geopede

geopede t1_jatuzsg wrote

Germany might not exist if the divergence is in the 1860s, it wasn’t a country yet, and the combat in the Franco-Prussian war that led to a unified Germany was heavily influenced by observations of combat in the American civil war. If the war doesn’t happen or Prussia loses (France got wrecked in real life, largely due to a disparity in railroads and railroad blitz tactics), Germany doesn’t become a country.

Assuming it does form, Germany is probably the most interesting country, but not for anything having to do with nazism. If WW1 still happens but there’s no US, the Germans win, the Kaiser stays in power, communism never gets a foothold, and Germany becomes the dominant continental power around 1920.

As far as the others you mentioned:

Japan is powerful, so it’s probably safe to assume China is not powerful. Generally only one of those nations is a world power at a given time.

Spain most likely follows a similar trajectory to our timeline, but loses the Philippines to Japan instead of the United States. It remains a second rate European power, as it did in our timeline.

Middle East looks very different if WW1 doesn’t happen (because no Germany) or goes the other way. The Ottoman Empire probably manages to stick around for another few decades (it was crumbling, but the uprising couldn’t have happened without the war), meaning there’s a Muslim great power in the Middle East. This most likely means Israel never becomes a country, the Arabian peninsula stays a backwater, and the Middle East ends up a bipolar region, with the Ottomans as one power and an Anglo-backed Persia as the other.

The other European countries are impossible to predict without knowing whether Germany forms. If it does, Italy never develops fascism because Germany wins WW1 and communism never gets a foothold outside of Russia.

Most of the alternate world is dependent on whether Germany forms or not.

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geopede t1_jats8lc wrote

And also about all the viruses and bacteria likely brought back from a different world, 160 years on a divergent timeline is long enough for some nasty stuff to develop that we don’t have. It also sounds like the technology in that timeline is less advanced, so they likely still have smallpox and the like.

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