If you could change a single part of pre 18th century history what would you change?
If you could change a single part of pre 18th century history what would you change?
I'm looking for specific and non obvious answers. Give me something visceral, rid the world of a figure or nation you hate. Preserve a culture you adore. It doesn't have to make sense either, you are basically god here.
What I mean is don't just say you'd get rid of imperialism or colonialism bc no shit
Personally I would make it so that the Americas are never discovered by the old world and every would be conquistador (especially cortez and pizarro) explodes.
Maybe have capitalism simultaneously start in India and China alongside Western Europe so we can see how much current timeline capitalism sucks because capitalism sucks in general and how much current timeline capitalism sucks because the Occidentals are an avaricious warlike tribal people with no regard for the sanctity of life.
I wrote a quick page of flash fiction sketching out a world where Chinese ships reached California a couple hundred years before the Conquistadors reached South America, tl;dr the Chinese empire can't exert power on the continent the way the European empires could, indigenous cultures adopt some Chinese technologies and state organization principles, and the Spanish and English arrive on schedule but find their ability to conquer stymied by Aztecs with arquebuses and cannons.
My second choice is that a major slave rebellion is successful in Ancient Rome, resulting in a class-based overthrow of the previous state apparatus. The former slaves reform the existing Patron-Client networks to eliminate the patrons all together, resulting in a society economically organized around circles of associated producers and craftspeople who are of equal social rank and work together while sharing a commons. Eventually as the Roman state breaks down from the inevitability of its size and outside pressures, the resulting "fuedal" system is not one dominated by noble lords and their systems of alliances, but a complex web of cities and townships which associate freely with one another, slowly forming into complex realms with distributed, instead of centralized, leadership structures.
Flip those positive and negative charge symbols around, Benjamin Franklin.
Fossil fuel deposits are more evenly distributed and whatever hasn't been burnt by 2025 are rapidly less recoverable. Maybe zap those gas hydrates out of existence while we're at it.
It's really quite rude to give the hairless primates the tools of industrialisation and extinction in one hit.
Make central Australia a bit deeper, with a sea connection to the northern and southern coasts so the interior can stay forested.
give the native americans horses far earlier by way of the viking settlements in canada
Having access to horse domestication would have done a lot to advance the development and size of native american civilizations. Beasts of burden in particular to help with nomadic migration and agricultural exploitation.
they also did so well as horse riders in our timeline they made rifles obsolete and made the empires invent the revolver just to combat them. and thats with only a century of horse domestication. Give it to them far before european settlement and theyll be able to put up even more of a fight.
Every European has an ass where their face should be and vice versa.
Chinese not abandoning their large ships probably leads to their technology not stagnating and their trade with and/or settlement in Western North America. Really crazy change to history.
Please go on!
See below post
Explain the history here to me
There's a good We're Not So Different about it. The Chinese Emperor built giant ships to show off their wealth and got across to Ethiopia on Africa.
They almost certainly could have made to the West Coast of North America either open water or hugging coastlines.
They ended up scrapping them to focus internally.
Had they kept it up it could have spread their technology to Africa, Oceania and the America's. And in turn kept up with advances in the middle East and Europe.
Like it's really different timeline.
Fossil fuels never existed
Solid choice
At the advent of agriculture and the transition away from pastoralism and nomadism, I wish that all tribes had enforced a collectivist mentality regarding possessions instead of allowing chains of inequality that have lashed out for millennia.
I think inequality is one of those things that is really difficult to erase once it has already been normalized. It allows for accumulation of power, and then uses that power to fight against the fragmented opposition to itself. I think there would have been so much less suffering if that issue had been nipped in the bud back at the start of "civilization."
I highly recommend The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It presents a new anthropological survey of humanity starting at the question “What is the origin of inequality.”
I'd ensure Spartacus's slave revolt succeeded, resulting in Rome falling to a grand slave revolt, smothering in the cradle the pro-debtor/creditor government and empire.
Probably just delay it emerging later down the line but who knows.But best part is this stops a lot of follow-on bad happenings such as Christianity being proclaimed the official religion of Rome, certain unifications don't occur under wartime conditions against Rome. Maybe they even implement a kind of early universal suffrage and it ends up failing but it means that 17th century enlightenment thinkers have more to chew on which means they and the French revolution see certain flaws in liberal thinking and advocate a more radical course of action leading to the US founding fathers being a bunch of, republican, class traitors and hardcore abolitionists which leads to a crumbling of the capitalist world order over time that means the German revolution succeeds and European capital is murdered off in a bloody series of revolutions ending by the year 1980. While simultaneously anti-colonial sentiment creates uprisings across the globe that further weaken capital. Thus global communism by 2040.(Yes I know there are problems with this but let me dream)
Spartacus's Slave revolt succeeding leading to the Spartacus uprising in Germany succeeding?
I think it makes absolutely perfect sense.
I think it would be a funny prank to destroy a merchant's reputation by swapping his ingot inventory with shitty low-grade copper
Going back in time to PRANK Ea-nāṣir (GONE SEXUAL?)
Going back in time to prevent my ancestors from leaving Europe just so I can have affordable healthcare.
Marx gets a gundam
Extend the life of Kublai Khan and expand the Mongol Empire into Western Europe
if we're dreaming, how about preserve and spread the apparently egalitarian urban culture of the bronze age indus valley civilization or any similar culture as a hopefully proto-socialist mode of production that dominates until industrialization allows for proper communism, perhaps largely bypassing slave-based, feudal and capitalist stages if a ruling class based on ownership of people and private property fails to really take hold.
