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Makemakean Does Various Graphical Things!

And I'm sure Nordic authorities don't take an absolute delight planting all kinds of fake stories all around Europe...

Wouldn't a Sikh be wearing a turban, though?
Strictly speaking it is only members of the Khalsa who have to wear turbans (and even then it's really 'they don't cut their hair' and a turban is the most obvious way to keep this in check), although this like many things has become confusingly associated with the entire Sikh religion (confused further by the idea that some argue that all Sikhs should be members of the Khalsa by definition).

(I had some good GCSE RE teachers)
 
Figured that now that I am on vacation, maybe I should get back to finishing that massive project with that master map for the Nordic Union Election of 1867:

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Took me forever to find the right borders of Finland and Norway vis-a-vis Russia, but I am finally satisfied with how it ended up.

Things that I eventually will have to get back to:

  • Stockholm: Stockholm still uses that crazy old electoral system from the Age of Liberty. In 1867, Stockholm has 12 MP, of whom 3 be elected by the City Magistrate, 2 be elected by the class of Grocers, 2 be elected of the class of Fabricants, 1 be elected of the Trading Societies, and 4 be elected of the Guilds.
  • Christiania (Oslo): The Norwegians have gone really hard for single-member districts, and their capital of Christiania is consequently divided up into no less than six electoral districts. Fortunately for me, I have access to very detailed information about the population figures in various parts of Christiania in the 19th century, so should be able to come up with plausible-looking constituencies.
  • Copenhagen: The most populous and most populously dense city in all on the Nordic Empire, Copenhagen has no less than 17 MPs. As in OTL, the Danes are experimenting with something very similar to STV, and whereas the rest of Denmark uses FPTP in single-member constituencies, Finance President Edvard Cohen-Brandes has managed to persuade Conseil President Nicolas Andersen to use this novel electoral system in the Danish capital. Andersen was admittedly first confused, and then just bored when Cohen-Brandes tried to explain the mathematics of the whole thing and how it would lead to "fairer results", and was about to fall asleep, but Cohen-Brandes managed to win the day when he (almost as an after-thought) remarked that with this system they need only to divide Copenhagen into three electoral districts. This suddenly appealed to Andersen, who has long since found the old constituency boundaries in Copenhagen to be distasteful in that they go against the principle that a constituency is supposed to represent a community ("One man votes in one constituency, his neighbour might vote in another, the baker they buy their bread from might cast his ballot in a third, and when they go to church on Sunday, all three of them walk over into a fourth constituency!"), and has always been deeply suspicious of how easy they are to gerrymander ("They give an absurd amount of power to the census-takers and the map-makers!") and was brought onboard. When Nicolas Andersen made his views known, pretty much all of Radikale Højre followed him.
  • The Union County of Gothenburg: The Union County of Gothenburg does not differentiate between urban and rural-dwellers, and have settled for the single non-transferable vote, which greatly appeals to the clientel politicians of the place.
  • Åbo/Turku: The capital of the Grand Principality of Finland (which in the Kalmar Conferences were granted full country-status, like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway already had), has a mere 2 MPs, and uses the single non-transferable vote. A linguistically very divided city, the Finnish-speakers tend to vote Cap and the Swedish-speakers tend to vote Hat. Consequently, what with the numbers of Finnish-speakers and Swedish-speakers being comparable, it would seem reasonable if we end up with one Hat and one Cap. And how does the situation look? Well, it seems the Hats have gotten their game in order, and only nominated two candidates, both Swedish-speakers. Fair enough. And the Caps...? They have of course had a falling out between their Finnish-speaking wing and their Swedish-speaking wing and so no less than four candidates are running under the Cap banner. Ah.
 
Okay, so thanks to @Ares96 's kind help, there the administrative divisions of Norway are done:

path841.png

I have the vector map of the borders and constituencies for Slesvig-Holsten-Lauenborg on my old computer back in Sweden, and I think I will do the Danish administrative units, the amts, at the same time as I do the constituencies in Denmark. And yes, I also will have to divide Scania into Malmö and Kristianstad counties respectively.

But other than that, I feel I can now safely begin the nitty gritty of the actual constituencies. I have no idea how @Ares96 is able to pump out his maps as fast as he does. For comparison, here is his final map:

FinalFinalFinalMaxJ.png

Hopefully I should have this interactive map finished sometime in, err-... December, maybe?
 
After some final modifications to @Ares96 's Revised Version of Makemakean's master list, I finally feel fairly comfortable with the constituencies for all of Sweden now.

Here are Sweden's 122 country constituencies (landsbygdsvalkretsar), of which 93 are single-member and 29 are dual-member, electing a fine total of 151 MPs. Additionally, there are the 44 burough seats, and of course, the 3 mining seats, giving Sweden a total of 198 MPs in the Nordic Unionsdag.

