.

Indo-Europeans going East is generally taken (almost as a meme) to produce an ATL "China" populated by red-headed pyramid-builders who speak an Indo-European language with a lot of Sino-Tibetan influences mixed in. Generally speaking, I think looking towards India would give us a pretty good indication of how this would end up. (With Southern China standing in for Dravidian Southern India.) As for the effects on Europe of a distinct lack of horse-riding invaders from the steppe: Salvador79 wrote The Book of the Holy Mountain on AH.com and it's very much worth reading. I've commented in that thread, since I was still a member there at that time. So any quibbles I may have with some assumptions of the author can be read there. Regardless of any such quibbles, it was a fascinating read.

Killing off Abrahamic monotheism is actually pretty tricky to extrapolate, because there are multiple conflicting views on how much it actually influenced cults in neighbouring regions, and how early it may have started doing that. I think you're going to have a fairly recognisable world until you get to the Roman period (and I think you'd probably still get Romans, even with this POD). At that point, the earlier occupations of foreign empires would have had the same effect on the polytheistic ATL Jews that it had on the other OTL polytheistic Levantines. Their identity would have started to erode, slowly dissolving into the syncretic background of the Hellenistic period. So you'd get a world without the fierce Jewish rebellions against Roman rule, and without Christianity ever arising. I think you wouldn't get anything (proto-)gnostic, either, which in turn kills off a lot of Neo-Platonist and Hermeticist mysticism. We get no Manichaeism or Mandaeism, either. I still don't think traditional Greco-Roman religion is going to remain dominant (at least not un-altered). But I've just killed off a lot of the competition. Mithras could make it big in this ATL, if the cult's adherents can get rid of their cult-typical tendency towards exclusionism. For success, you must seek to draw in the masses!

This leaves the scenario where Alexander lives much longer and founds a lasting Empire that basically aborts our notion of Western civilisation by drawing the whole Mediterranean into a greater interaction sphere that is tied to Persia. The world South of the Alps, Carpathians and Black Sea is going to be fundamentally different from the one North of that boundary. And that is presumably not going to change for a very long time. I have many, many thoughts on this. But perhaps these are best saved for another occasion.

 

[WolfBear]

Actually I doubt that would have much if any effect. Lenin was one of several competent leaders of the Communist movement in Russia if he wasn't there to step forward one of the others would have, and while whoever replaces him might not be as competent as Lenin was, the difference wouldn't be all that great overall, and may even turn out that his replacement is better in some respects.

But even no Brest-Litovsk Treaty could make a giant difference here!

 

[The Unicorn]

But even no Brest-Litovsk Treaty could make a giant difference here!

Sure, my point is Lenin not being around would not significantly affect that.
For that matter it's quite likely that Lenin will be around if Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov died much before 1917, someone else will take the name if it wasn't in use .

 

[WolfBear]

Sure, my point is Lenin not being around would not significantly affect that.
For that matter it's quite likely that Lenin will be around if Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov died much before 1917, someone else will take the name if it wasn't in use .

I'm not sure that another Bolshevik leader would have actually agreed to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

 

[The Unicorn]

I'm not sure that another Bolshevik leader would have actually agreed to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

why not? The entire point of the revolution was that they were sick and tired of the War and wanted OUT at practically any price. The precise details of the agreement might vary, but I can't imagine any Bolshevik leader not signing a similar agreement.

 

[Skallagrim]

Why are you guys debating a frickin' 20th century POD in a thread dedicated to imagining ATL scenarios that produce worlds that would be truly unrecognisable and staggeringly alien to preset-day viewers from OTL?

Short of perhaps "massive nuclear exchange occurs during the Cold War", no 20th century PODs will achieve that.

 

[Earl]

Why are you guys debating a frickin' 20th century POD in a thread dedicated to imagining ATL scenarios that produce worlds that would be truly unrecognisable and staggeringly alien to preset-day viewers from OTL?

Short of perhaps "massive nuclear exchange occurs during the Cold War", no 20th century PODs will achieve that.

Even that would probably still leave stuff we could all recognize, I doubt people would just abandon their national loyalty over night and their would be remenants of the old world in every nook and cranny.

 

[Bassoe]

One I've been playing with is the idea that the oceans are full of aggressive megafauna out of mythology, your sea serpents and krakens and the like. This renders trans-oceanic travel a non-starter up until the invention of propulsion systems and weapons systems able to cope, well beyond the OTL age of exploration.

Why not just use poison? Megafauna needs a supporting ecology and humans have been able to kill that by accident since we had populations large enough to produce sewage runoff.

 

[WolfBear]

Actually I doubt that would have much if any effect. Lenin was one of several competent leaders of the Communist movement in Russia if he wasn't there to step forward one of the others would have, and while whoever replaces him might not be as competent as Lenin was, the difference wouldn't be all that great overall, and may even turn out that his replacement is better in some respects.

I don't know if there would have actually been an October/November Revolution in Russia in late 1917 without Lenin's single-handed level of determination to achieve it, though. Or whether the Reds would have actually still won the subsequent civil war in Russia in a scenario where this revolution still occurs.

I might have mentioned this earlier here, but a PoD with either a surviving Alexander the Great, no Jesus, or no Muhammad--or some combination of these figures--would be extraordinarily significant. You could also avoid conceiving the future Buddha, hence no Buddhism. Hinduism is harder to prevent because AFAIK it wasn't created by a single historical figure. And Daoism is sort of irrelevant outside of China, I think.