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COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY
What If Germany Had Colonised China in the 19th Century?
Would global geopolitics be utterly different now? Or have ended up much the same?
Counterfactual and time machine fiction looking back at the 20th century tends to focus on the key figures and events of the World Wars, and how changes might have shaped the course of history.
What if the Black Hand had failed to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What if a time traveller could be dispatched to eliminate a young Adolf Hitler? To issue an early warning at Pearl Harbor, or impose different terms at Versailles?
How about we follow the timeline further back, though, and look at the tensions of national psychology and geopolitics that set the stage for the antagonistic foreplay preceding the First World War? Because by the time Franz Ferdinand’s death serves as the immediate trigger, or pretext, for hostilities in Europe, the spring has already been tensed too far, hasn’t it?
France and Britain have established their colonial empires. Spain, having once been top dog, has lost its own over the course of the 19th century, receiving the final KO in the humiliating war against the USA over Cuban independence in 1898.