The three mining seats are interesting, in that they function in the same way the mining seats worked in OTL, in that the voters were literally the stockholders in the various mining companies working in the area. They didn't vote exactly in proportion to their share of stocks, and there seems to have been something of a formula where this proportion further had to be weighed in proportion to the total productivity of the company in which they owned stock, the tax that company already paid as part of the cost of doing business, etc. Quite wonderful.

I think that in the story, I'll have those particular elections taking place at Stockholms and Gothenburg's stock exchanges for maximal irony.

path841.png
 
Gothenburg seems like an odd place given that none of the mountain seats covered areas anywhere near it. The way I had it set up on my map was as follows:
- First seat covers Stockholm, Uppsala, Södermanland and Gävleborg
- Second seat covers Värmland and Örebro
- Third seat covers Västmanland and Dalarna
 
Gothenburg seems like an odd place given that none of the mountain seats covered areas anywhere near it. The way I had it set up on my map was as follows:
- First seat covers Stockholm, Uppsala, Södermanland and Gävleborg
- Second seat covers Värmland and Örebro
- Third seat covers Västmanland and Dalarna

Yeah, I'm keeping the same system. Perhaps I should have all three elections take place in Stockholm, then...?

The idea is basically that even though the constituencies ostensibly represent the people involved in the mining business, by 1867, most people who own stock in the various companies have long since stopped living anywhere near the mountain areas.

But I anticipate that the counts would still take place in the geographical places to which the seats refer, but that most people voted by telegraph at stock exchanges far away, and that votes came in not just from Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Gothenburg, but also from Berlin, Paris, and London.
 
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Wasn't the easiest thing to find maps of Finland's parishes in the Mercator projection, but I was fortunate in finding the Economical Maps of Finland, a series produced in the first half of the twentieth century that are remarkably detailed. Still, the work here goes decidedly slower than it did for Sweden. Only managed to do the fourteen constituencies of Turku County and Uusimaa County, bringing the total number of assigned seats to 166.

path841.png
 
While I generally follow @Ares96 as closely as I can, in this one particular case when it comes to Vaasa County in Finland, I decided to go a little crazy, and I can only hope that he will give me his blessing on this one. He had earlier suggested that since Vaasa County contains the part of Österbotten where much of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority lives, and since we have established that Swedish-speakers in Finland are almost all loyal Hat voters, there would be a bit of a gerrymander in the Ostrobothnia region to benefit the Swedish-speaking minority. Ares96 handled that with two-member districts, but I decided to double down and have the whole thing done with only single-member districts to guarantee a victory for the Hats.

Though the Swedish speakers remain a minority in Vaasa County, now, much to their happiness, they are the majority in 7 of Vaasa County's 12 constituencies!

Ladies and Gentlemen and Others, I give you, the Hattimander:

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As Sønderheim is supposed to be "in the spirit" of William Gladstone and Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Émile De Geer is supposed to be "in the spirit" of William Pitt the Younger and Alexander Hamilton, young and ambitious men who greatly shaped the futures of their respective countries, exercising power at pivotal times.

But as his name suggests, he's also partially inspired by Louis De Geer, one of the most important Swedish statesmen of all time, as he was the one who reformed the government into a proper cabinet with a clear leader of government (rather than just having the different Ministers compete with one another for influence), and also abolished the grotesquely archais Riksdag of the Four Estates. Poor De Geer sacrificed most of his friendships to bring about the latter, and would go on to die a rather sad and lonely man, though one who until the end insisted it had all been worth it.

The De Geers I've just found out, were originally a bunch of Walloon Protestants who made their money in the Netherlands and Sweden :) influence and interesting bunch.
 
I'm reminded of the fact that the my first trip to see @Redolegna in Paris last November only confirmed the running gag that we are the same person only English/French respectively (due to the fact that his Offenbach fandom is matched only by my Gilbert and Sullivan fandom).

I've got a cupboard full of different varieties of leaf teas.

He's got a cupboard full of different types of coffee.

Can confirm that Angelo and coffee is an excellent mix!
 
Faces of Nordic Reunification

View attachment 9894

A peculiar man, Henrik Quintilius Askman is Director-General of His Majesty’s Bureau for Peculiar Affairs.

His background is classified.

The details of his work are classified.

The last two people known to have attempted to obtain further information regarding H. Q. Askman have both found themselves beaten up by drunken Finns under mysterious circumstances.

H. Q. Askman wants you to know that he would hate it if you were to find yourself beaten up by drunken Finns under mysterious circumstances.

Isn't that the main villain of Who Framed Rodger Rabbit?
 
