Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "CaspianReport"
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@RobBCactive I don't know if that would have done the trick. Sure, the Mongols had a civilization-warping effect where they conquered and are responsible for many of the characteristics of Russian society. However, Genghis died in 1227 and Ogedei was still able to expand into Mesopotamia, sacking Baghdad in 1258, wiping out Classical Islam in the process. While teleology is as dirty a word as presentism when it comes to history, the steppe would still have been as good horse archer country as it was tank country, and historically the second wave of Mongols was stopped because the medieval armies learned to position themselves to funnel feigned retreats toward rivers and other natural obstacles. Possibly had the early Ming broken character with their self-conception as the centre of civilization and agreed upon some sort of nontributary alliance system with Outer Mongolia Russia might have been deterred from conquering Siberia - but this would require that the impact of the Yuan was fundamentally different on the way literate Chinese thought about their civilization than it was in our timeline. Stretching the medieval warm period so Mongolia was still as good a place to graze horses in the 13th century as it was in the 12th and getting rid of the little ice age would have some impacts outside of Mongolia, if we want to allow for a set of climate-altering satellites and reverse Snowpiercer type equipment loaded up into time tubes for this scenario. (the rest is a tangent on that subject) It wouldn't interfere with the initial English constitutional development which lead to the signature of Magna Carta, but Wales was only conquered during the little ice age, meaning a population armed with weapons which could pose a credible threat to their feudal overlords might simply not have arisen to insist upon their rights any more than a population within which a plurality of workers were waged labourers rather than serfs. Absolutism in the West was to become the aspiration of governance, at least on the continent, between the 17th and 18th centuries. American-style ideals of governance - within which "police state" is an insult to government rather than a self-adopted label for its gold standard - were an eccentric deviation from an eccentric deviation from the divine right of kings that had been the norm in the West. One could even argue minus the birth of America that the absolutists would never have had the cash crunch which lead to the development of continental systems which so much as rhymed with it - and had classical liberalism remained simply a set of ideas on the continent, suppressed by the local secret police forces of the Holy Roman Empire and Austria and the centralized secret police force of the Kingdoms of France and Spain, would we even have a "West" that was horrified by the prospect of Russian-style absolutism? Assuming the English constitutional process even occurred, would the civilizational outsider then not be the empire where Home Rule was even on the agenda for the colonies?
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