A Brief Geographic History: How Did the World Born Yesterday Reach 1900 AD?
Hundreds of years ago, Zheng He came to the New World, reaching a continent the Anglos now call North America. Imperial China was not interested in his discoveries, but mystics, adventurers, peasants, criminals—they all were. Today, the heritage of the great explorer is split between two states: federative Xingguo and royal Shengzhou, which stayed associated with the homeland for longer, but has a racially mixed population with strong Mexica roots.
Not all Amerindians were as lucky as the ones absorbed in Shengzhou. Just across mountains in the center of the continent, the states of Apache and Cheyenne are young and poor. The former is still being organized under the auspices of Anglo Texas, while the latter’s long-suffering people are enjoying a brief rest from generational warfare with the Anglos of the Combined Syndicalists of America. The CSA is a degenerative country—its founding revolutionaries had high ideals and its current ones want only to hold onto power in the wake of their Second American Civil War.
South is the land of Dixie. Its rulers are of Malinke heritage, and Dixie is an Anglo word, but after surviving a brutal war against the Syndicalists some years back, Dixie’s proud ruling landowners decided to embrace the exonym to better fit with their neighbors. But even while they play up to Texas, the landed class of Dixie still oppresses their (nominally) emancipated German agricultural workers, whose forefathers were brought over from Europe in chains when Dixie was still a Malinke colony.
Further south is the Caribbean Sun, a union of ex-colonies from different countries that has managed to wrest Florida away from Dixie. A monarchy, the devoutly anti-colonialist Caribbean Sun has long been thought ascendant, though their relatively small territories make one wonder if the Caribs deserve their reputation.
Rotating back to the north of the CSA, three nations cross the roof of North America. The easternmost, Vinland is more than twice as old as the Chinese states, but the Norsemen have lived out a relatively quiet history, experimenting with the sort of democracy that is only a dream in the CSA and trying—with moderate success—to stay out of the way of independent French Kanata, just to the west, whose people were prideful and abrasive even when they owned allegiance to Paris in the time before the Napoleonic wars.
Beyond vast Kanata’s southern rail line, one reaches the third of the northern triad, the Aleutian Empire. Born of some of Xingguo’s most ambitious, the Empire is a trading company with its own nation, which became independent during one round of Xingguo’s fractious politics. The Empire’s lands extend into Asia, but let us turn from that for now, and go south again. Far south.
Below Shengzhou, below its Central American sometimes tributary Miskito, is the continent and country of Tilabaiinke. The Tilabaiinke Republic slipped away from its African Malinke metropole much when Dixie did—around the time of the world-shaking Napoleonic wars. Tilabaiinke has since created a curious state of affairs in the vast land some Anglos stubbornly call South America. For reasons of governmental weakness—Tilabaiinke was never quite as strong as it wanted to be—the nation tolerates three other powerful governments within its official territory.
First, Tawantinsuyu, or the Land of the Sapa Inca, stretches along the parts of the Pacific coast, and, despite its low world profile, is probably the strongest pure Ameindian state that remains. Second, New Deseret lords over the Kodugu River as only a state of theocratic Anglos can. In the mid-nineteenth century, vast numbers of Mormons came from their Salt Lake in Xingguo to expand Amazon City as a riverine port in the heart of the jungle, and the population of their land has exploded, even as Tilabaiinke tries to keep tabs by forging alliances with the loosely organized tribal federations that ring the Mormons.
Third (again with that number), Tilabaiinke tolerates a Malinke presence along the north of their continent. This region, which the Anglos call Great Colombia, is the last colony in the Americas, and only exists because it is not a colony at all. Tilabaiinke shelters the Malinke colonial government from Caribbean Sun wrath by asserting that the monstrous colonialists are actually pay tribute to Zanuyeba, and the local Malinke colonial governor humors the upstart Tilabaiinke Republic with missives of submission so he can continue paying taxes to his African masters in Timbuktu.
Across the Atlantic
