Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  [122] Early on, the Manchu army was organised into Banner groups; these became more and more ceremonial as the Qing dynasty wore on.

  [123] In OTL, Alexander Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler and had Philip with her. ITTL, Hamilton marries her sister Angelica, who in OTL Alexander not only got along with better than he and Elizabeth but also were rumored to be having an affair together.

  [124] Though somewhat less so than OTL due to Mount Royal (Montréal) being in the same country and access to the Great Lakes not being contested.

  [125] Transliterated Noongar by the British in OTL.

  [126] Of course this is not actually the case, but discoveries of gold and other valuable resources lay many years in the future.

  [127] Near OTL Newcastle (and confusingly not the OTL Esperance on the other side of the country).

  [128] OTL Port Lincoln.

  [129] Near OTL Darwin, named after the seventeenth-century Dutch explorer Abel Tasman (who eventually gave his name to Tasmania in OTL).

  [130] Norfolk is on the site of Fremantle, the initial landing of the colonists who in OTL went on to found Perth. ‘Noble families’ here means the First Families of Virginia (mostly descended from the earliest seventeenth century colonists, often Cavaliers upset with Cromwell) who essentially became an unofficial nobility even in the republican America of OTL.

  [131] OTL Hutt River.

  [132] That is, the Ngāpuhi. Raouirie is a French transliteration of the Maori name spelled Rawiri in OTL.

  [133] That is, Rostov-na-Donu (Rostov-on-Don); the latter addendum was only added in 1806 in OTL, and never makes it in TTL.

  [134] The modern OTL United Arab Emirates.

  [135] In OTL Bandar Abbas was under the control of Muscat from 1740 until the 19th century. In TTL Muscat is never separated from Oman.

  [136] Zanj, “black” in Farsi, is a term used in Persia and the Arab world denoting East Africans and their land (as in “Zanzibar”, for example).

  [137] Among them the Qajars, who had by this point in OTL become the ruling Persian dynasty.

  [138] Recall the Persians took control over all Azerbaijan during the Russian Civil War – therefore they’re ceding all of it to the Ottomans now.

  [139] Shiraz is the Persian capital under the Zands (and was in OTL).

  [140] Generally speaking writers in TTL call them ‘Japanese’ when talking about the period prior to the RLPC arriving in Japan and ‘Yapontsi’ later (compare ‘Siamese’ vs ‘Thai’ in OTL) but this is not always consistently applied.

  [141] Vladizaladsk is TTL’s name for the OTL city of Sitka or Novoarkhangelsk in Alaska. Cometa (short for ‘San Lorenzo del Cometa Brillante’) is the TTL name for San Francisco – the reasons for the different name will be described when we get to the history of California in Volume IV.

  [142] Hawaii. The TTL name has been filtered through Russian orthography.

  [143] English name for the Nez Perce.

  [144] Chichago province consists of the northern half of the OTL state of Indiana plus parts of northeastern Illinois (including the fort that would become Chicago) and parts of northwestern Ohio; Tennessee province is the western half of the OTL state of Tennessee; and Washington province is the southern half of OTL Illinois plus the western half of OTL Kentucky. Note that all of these are rather low in population at the time and provincial accession in the Continental Parliament is partly driven by a ‘rotten borough’ desire to create overrepresentation for a small number of (theoretically) more easily bribed settlers.

  [145] OTL Great Falls, Montana.

  [146] Near the site of OTL Vancouver.

  [147] On the site of OTL Portland; Fort Washington itself is on the site of Seattle.

  [148] Term in TTL for cold war.

  [149] The Green Standard Army was a Qing Dynasty force consisting mainly of Han Chinese, descending from those Ming Dynasty armies that had surrendered to the Qing more than a century before (as opposed to the Eight Banners of Manchu). In OTL by this point in history it had seriously decayed; this is somewhat less true in TTL due to Yonzheng’s continuing reforms, but the sleepy capital garrison at least would likely have degraded regardless of other events.

  [150] Modern OTL Nanjing was officially known as Jiangning under the Qing dynasty.

  [151] Not OTL’s Hyojang, who like OTL died young, but a third son (after the mad Prince Sado) who King Yeongjo didn’t have in OTL and named after his deceased first son. See Chapter #47 in Volume 1 for more details.

