by Tom Anderson
[197] In OTL’s transliteration, the Tulou of the Hakka people, or ‘Hakka Han’.
[198] Unlike OTL in which the Gothic Revival achieved mainstream success across much of Europe. The comparative failure of Gothic Revival in TTL is largely due to the fact that Neoclassicism is not discredited in conservative eyes by being associated with the French Revolution and Napoleon (the “Empire Style”).
[199] In some ways Utilitarianism can be thought of as “Brutalism if it had been invented before the usage of concrete became popular”.
[200] “Pixellated”, in OTL terms.
[201] The Nouvelle Salon is Restoration France’s chief art museum – Lisieux had the Louvre demolished of course.
[202] American elections are organised under a modified form of the provisions of the Triennial Act of 1694, i.e. elections must be held no more than three years apart. In Great Britain this was later revised by the Septennial Act of 1716 (elections every seven years) as holding them every three years meant a near-continuous state of political campaigning and heightened partisanship known as the “Rage of Party” (modern Americans, stop if any of this sounds familiar). However, by the time of 1788 when the Continental Parliament was organised, people had largely forgotten about this and the provisions of the American Constitution were partly drawn up by British radicals who thought more frequent parliaments were a good thing (in modern OTL Britain Parliaments have since been limited to five-year terms). However, because there tends to be a gap of about four months in between the dissolution of Parliament and the opening of a new one (a month’s campaigning and three months to collect and count the votes – remember this is the early 19th century), the space between elections can be somewhat longer than three years, and this is generally the case as American Lords President usually run their term right to the end to get as much work out of this truncated parliament as possible.
[203] A euphemistic term for defence minister; in theory the regiments raised in America on the authority of the Cornubia Palace are part of the British Army and therefore under the ultimate command of the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Horse Guards. In practice, of course, this is no longer true – particularly given the destruction of Horse Guards and limited Marleburgensian reconstruction only barely being able to impose its authority on the army in Britain, never mind anywhere else. However the Patriots thanks to their political background tend to at least throw bones to the illusion of a tighter relationship with the mother country than the Empire in fact has anymore.
[204] Wade Hampton died as the richest man in the USA in OTL.
[205] Largely groundless rumours. While Churchill certainly did use the PSCs to crush popular demonstrations, he did not support them over using money to buy food to feed the people, which he saw as a great moral crusade.
[206] In OTL Massachusetts formerly included Maine as a territory, which was eventually split off as its own state; in TTL the two were instead divided into North Massachussetts (OTL Maine, more or less) and South Massachusetts (OTL Massachusetts).
[207] Wisconsin Territory at this point is a vaguely defined stripe of New York confederal territory taking in roughly OTL southern Minnesota, South Dakota and northern Wyoming.
[208] The Constitution of the Empire of North America devolves the decisions over how elections are organised to the Confederate assemblies to the individual confederations. Carolina has chosen a model with fixed five-year terms rather than one where the ruling party can call an election at any time.
[209] Unlike the Speaker in Westminster or the Continental Parliament, this is a post essentially equivalent to prime minister (compare its use in the OTL USA).
[210] The rattlesnake is considered America’s main national animal in TTL; it is represented on the royal and imperial banner (alongside England’s three lions, Scotland’s lion rampant and Ireland’s harp) with five coiled rattlesnakes for the five confederations.
[211] In OTL Wolfgang von Kempelen was the inventor of the Mechanical Turk, a hoax chess-playing ‘automaton’ that was in fact controlled from within by a hidden operator. In TTL he built a similar device, although butterflies mean it is not constructed with a Turkish theme and is also more capable than OTL’s, being able to fake other activities as well as chess-playing.
[212] In OTL we might say some of them were autistic, although orthodox psychology (‘alienism’) in TTL does not label it in such a way as a discrete state, instead classifying such cases more according to a gradualist continuum.
[213] Primo Uomo is the male analogue of Prima Donna. Essentially the OTL proverbial comparison of Prima Donna = high-strung and egotistical is being applied earlier on (perhaps the use of the Italian term may be related to Dragonetti’s presence) but is being masculinised rather than left in its original form.
[214] The area of modern OTL Kazakhstan was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries divided into three separate ‘states’ known as the Great, Middle and Little Jüz. Whether these are best thought of as consisting of simply three groups of Kazakhs or of distinct ethnic groups is one of those questions that depends very much on who you ask.