Think I've finally arrived at a design for Mikael Lindroos that I feel kind of satisfied with. I might want to make him a bit thinner, but this one I feel kind of encapsulates what I was going for sufficiently well:

IMG_0566.jpg

The character of Mikael Lindroos was originally @Ares96 's idea, and he was very much going for the kind of Scandinavian Noir of the Sjöwall/Wahlöös genre. Unfortunately, I've never really read Sjöwall/Wahlöös, but I have seen my fair bit of Scandinavian Noir on TV, and so I pieced him together from a wide variety of influences, and characters I've come across, including in real life.

Mikael Lindroos is the most talented investigator that the police force of Åbo/Turku (the capital of the Grand Principality of Finland) has, but for reasons that we'll delve into later on in the description, is popular with neither the public at large, nor his superiors.

His backstory is meant in a sense to be an "anti-version" to the romantic tale of Benedetto di Ratta, Marquis of Mandal. Lindroos was born in the mid-1820s to a Finnish-speaking tennant farmer family in Turku County, his Swedish name derives from that when his grandfather was drafted in the Napoleonic Wars some thirty years earlier, the Swedish-speaking clerk draw names from a hat to assign to soldiers as they came in, and so his family ended up with a Swedish surname. Though by the 1860s, there is a movement among Finnish-speakers to Fennicize their names, Lindroos doesn't. Not because he is eager to be accepted by the Swedish-speaking elite as some middle-class Finns are, but just because he cannot be bothered to go through with it. The way Lindroos sees it, his grandfather viewed himself as a Finn and didn't let his Swedish name bother him, his father viewed himself as a Finn and didn't let his Swedish name bother him, so why should the third generation feel any different?

He is as such in his early forties by 1867, but he looks at least a decade older. In the 1850s, Lindroos joined the army, not out of a deep sense of patriotism, but merely because it seemed like a decent-paying job. Then a few years later the Great Baltic War broke out, and as a soldier, Lindroos had to fight. He unfortunately found himself one in the army that participated in the nigh-suicidal Assault on Reval early in the war, and since he was "lucky" not to be killed, he instead became a prisoner of war of the Russians, and was shipped off to Siberia to work on the railroad. Thus, Lindroos learned Russian. Interestingly, the whole ordeal did not make Lindroos feel any animosity towards the Russians. The Russians were his fellow prisoners, and he had to deal with them on a daily basis. Many of them were there simply because they espoused politics the Tsar's regime did not approve of, were ordinary blokes, no different from himself.

He first received news of his release and the end of the war over a month after the Great Baltic War actually ended in early spring of 1859. The Russian government would not offer to bring him back to Finland, and so he had to walk the distance himself. Not the nicest of experiences. On the other hand, the Swedish government did not do anything to get him home either, so he could hardly blame the Russians. When he got home, he received a medal, of course, but no pension, on the grounds that he had not been in combat enough, and so he had no other choice but to get back to work. His military service did interestingly enough entitle him the right to vote in elections, but he has yet to ever exercise that right, as he is fairly indifferent to politics in general, holding a view of "they're all basically the same".

By 1867, he has become quite possibly the most talented detective in the Åbo Police Force, which is viewed by half the city as an occupying army, and the other half as a drain of the public purse. The police force is ridiculously underfunded, but fortunately, Lindroos particular talent is in doing a lot with little.

He is not well-liked though, as his superiors do not much approve of his interests in new investigatory and forensic techniques from Down On The Continent and the British Isles, and feels that his insistance on leaving nothing unturned and doing everything by the book is tedious and annoying, and would often prefer him to just trust what they consider "gut feeling" and close a case when a convenient opportunity presents itself.

A few months prior to 26 June 1867, there was a minor incident in the port that Lindroos was involved in. Lindroos was leading a team tracking down a gang of Russian smugglers, and in order to infiltrate the gang and expose and arrest them, Lindroos instructed the officers under him to conceal the fact that they were policemen and "go undercover". Though he was successful and the gang was arrested, the fact that Lindroos accomplished this by deceit, it ended up being a rather controversial affair in the papers. Going undercover and infilitrating criminal gangs is most decidedly an ungentlemanly thing to do, and one would expect better from the city's police force.

His superiors would very much like to fire him, but they cannot because they know they're unlikely to find anyone as talented as him to accept the job he currently occupies at the meagre salary it draws. Instead, he was merely chewed out, disciplined, reprimanded, and told to keep a low profile.

Which didn't really bother Lindroos that much.

He has never sought public praise or fame or glory or anything of the sort. He's just a guy who wants to do his job, and do it properly.

And what with the police force to start with being fairly unpopular a little motley crew (to a great extent consisting of the very dreg of society that might well otherwise have turned out to be criminals), it's not like he blames his superiors. Keeping a low profile is, if anything, exactly what Lindroos wants to do anyway.

All Lindroos has ever wanted out of life is a good pint of ale or two at the end of a hard day's work, some pipe tobacco to smoke, and a steady stream of black, salted coffee.

Just don't try to bullshit him, or deny him that, and generally leave him alone, and you'll be on his good side.
 
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