Greater Catalonia

And yet another Alternate History Travel Guides map. (Quite a bit of what follows is from [link])

a world in which the leading European colonial state was a Greater Catalonia extending from Southern France to the Straits of Gibraltar. Islam has had a bad time of it in this world: the Mongol Wars of Succession having prevented the arisal of the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic world remained too disunited to effectively take the fight to the enemy, and has been mostly driven out of the Mediterranean over five centuries of warfare (Egypt is about 80% Christian nowadays: Italian Tunisia is still about 45% Muslim, and having some nasty we-want-the-vote riots.)

Thanks to the tolerance of the Aragonese kings, the Cathars still survive: a small community in Europe, a larger one in the Americas. France lacks its southern third, but includes England and Scotland: Norman-British connection led to England being swallowed by France a long time ago, and English is something Yorkshire country hicks talk among themselves to insult the tourists. Most of the Americas speaks either Portuguese or Catalan, although Mexico is essentially bilingual in Nahuatl and Portuguese (the Portuguese stamped out the human sacrifice, but weren’t numerous or religiously enthusiastic enough to stomp on native culture as thoroughly as the OTL Spanish), and there is a sizable Scandinavian “Vinland” in NE America. (Not Viking-settled, but named after the Viking colony: settled by a united Danish-ruled Scandinavia with substantial Hanseatic input, after the Scandinavians decided to follow up on reports of a land to the west of the Greenland colony). A few centuries later on, united Scandinavia broke up a bit acrimoniously, but their colony has grown and flourished.

Russia is essentially run by a couple dozen great noble families, (Merchants and Boyars won out over Czars) and is known for its huge gulfs between the wealthy and the poor, the toughness of its merchants, the haplessness of its armies, and the religiosity of its people. The Polish-Ukrainian Empire (three, alas, turned out to be a crowd) dominates the Black Sea and meddles in messy Balkan politics.

There is still a Hanseatic League, forming a state-within-a-state in the Dutch-led North German Confederation. To the south lies the Very Catholic Holy Roman Empire. Both Korea and Japan managed to modernize, and are fact fairly cordial neighbors: butterflies means that the Hideyoshi’s very bloody invasion of our history never happened. Thailand, the Tibetans, and the Hindu kingdom centered in Bali and including half of Java have also had a fair bit of success in modernizing and have avoided colonization. Insular China was less fortunate, and after foreign powers intervened in a messy civil war, is currently divided into spheres of influence and its trade and foreign relations controlled by an international commission: supposedly, only until the place manages to reform and modernize enough to be a “responsible” part of the international community.

Persia (non-Shi’a, although with Shiite minorities) includes most of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and parts of Turkestan, and is approximately as screwed-up as OTL’s Ottoman Empire at the start of the 20th century. There was a massive Arab migration south, leading to an Arabization and also political development of the Sahel states, to the point where the Soudanese Caliphate is left alone by European colonizers which see conquering the area as rather more trouble than it is worth.

Technology is mostly early 20th century, although more refined in some ways than OTL (primitive fax machines, refrigerators, really fast trains), with radio and silent movies but no TV and as yet no theory of Relativity. (Pure, as opposed to applied science, is less energetically pursued than OTL). Zeppelin-type dirigible flyers are common. The Aragonese Commonwealth and its allies (Greater Netherlands, Portugal, Vinland, Savoie, etc) are politically/culturally a bit like third Republic France – a basically middle-class society, democratic but rather turbulent and unstable political systems, and a hell of a lot of art and culture being produced.

It’s generally a progressive and optimistic world, and it is generally accepted that the colonial peoples will at some indefinite point be ready for self-government – “scientific” racism and social Darwinist thinking are rather less influential than they were OTL at that level of technological development. There hasn’t been a major war in nearly a century, although the India Conflict looked like it would grow into a global war before cooler heads prevailed. Environmentalism is also more advanced: in a world more crowded than our 1910, preserving wilderness is a broadly popular movement.

Overpopulation is a problem: Aragon Earth has had good medical care for a while, but has not yet become wealthy enough to undergo a full demographic transition, so it is getting a bit crowded. There is not, as yet, a food crisis, thanks to much heavier investment in food crops in colonized areas than OTL and the more developed nature of what OTL is “Latin” America.

Aside from a greater Christianity, Buddhism has also done better in this world, having pre-empted Islam in Malaysia and Indonesia (although Greater Bali remains Hindu) and what in our world would be Bengal, now part of the Tibetan Empire (given population densities, really more of a Bay of Bengal Empire with a big mountainous back yard). Christianity is rather more divided than OTL, though: from the Waldensian Protestantism of Savoie (OTL northern Italy) to the reformed Catholicism of most of continental Europe and the Scandinavian and American state churches and North German pseudo-Anabaptism, never mind the four Orthodox Christian churches of Africa and Asia.