  [152] In OTL Appalachian ginseng was the major commodity of the ‘Old China Trade’ between the United States and Qing China. It allowed America to have a considerable trade without resorting to morally repugnant trade goods like opium, which in turn meant that America had some of the best diplomatic relations (such as they were) of any European or European-derived power with China prior to its opening. In TTL, the BEIC (which includes American interests) has this advantage instead, and has more trade capital to further build up ginseng cultivation in the Empire.

  [153] TTL’s New York Stock Exchange was formed in 1796 in response to the expansion of the American economy due to gearing up to assist Britain in the early stages of the Jacobin Wars. Unlike OTL its building is on Nassau Street rather than the neighbouring Wall Street.

  [154] This is of course pretty much exactly what did happen in OTL during the Opium Wars – but that was both after a further four decades of decline, and besides this timeline has not seen the level of decay OTL saw under Qianlong and Jiaqing, either. Though diminished from her own self-image, China is certainly not a trivial opponent.

  [155] Marleburgensian = Latinised adjective of ‘Marlborough’, i.e. the period in which John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough was chief power in the land. Note that he is however usually referred to as ‘Churchill’ not ‘Marlborough’ for reasons which will become clear.

  [156] John Alexander was not, in fact, in command of the American contingent at the time when they came to Britain, only being a colonel. The author has either ignored this due to the fact that Alexander is inextricably linked with the American participation in repelling the invasion in the public mind (and became a more significant figure later), or it is an actual mistake by the author.

  [157] In OTL when the Palace of Westminster was burned down in 1834, a neoclassical style was considered (at the time being popular, cf. the U.S. Capitol) but was rejected in favour of the present neo-Gothic building, as neoclassical style was too associated with republicanism. In TTL, with no United States and with the Revolutionary French less enamoured of aping Roman and Greek styles, this factor does not exist; expect the new Whitehall to look more like a cross between the government districts of OTL Washington DC and Paris than anything recognisable to an OTL Englishman.

  [158] Including most of the Mittelbund members and the Austrian Hapsburg dominions.

  [159] In OTL the North Briton was founded by John Wilkes in mockery of The Briton, an official government paper released by the Earl of Bute, then the Prime Minister under George III, referring to the fact that a politically-correct term for Scotland at the time was “North Britain” (to emphasise the unity of the Kingdom of Great Britain) and that Bute was Scottish. In TTL its foundation is similar, although Bute was only the Leader of the Opposition and The Briton was instead a Tory opposition paper.

  [160] As in OTL; volcanic eruptions are not affected by butterflies a century or so old.

  [161] “The Hanoverian Dominions” is a common term, especially in the 20th century, used to collectively refer to Great Britain and the Empire of North America, and to a lesser extent Ireland, Iceland and Hanover itself. Note that the term “British Empire” would be viewed by the inhabitants of this timeline as crass, outdated and inaccurate, belonging solely to the period before 1751.

  [162] The first President-General, who served from 1785 to 1794.

  [163] Spanish demonym for people from Lima.

  [164] Confluencia is roughly equivalent to the modern OTL Argentine prov
ince of Neuquén. La Frontera province as a whole would be equivalent to both Neuquén and Rio Negro provinces in OTL.

  [165] In OTL the Mapuche successfully resisted Tahuantinsuya (Inca), Spanish and Chilean attempts to colonise their territory (called Araucanía by the Spanish) from the fifteenth century to the late nineteenth. They also hampered Argentine and Chilean attempts to colonise Patagonia because they expanded into the territory themselves in the early 19th century and assimilated many of the Tehuelche and other natives, presenting a stronger front against the two countries. In TTL, the colonisation of Patagonia at least on the Argentine (Platinean) side is much easier, because it is launched before the Mapuche have tried to expand eastwards. The Tehuelche also enjoyed good relations with the Welsh colonists of Patagonia in the 1860s of OTL, so it is not too unlikely that they would have been fairly amiable to Meridian colonists – at least at first, and particularly given there were other natives accompanying them.

  [166] OTL, the French Republic abolished slavery and the slave trade, but they were later restored by Napoleon. In TTL the Linnaean ideology of the French Latin Republic means that there would be no ideological incentive to attack the institution of black slavery – and besides, Lisieux would go on to enslave (white) political dissidents in the shipyards of Toulon and Marseilles in all but name.

