The Old World's Interrupted Trajectory

[DaleCoz]

I've recently started a "Tuesday Evening Alternate History" column on my blog. This is a pale shadow of the Alternate History Newsletters I did for a little over a decade ending in 2011, but hopefully they're worth reading. This is the latest column.

Several years ago, I did a long, detailed scenario/essay about where I thought the New World would be now in the absence of Old World coming crashing in on it. I thought about doing something similar for the Old World, tracing the last 528 years of the Old World if the New World and Australia were for some reason inaccessible to the Old or simply didn't get discovered.

Early on, I realized that I don't have anywhere near the knowledge base to do this for the Old World in the same depth I did for the New. I did come up with some thoughts I thought might be worth sharing. Consider this tentative, early stages and feel free to add, subtract (or divide or multiply) points.

First, to dispose of the inevitable "But somebody was going to discover the New World." True and irrelevant in a universe that allows Snapshots—essentially ASB-created artificial universes that exactly replicate an Earth continent or set of continents as of some date. It's 1491 or 1492. The Tourists make a Snapshot of Eurasia and Africa. It's in its own artificial universe. No New World to go to, at least until the Old World can get to a Vent 30k feet up.

By the way, the Snapshot Universe isn't something I made up for this scenario. I've set several novels in the universe.

All inputs for a Snapshot, including ocean currents are on a one hundred year loop, which has its own peculiarities but prevents problems from the apparent wall disrupting ocean circulation or atmospheric processes.

And what happens next? Columbus runs into an invisible wall, as do Chinese and Japanese explorers coming from the Pacific, and Portuguese explorers off course on their way around the Horn of Africa. I'm sure that excites scientific curiosity, but voyages are expensive enough that the wall passes into the realm of semi-legend, to get rediscovered from time to time. A few adventurous fishermen may find themselves cut off from their new secret fishing areas, but they were never officially there anyway. Sporadic trade across the Bering Strait between Eskimo/Aleut groups stops. The abandoned Greenland Norse settlements are no longer accessible and become semi-legendary. Japanese fishing boats that would have otherwise been wrecked in the Pacific Northwest never get there.

Eurasia and Africa go on about their business, never knowing that there had once been a whole New World sitting there for the taking.

The Eurasian trajectory changes drastically, though no one knows it. Here are a smattering of the ways:

1) Most of Eurasia at least, and parts of Africa, have a lot less silver and gold to work with. In societies where precious metals were money, that means much less liquidity coming into the economies. They can't expand the way they did historically. Historically, New World precious metals spread widely, with Spain buying ships, guns and a myriad of other goods from all over Europe. Spain paid armies that would ordinarily have been far too big for the country, bought off electors to install Charles as Holy Roman Emperor, bought goods from China through the Philippines and so on and on. Historically, New World treasure fueled inflation in Ming China, made the Ottoman Empire's gold and silver hoards worth less, created pockets of wealth around the home villages of lucky conquistadors and merchants who ended up with bits and pieces of the precious metal haul. In the Snapshot, none of that can happen.

More under the next rock. If you want to check out the rest of my Tuesday Evening blog posts, plus early AH posts, you can go to:

The Old World’s Interrupted Trajectory (Tuesday Evening Alternate History) – Dale Cozort (wordpress.com)

 

[DaleCoz]

2) The Catholic Church is both more wealthy relative to the rest of society and less wealthy in absolute terms than it would have been had there been a New World to be found. Fewer or less grand Cathedrals, probably more real power. To a certain extent, more money in an economy pulls people out of subsistence mode and into the cash economy. There isn't more manpower per se, but there may be more manpower that can be mobilized by the wealthy and by the church.


3) Population growth is much slower in Eurasia throughout most of the last 500 or so years. It is slower than it was historically in Africa from roughly 1500 to 1650, remains about even with what Africa experienced historically during the height of the slave trade (1650-1850) and is again much less than historical growth from 1850 on. Why? Mainly no New World crops. Corn, Manioc, Potatoes, Sweat Potatoes and a lot of other lesser-known New World crops historically pushed back limitations on Old World agricultural productivity, allowing use of what had historically been marginal land and increasing the calories that could be extracted from small farms. Potatoes especially became an Old World peasant staple historically, allowing more children to survive, not just in Europe but throughout the Old World.

4) Change in general is much slower than it was historically. The New World historically created an escape valve for the anger and displacements that inevitably come with change. The most ambitious people in a group losing their livelihoods to new technologies could and often did, seek a new fortune in the New World historically. Without that escape valve, change that destroys peoples' livelihoods in any significant numbers is likely to get the innovator killed and the King who allows that kind of change overthrown if he doesn't rein it in.

