Meanwhile, just in time, Portuguese settlers in Brazil had erected monuments like the Statue of Liberty, the Westminster Palace and (thanks to a deal with the friendly Mughal Empire) the Rio de Janeiro Fish Market. But the Crown had realized that the future of Portugal did not lay in Europe. Unwisely, they decided that this future would be in the remote settlement of Cabo de Boa Esperanca (Capetown), where the palace was relocated to. The irate Brazilian settlers thus revolted against Portugal, and desperate upon their revolt, the Portuguese King Hernandez the Feebleminded did not only leave them the entire treasury, and the revolting cities on the Continent of Brazil, but also the prospering West African cities (Sofala, Quelimane, Mombasa) and even the Sacred Capital of Lisboa together with Santander and the nearby island of Ponta Delgada.
Despite all these losses, the Portuguese Government in Exile stuck around for a while with a few colonies they had acquired in the Caribbean and West Africa thanks to the Palace of Nations, and with the other powerful cities on the Iberian Peninsula, hosting the military might of the colonial empire, and still clinging to the old vassals of Mexico, Morocco and Ethiopia.
The brave Brazilians had directly realized that the formerly productive slavery population in the cities of their home continent were no longer allowed by the world mechanics, and had to be shipped and resettled on other continents... meaning the "old world" of course. But only so many of these slaves would be able to fit into the few cities inherited from the Portuguese crown, and so the government made new and ambitious plans: Colonialism was to remain the law of the land, but now there would be new colonies taking advantage of the old world instead. Portugal had been a formidable empire thanks to their overwhelming progress, and the newly emerged Brazilian State had to hurry up and rush all their scientists into a race to regain the institutional knowledge that was lost when they had declared indepence from the Portuguese crown. Together with newly trained troops, a flood of Brazilian slaves was shipped back across the Atlantic ocean, but now into the fortified harbor of Lisboa, from where a miracle crusade was conducted...
Just as Brazil had stepped into the light over the next decade, the remnants of Portuguese Iberia had also given birth to a long forgotten player that reappeared on the world stage: Spain. Brazil refused to seek peace with the former enemy of their ancestral country, and claimed to keep Santander. And yet, the Spanish insisted to reconstitute their lands in Iberia, and Brazil had to storm their cities by force. Once this was done, the Brazilian forces rushed towards the ancestral archenemy: Italy in their city of Firenze, and easily took the city that was under assault from the Russians, from the other direction. Directly afterwards, the last remnants of the Portuguese Empire suddenly dissolved, meaning that there almost could have been a
Second War of the Roman Succession, with Russians and Brazilians fighting over the Papal City. But the Russians did not declare war over the matter of Italy, and they would come to regret it. The Brazilian Expeditionary Force was able to quickly capture Rome, while the Russians took Naples, thus dividing Italy into two factions yet again. As the Moroccan Empire also dissolved soon after, the exhausted Brazilian conquest finished up its loop in North Africa, claiming the Maghreb cities next and soon controlling both Northwest- and Southeast-Africa. Each of the conquered cities would host many of the slaves that had been brought back over from Brazil.
What followed next, was a period of relative peace for Brazil: The nation would (re)discover new technologies year after year, and even be awarded the First Great Persons of the modern times again (the free engineer/artist/statesman...) that Portugal had previously claimed for being the first to discover. With Portugal gone, it would be Brazil now to first (re)discover these technologies, and benefit from their potential. More and more monumental buildings were erected in Brazil, including the UAV-goal wonders of Brazil but also the Metropolitan, the Crystal Palace and even the Empire State Building. In the 1890s, Brazil finally signed the Emanzipation Proclamation, bringing liberty to its slave plantations and to thousands of settled slaves in their African and European cities. Until the late 1920s, the Palace of Nations would also allow Brazil to wage the
Cold War of the League against Russia: Systematically, by dominating one world congress after the other, Brazil would claim city after city from Moscow. First Naples, then Ljubljana, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, peacefully gaining a foothold in Central Europe that had been previously denied to Portugal. Whenever the Brazilian attempts were stalled in the congress, they would demand British-Indian territories instead, beginning with Ceylon, followed by Tanjapuri and Chennai.
After winning the UAV in the late 1920s, the Government of Brazil decided that there were stretch-goals to achieve: the establishment of the
Brazilian Empire ruling over
Russia,
India,
China and
South Africa - in short, BRICS. The former Portugues colony in Capetown was already acquired, but other rivals had still be brought down. The
War For BRICS began in the mid-1930s with a Brazilian assault on the hostile forces of Britain in Mumbai, taking the garrison by storm and splitting India into a Brazilian south and a Pakistani north under the reign of Benazir Butto. But Churchill had allied with Stalin, of course, and so Central Europe would see combat yet again. Despite being the second-most powerful military in the world, Russians had been late in introducting infantry soldiers, and this allowed brave Brazilian tank forces to cut through Russian riflemen and grenadiers with great speed, especially once bomber- and fighter-planes would arrive on the scene to weaken the Russian cities. In 1942 already, Brazilian forces had arrived in Moscow and positioned themselves to besiege Stalingrad. But Stalin himself was content to lose all core territory cities, relocated his capital four times way back beyond the Urals and only sued for peace in 1946 when the Brazilian generals had arrived in Novosibirsk. Given his fierce resistance, it remains unclear why Stalin surrendered... maybe it was the world news that Brazilian astronauts were about to land on the moon, just one year later?
Having focussed so much onto the Russian enemy, Brazil was shocked to learn from their Tibetan allies that the traditionally hostile Chinese Empire was on the verge of collapse... and did so right after peace was made with Russia and its former vassals, the Ottomans and Germans. And thus, the
Scramble for China began: Brazilian troops were hurried along the meticulously prepared naval chain-routes across the Atlanto-Indian Ocean, but also along the nearly finished Transibirian Railway and hopping from airport to airport, to arrive in China in time. But here they were humbled: the neutral Mongols and the allied Pakistanis beat them to most Chinese cities; the second-to-last coastal city Guangzhou was taken by Pakistani forces right when the Brazilian Expeditionary Force had already landed on the shores. And so, Hangzhou would be the one and only city of former China that Brazil would be able to incorporate into their Empire right away... at least as long the treaties with the other powers were honored. But the Brazilian government only had to check their overexpansion-meter (only balanced thanks to the currently booming economy!) to conclude that this would likely be the final expansion.
However, here we are at the current height of
Empire of BRICS, established in 1953. (enlarged world map in the upper right corner)