  [167] That is, the islands in the Pacific Ocean. An example of this kind of activity in OTL is the Peruvian raids on Easter Island in the 1860s, which ultimately wiped out what people they left through disease.

  [168] Spanish demonym for Buenos Aires.

  [169] Term used in TTL for ‘realpolitick’.

  [170] Note in OTL Andong was renamed Dandong “Red East” by Communist China as the former name was ‘imperialist’. Dandong also happens to be the twin town of Doncaster.

  [171] OTL modern Jilin, a Chinese transliteration of the Manchu name.

  [172] i.e. the Han Chinese Green Standard Army and the Manchu Banners, although note the ethnic identification had become considerably blurred by this point.

  [173] The areas China conquered from Konbaung Burma in 1769 and annexed to the Empire after carving the rest up into the puppet states of Toungoo Burma, Tougou and Pegu. Named for the dominant Shan ethnic group, though in Chinese it also punningly suggests ‘mountainous land’.

  [174] Nowadays part of the conurbation known as Wuhan in modern OTL China.

  [175] Hu Kwa is the nickname of an OTL Hong trader (and survives as the name of a tea named for him), although the OTL version was somewhat younger; he inherited the name and business of his father, so this ATL ‘brother’ carries the same name and roughly the same wealth. According to some, he was the richest man in the world at the time.

  [176] Modern OTL Zhuzhou.

  [177] In OTL this name was used by a group of ethnic Zhuang bandits and mercenaries who fought in both the Taiping Rebellion and then against the French in Vietnam.

  [178] The other three being the compass, papermaking and printing. Note that the concept of the Four Great Inventions is a western Sinophile one and dates from long after the POD of this timeline but has come about in parallel, as the reasons behind the choice of those four are no different (that they were long thought to be European in origin by Europeans and it was humbling to learn the Chinese had got there first).

  [179] In TTL tarmac was invented by a man named Taggert rather than Macadam.

  [180] “Optelegraphy”, “Optel” for short, is a retroactive term to describe semaphore and similar mechanical telegraphy systems – obviously, it only showed up after the development of later more advanced communication systems to distinguish it from them (previously just having been called ‘telegraphy’), but the author here uses an anachronism for his modern readers.

  [181] Recall this is basically an explanation of photosynthesis, but with some moral overtones about the dangers of depriving urban areas of dephlogisticated air/Elluftium (oxygen).

  [182] Imperial Russian unit of length very close to a kilometre.

  [183] Indochina, properly, means all of mainland Southeast Asia, although in OTL this has become somewhat obscured by the fact that the French possessions in the region (modern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) became known as “French Indochina”; while this was originally intended as meaning “the part of Indochina that is French”, over the years many people have mistook this as meaning that only Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are “Indochina”. Nusantara on the other hand is an Indonesian name to describe all the islands that make up modern Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste. The more usual term in English in OTL is “the Malay Archipelago” but this has not been adopted in TTL.

  [184] Like many authors Ostrakov is rather brushing over a number of awkward counterpoints to his thesis, especially Sino-Vietnamese relations in both OTL and TTL.

  [185] “Burmese” is a general term which can take in peoples such as the Mon, Karen and Shan, whereas “Burman” (nowadays in OTL normally called “Bamar”) refers to the specific ethnic group dominant in Burma. This dichotomy does not exist in Burmese itself, where the term “Myanmar” is used as a general term for all the ethnic groups and the nation. The fact that English has confused the two illustrates both how powerful the Burmans were within the whole of ‘Myanmar’ (which can be compared to modern confusions of ‘England’ with ‘Britain’ or ‘Holland’ with ‘the Netherlands’) and also the fact that the English-speaking history of ‘Myanmar’ has mainly unfolded through clashes between the British and the Burmans of Ava. In TTL the Burmans are allies of the BEIC rather than enemies but the close association delivers the same confusing terminology as OTL.