Africa could be an escape valve to a certain extent, but it doesn't work as well as the New World because (a) European diseases won't, except in the extreme south of Africa empty out space for European settlers. As a matter of fact, the disease arrow points the other way in large parts of Africa. (b)Again, with the exception of the extreme south, Africa wasn't that far behind Europe in the early 1500s. The extremely fast pace of European technology (and mimetic) change in the 1500s to late 1800s opened a big and exploitable gap by say 1870, but in this scenario the pace of European change would be slower.

5) Speaking of Africa, Spain and Portugal would almost certainly put massive efforts into extending the Reconquista into North Africa. That was the logical way to go and to some extent Spain went that way historically, taking and then losing several North African cities in the 1500s. Historically that didn't happen any more than it did partly because of Spanish focus on the New World, but also because Spain got drawn into the French/Hapsburg rivalries and more importantly into the Italian wars. Italy was rich and disunited, which drew in both France and Spain for a series of wars that lasted from 1494 until 1559, with breaks from time to time. The French got the worst of the Italian Wars much of the time, despite being Europe's 600 pound gorilla in terms of population and to a lesser extent economic power and were forced into a dangerous and distasteful alliance with the Ottomans for much of this period. New World precious metals were part of the reason Spain was able to match French armies in Italy, though they were doing well even before that gold had much impact. I suspect that Spain would have fewer resources for the Italian wars and for North African adventures in a no New World scenario, but would focus more of the resources they had in North Africa.

Without the New World, I could see Portugal or Spain (assuming Spain existed) competing for the trade routes to the East Indies and settling South Africa. Spain historically did nose around Africa a bit, doing quite a bit of intrigue in what is now Angola. It's quite possible that Spain or Portugal would conquer the big sort of sub-Saharan empire of Songhai instead of the Moors.

 

[DaleCoz]

6) Any innovation that requires rubber is simply not possible, though there are Old World materials that do some of the same things. If this Old World somehow gets to the verge of an Industrial Revolution, the lack of rubber makes a lot of things more difficult and expensive and pushes technology down a different set of paths if society does industrialize. This is kind of fun to speculate on, though it would take someone with a lot more knowledge of how things work than I have.

(7) It's easy to get into the weeds here and discover that almost everything you think is solid about European history in this period turns liquid when you look at it closely. Example: would there be a Spain in the historical sense without the New World? In 1492, Spain was a personal dynastic union between two very distinct kingdoms, with no guarantee that the union would persist after the monarchs involved died, depending on whether their children survived, and certainly there was no guarantee that the two kingdoms would become part of the Hapsburg domains. That's all very contingent on who dies and in what order. Also, I would be a bit surprised if the Dutch existed as an identifiable people in this scenario and the Puritans as an identifiable group is also a bit iffy with this big of a change this much before the group formally came into existence.

Key question: Would Europe still innovate faster than the rest of the world and still dominate the Old World?

The extent of the European edge in this scenario is a key point and not one that I consider settled in my own mind. The New World resources did make European innovation faster. The question is how much of a role other sources of European innovation played.

First, was there some secret sauce of European innovation from the way European politics was structured? I've seen it argued that innovation happened faster in Europe partly because no one king or emperor could shut it down, especially if it was militarily useful. Ignore a significant military innovation in a competitive military environment and you become Burgundy. If it is true that military competition drives or allows innovation, periods of warring states would be periods of innovation and empires periods of relative stagnation. But what advantage would Europe have over other areas with competing states--Japan during its prolonged civil war or China during the period where the Feudatories were pretty much independent of the Manchu empire? Also, competing states can lead to economically devastating wars like the Thirty Years War.

Europe maintained competing states far longer than the others I mentioned and seemed very resistant to consolidation. Case in point: In the Spanish beat France about as decisively as a country could be beaten at Pavia in 1524. Destroyed the French army. Captured the French king and a lot of nobles. Game over for France, right? Nope. The Spanish ended up with very little advantage from the battle in the long run. If Europe was going to get a universal monarchy, it would almost have to be through slow accretion via dynastic marriages. The Hapsburgs came closer than anyone there, but couldn't really run even the empire they had under Charles, much less a bunch more. So maybe Europe was inherently going to innovate more quickly than most of the Old World due to internal competition.

Second: It is possible that controlling the sea lanes inherently caused European innovation to speed up. Europeans had access to all of the coast of the Old World, which meant that they could choose the innovations that they wanted from all of the Old World. The Turks, Arabs and other Indian Ocean powers only had contact with part of the coast, so they were exposed to smaller range of innovations.

How important were those factors compared to having New World resources? I don't know.

That's the broad outline. Nailing down specifics would require a lot more research, which I might do at some point, though I suspect I could spend years on the project and never come close to finishing it. What do you think so far? As a mentioned, ideas are welcome.