Like 1000-ish years before Columbus, I'd give the native Americans all the Eurasian/African domestic animals and knowledge of metallurgy. When sustained contact happens, it will be on a more equal footing, stopping European colonialism before it can really start.
I'd give the native Americans all the Eurasian/African domestic animals
If we had that happen... then we shall confirm this:
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If they don't die in a droves due to transported Old World disease, due to previous exposure to animals and to an extent, the Old World, they will make their bones as a majority-indigenous continent akin to the former, and at worst, end up more like the historically western-imperialized people of Asia and Africa that later fights back in large numbers rather than the near-genocided condition they are in, today, that make them a minority in most of the Americas.
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If despite the previous disease exposure and skills given, they die in similar amounts during the European conquest, we can more certainly conclude it was European imperialists and settlers, such as by their hunger-causing scorched earth tactics, and forced labor plantation overwork, whose policies more purposely seeked to eliminate them in the early 1500s-1600s, and indirectly caused the conditions for viruses and bacteria to kill them
Personally, as much as I want it to be the former, I feel its the latter...
Edited
If they don't die in a droves, supposedly due to transported disease from the Old World, they will make their bones as a majority-indigenous continent akin to the former, and at worst, end up more like the western-imperialized people of Asia and Africa that later fights back rather than the near-genocided state they are known as, today...
That's why I'd do it about 1000 years before, to give the American population time to bounce back.
If despite the previous disease exposure and skills given, they die in similar amounts during the European conquest, we can more certainly conclude it was European imperialists and settlers, such as by their scorched earth tactics, and forced labor plantations, whose policies more purposely seeked to eliminate them in the early 1500s-1600s
I figure if they have iron or steel weapons, along with cavalry and other various animals to serve as beasts of burden and food sources, they'd be able to defend themselves from the Europeans pretty adequately no matter what.
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I was thinking more along the lines of two giant walls splitting the pacific and atlantic down the middle. The walls reach the stratosphere and if european touches them they explode.
Your solution is good too but my goal is to see how they would develop in isolation. Its also worth mentioning that the new worlders had a severe disadvantage not just in knowledge but in resources. They did not have large pack animals so much of their labor power was tied up in manual tasks. They also had significantly less time to domesticate their plants making them more nutrient rich. Peas were already domesticated by the time they had even began farming iirc. Although the Inca's and pre Incan societies were very proficient at selective plant breeding. So while a thousand years of metallurgy would help I'm not sure it would be enough
I'd teach Vivaldi about breakdowns so he could open up the fucking pit
I would stop the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Primates are locked since y'all couldn't behave.
"Don't just say you'd get rid of imperialism or colonialism"
Proceeds to get rid of at least half of colonialism
Ok yes but I was more creative about it. I was curious to hear about how y'all would change things more than about what y'all would change.
Give Hannibal Barca a bunch of assault rifles and molotovs. Fuck Rome. I want to see a Carthaginian win to the Second Punic war
Agüeybana gets a Dongfeng ICBM.
That's too quick a death for the spanish. Give the Taíno people assault rifles and napalm
I'd want to see how radically different history would be if Constantin 1, the Christian one, was assassinated before he could proclaim Christianity as the religion of the empire.
Alternatively I'd want to see how wild shit would get if Qin Shi Huang didn't poison himself to death via alchemy bullshit.
Third one: horses in the Americas for as long as they've been in the old world.
Third one: horses in the Americas for as long as they've been in the old world.
I think you'd see something like the Mongol Empire emerge in the Great Plains.
See, very interesting possibilities
Either China doesn't give up on exploration after Zheng He's voyages or England has a faction who isn't the absolute fucking worst be the ones to kill king Charles I.
Agree that Zheng He would be the biggest individual to cause a butterfly effect. I don't know how you get China to commit to that development since they seem to always be an internally focused culture.
Matriarchy from the dawn of civilization
OK we're keeping Paleolake Megachad and seeing what happens
Why this specifically? I don't know the historical context this lake other than it being big
If we're doing alt history why not change something big? The timeline of human civilization would probably be unrecognizable. Alt history is usually about small changes so let's try producing something very novel.
Not exactly sure how but I'd try to preserve knowledge from all over the world. If humanity was able to constantly knowledge instead of rediscovering everything every couple hundred years we'd have FALGSC by now.
Vitruvius'/Hero of Alexandria's aeolipile gets recognized for its true potential. Steampunk antiquity time!!!
I'm showing everyone how to make penicillin and publishing germ theory in the Torah. Kosher practices did wonders for public health, and including modern knowledge of public health will save billions of lives.
i would use my powers to make some of the Years of Rice and Salt stuff happen. ideally do the thing where the black plague kills 99.9% of europe and just see what happens. but since the book is written by a Materialist, he recognizes that other cultures from North Africa and Asia will just move in and do Imperialism eventually just in a delayed fashion. so maybe the delay will give an edge to the colonized peoples?
still might get that massive central Asian world war from the book but it's basically the biggest and only global war and long before nukes. but hey maybe you also get Communist Haudenosaunee superpower that helps everyone rebuild and the world transitions to socialism during the reconstruction
Jesus reveals "it was just a prank bro" as he does a front flip off the cross.