  [186] Pegu is the city which is the capital of the state, but general naming terminology in Indochinese history has tended to ascribe the city name to the whole state. The reason for this is that often the “states” are actually just very long-lasting dynastic or regional factions all struggling for power in what is theoretically one nation; Europe’s late-period Holy Roman Empire is not a perfect analogy, but there are some similarities. Pegu is also known as the Third Kingdom of Hanthawaddy because this is the second time it has been restored after being conquered by Ava.

  [187] As with footnote 185, Dai Viet (modern Vietnam) had confusing naming terminology in the 17th-19th centuries. As far as its people were concerned, it was all one country, but was locked in a perpetual civil war between the Nguyen Lords of the south and the Trinh Lords of the north, with the largely powerless Le Emperors getting caught in the middle. Because of this division, Europeans thought of the two parts as two separate countries, which they named Tonkin in the north and Cochinchina in the south. (In OTL the definition “Cochinchina” was later restricted to the very southernmost part of Vietnam, with the rest of the south being called Annam, which is really one of the many alternative names for all Vietnam).

  [188] The Gorkhas (Gurkhas) did some of this during their OTL invasions of Tibet in 1788 and 1791. Their motivations in sacking Buddhist monasteries can be debated, much as with the Vikings raiding Christian monasteries a millennium earlier; there was probably some religious component, but mainly it was simply seeking loot. In OTL the Gorkhas were driven off by Chinese armies sent by the Qianlong Emperor, who had more of a vested interest in Tibet than the Chinese Emperors of TTL. This is not due to differences of personality, but simply because in TTL the Tibetans never rebelled and killed the Chinese Ambans (residents) in 1751. China did intervene to protect Tibet from the Gorkhas in the 1780s, but this was a much more minor affair than the OTL wars.

  [189] OTL Uthumphon did cease being a monk twice, once in order to be king and then again to help fight in the war with the Burmese. In TTL he simply does so a third time.

  [190] This reflects later events in TTL; the Zhuang people in southern China are China’s largest minority in OTL and share a common linguistic heritage with the Thais of Thailand (the broader ‘Southwestern Tai’ language group), but diverged over two millennia ago and few in O
TL would describe the Zhuang as ‘Thai’ or try to claim any kind of common national consciousness. As seen in much of the late 19th century European nationalism of OTL though, all sorts of claims of common heritage can be made to justify policy…

  [191] In OTL Mergui is now in Burma/Myanmar, a legacy of the 1760s wars going differently.

  [192] OTL, all of the southern Malay peninsula (i.e., the western half of modern Malaysia) was British or British-influenced by this point, and the BEIC repelled Siamese attacks – the Thai states had had ambitions on Perak and Kedah for more than a hundred years. The British dominance was due to the fact that spheres of influence had been delineated after the Napoleonic Wars; prior to this both British and Dutch outposts existed there. In TTL there has been no such agreement, meaning the British, Dutch and French all have outposts on the peninsula and the states there are divided in influence between the three. This makes an Ayutthai conqueror’s job a lot easier.

  [193] Although this is the first of several references Dr Lombardi makes to supplementary transmissions from Cpt. C. G. Nuttall (refer to file #25723-Charlie-Delta) no record of any such addendums to the TimeLine L data has been found in the archives of the Thande Institute. Investigations are ongoing.

  [194] In-timeline name for Rococo. Although Rococo itself predates the POD, the name only dates back to the 19th century in OTL and was first applied in a disparaging retrospective way. ‘Versaillaise’ as a name reflects the fact that the Palais de Versailles was perhaps the style’s most famous execution, as well as the more nostalgic attitude to it in TTL (not least due to Lisieux’s demolition of the Palais).

  [195] In OTL ‘nostalgia’ was actually classed as a mental disorder until relatively recently, and in LTTW the capital-N version continues to carry that meaning – a disorder in which someone is obsessed with the past and cares nothing for the present.

  [196] Bisgana is a Portuguese rendition of “Vijayanagara”, the Hindu empire which ruled southern India from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century (the name is later reused in TTL). Although the book here does not mention it due to its focus on Europe, Bisgana architecture itself underwent a revival in India due to the French’s tolerant attitude towards Hindus, which led to them being placed at odds in the public imagination with the British who mainly ruled over Muslim states (see Chapter #87). Prior to this Mughal and other Muslim rule had led to elements of Bisgana architecture being suppressed due to the fact that it commonly depicted living creatures, forbidden in Islam.