well, my thinking was that there would be 4 things:
1. A large proportion of the income of the in-crowd around the dynasty coming from coastal shipping, mercantile endeavors farther afield and East Indie plantations.
2. Ongoing competition with Europeans (Portuguese and Dutch at first) over...
If you release him to take Fukien in hand, then he is no longer in your custody. Keeping hostages only somewhat ameliorates this. Moreover, it wasn't just Zhu Chenggong, but also many of his uncles who rejected Zheng's capitulation. He seems to have thought that surrendering himself into Qing...
Yeah, but they reneged only after Zhu Chenggong renounced his father's capitulation. I suppose a POD in which Zheng is given Fujian and a free hand to bring his son into the fold despite Koxinga's continued defiance is possible, but frankly I find this less plausible (since it requires the Qing...
The germ of an idea:
When Zheng Zhidong defects to the Qing in 1646, Koxinga's filial duty compels him to grudgingly accept his father's decision. Zheng is made a Feudatory and is awarded with control of Fukien (and possibly even Zhejiang), as well as extensive trading privileges throughout the...
Presumably, because:
a. Prussia was an historical ally (and protestant. that still meant something)
b. They wanted to avoid a situation where Prussian would collaborate with France against Austria
That's essentially the issue. While the outcome outlined by EMT would fit the bill in form of creating a fairly stable division of Germany/Central Europe, the question is: who will have the incentive to push it through? I think the unhappiness of the German princes is a given, but that is not so...
The Rhineland was, as you say, not viewed as particularly valuable at the time.
I quite agree that Britain wanted to put Prussia on the front lines versus France- but I would equally argue that that was not somewhere Prussia's rulers wanted to be. Their instinct following the Napoleonic wars...
It is often overlooked just how much the modern map of Europe owes to the decisions made in Vienna in 1815, and how much the continent was in flux. Napoleon had just been defeated, but would make a comeback to Paris before the agreement was finalized. Much of the changes were being decided on...
I think the pre-1914 situation provides a rough template. for the sake of argument/modelling assume a rise in overall immigration pressure as agricultural societies in SOuthern and Eastern Europe hit a hard land-to-farmer ratio, with the cities and industrial sector not growing fast enough to...
I'm considering finally wrapping up a defunct TL in which WWI, the bolshevik revolution and WWII are all averted, and the U.S stays out of any of the more localized conflicts which occur in the Eastern Hemisphere up to the 1970s. Furthermore, persecution of Jews in Tsarist Russia is somewhat...
Why the blazes does SOuth Africa need nukes? Australia presumably as insurance against Japan, and Canada against the U.S, but SA has no potentially dangerous neighbors other than its own nonwhite population - and I guess that won't be much of an issue TTL until much later (and obviously, no...
OTL, much of the atomic talent which participated in Project Manhatan, Tube Alloys and the misbegotten Nazi hydra of a nuclear project came from the ruins of the Habsburg Empire. Got to wonder how the concentration of talent, let alone transuranic production, in AH will influence Austro-German...
OTL underage cantonists were supposadely released back to their families in 1856-1857, but I imagine that even in OTL 14 year old cantonists would have been considered borderline, that some of any age slipped through the cracks, and that this would have been especially true for those stationed...
I like this very much - but OTL, the cantonist system was abolished by Alexander II (or rather Milyutin and his reformers) in the aftermath of the Crimean War. Of course OTL Alaska was sold to the USA following post Crimean War Russian strategic re-entrenchment. So I suppose an averted CW could...