Alternative history, anyone?

[indianasmith]

If you liked HAMILTON: AN AMERICAN MUSICAL, or if you are just interested in Alexander Hamilton as a historical figure, this week's blog post is a special treat just for you - a short story that begins to answer the question: "What if . . . ?"




http://lewisliterarylair.blogspot.com/2017/05/interview-at-weehawken.html

[ER]

Sound as always, Mr. Smith!

[ER]

You know, I love alternative history, and have even written some myself. Probably enough for a small book. It's something I like to think about. Things like:

What if Henry VIII's and Catherine of Aragon's son had lived? (No English Reformation? No Elizabethan Age? No English colonization of North America? An extended Medieval period in England? The formal Catholic recognition of an English Rite Catholic Church, as nearly came to pass in the early 1500s? Maybe all or none of that.)

What if World War One had never been fought? (No Second World War, or maybe the First World War would have come later and been much like the 1939-1945 war as we know it. No Communism, or perhaps Communism arising in the west, maybe gradual democratization and a switch from absolute to constitutional monarchy in Europe. No Cold War as we knew it, or maybe an ongoing Cold War under a different name across Europe for half a century. Perhaps a weakening of European borders? Who knows.)

How would history have been changed had there never been a Black Death in the mid-14th century, or what if the plague had wiped out the majority of Europeans? (Surely some innovation would have come from such a large population, as Europe had reached by 1346 in our timeline. This population surge had created by the 1300s rather modern problems like a too abundant workforce, and even localized economic depressions that were "solved" by the sudden loss of no less than a third of the population----except in Poland, where the plague never struck, and no one is sure why.

Had there been no die off, surely a more recognizably "modern" economy would have generated in France and especially Italy, a century earlier than it did, meaning banking and capitalistic innovations might well have ended feudalism's last holdouts even sooner then happened in our own timeline, post-plague. The effect no massive die-off would have had on the Reformation is the most interesting question to me. How much of an underestimated role did the Black Death have in grandsiring the Reformation two centuries down the road? More than I think historians have been willing to admit.

And if Europe had died out, Islamic immigration would surely have filled the vaccuum, perhaps the way Kim Stanley Robinson speculated in The Years of Rice and Salt. A Europe under Islam would see the human race set back centuries, and I stand by that, despite the current exaggeration of Islamic contributions to science and the retention of literature in the second millennium, which somehow ignores Islam's propensity for wholesale destruction of what offended it: and much did.)

What if Islam had died with Mohammad? (Christianity would have remained the dominant force in North Africa and much of the Middle East, as it was for about three-hundred years previous to the Islamic ethnic cleansing and genocides of the jihadist 7th century. Zoroastrianism might've fared well too instead of seeing its followers mass murdered for not being peoples of the book, as would Buddhism in Afghanistan.)

What if bad movies had played in cinemas pre-1900s? (The human race would have been too preoccupied to reproduce: extinction within a century.)

I think about these things all the time, and (seems like he's on my mind today) have always enjoyed talking about them with my father, one of whose graduate degrees is in European history.

Good story again, Indy!

[Flangepart]

YOU!...are a very imaginative lady. Also- keep at it, Indy!