[215] Ablai Khan did this in OTL to the Qianlong Emperor. Ablai was indeed a great ruler who united the three Kazakh Jüz and stood up to Catherine the Great. However, unlike TTL, he did not have a son of similar or greater abilities and ambitions.
[216] Although Luvsanchültimjigmed has the same name as the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu who lived at this time in OTL, he is not the same person. Unlike OTL, thanks to the lack of a Qianlong Emperor and the Daguo Emperor’s more discerning approach to the Dzungar threat, there was never a Mongol rebellion led by Chingünjav, and therefore there was never the imperial decree that Jebtsundamba Khutuktu reincarnations would from now on be only found in Tibet rather than being drawn from the Mongols themselves. Mongolia in TTL is therefore somewhat freer and less resentful of the Chinese than OTL, although there are always angry young men…
[217] The Feng uprising hasn’t started yet at this point, so there are still only two claimant emperors.
[218] In OTL the Mongolians did this to their Jebtsundamba Khutuktu about a century later, in 1911, when they broke away from China. Bogd Khan is more of a title than a name, so is used in both cases.
[219] I.e., Japanese. The term ‘Japanese’ does exist in TTL and would be recognised but is considered an archaism, like someone in the present of OTL referring to Thailand as ‘Siam’.
[220] Known as the Sea of Japan in OTL.
[221] In OTL at this point the Daimyo was Shimazu Narioki, but by this point the butterflies genetic and otherwise mean that the man in question shares little with the OTL figure, and for example is a few years younger.
[222] It’s disputed even in OTL, so imagine how much more it is in TTL thanks to a combination of records being destroyed and archaeological analysis being politicised to reflect a point of view…
[223] Occasionally one sees different spellings, as here with gaidzin for gaijin, which reflects the fact that in TTL these words were transliterated into English via the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.
[224] Luddism.
[225] This sentence is a combination of exaggeration and outright lies by the biased author – see Nuttall’s disclaimer.
[226] Arguably the same applies to the Coreans, of course, but the writer would be careful not to say so.
[227] One example of this (from OTL) is how in the late eighteenth century, a new kind of billiards was invented in France using a spring-loaded launcher and dubbed Billiards japonais ‘Japanese Billiards’ despite having nothing to do with Japan, simply implying it was new and exotic. In a strange historical irony, this game went on to be the probable inspiration for the actual Japanese ball game of pachinko.
[228] Mostly propaganda nonsense, but by the point the book was published many people do genuinely believe the Yapontsi, or rather the ‘Old Japanese’, to be a people intrinsically incapable of adapting to change – a far cry from views of them in OTL.
[
229] Bushido in OTL, another example of Russian transliteration creeping in.
[230] Russified form of hara-kiri, the old name in the West for the practice (and still used in OTL Russia) whereas nowadays it is more commonly known as seppuku.
[231] Which is what it still means in OTL. In fact even earlier the term ronin referred to serfs who had fled their master’s land (hence originally being particularly insulting when applied to upper-class samurai).
[232] The disasters also happened in OTL, though the response didn’t.
[233] ‘Katana’ is actually just the Japanese word for any sword, but in TTL as in OTL it has come to refer specifically to Japanese sabres.
[234] Modern OTL Yingkou.
[235] Sedan chair.
[236] Modern OTL Kunming.
[237] This is either an inappropriate choice of words on the part of the author or else a misunderstanding on his part – the Phoenix Men refers to the cabal that launched the Feng dynasty and consisted of both Chinese and European traders. If anything, it would refer more to the Chinese than the Europeans, and certainly it wasn’t a union only of European traders as he appears to suggest.
[238] Again this is at best an oversimplification – while the Dutch were unpopular with the other trading companies in India for a perceived interventionist streak (having nothing to lose as they had only a few minor trading posts in continental India, as opposed to their possession of Ceylon) they were excluded before the Indian Board was set up, not after it had been established.
[239] The ICPA is essentially a more ambitious and organised form of the agreements in OTL that existed in informal anti-pirate coalitions both in the Barbary Wars of the late 18th century and later in the form of resolutions at the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle after the Napoleonic Wars.
[240] In OTL at this point the Burmans operated a small fleet of ships mainly for transporting troops up and down the Irrawaddy River; in TTL they instead have acquired a small blue-water navy via their contacts with the British East India Company (the Irrawaddy Delta remains under the control of independent Pegu).
[241] This also happened in OTL, but later on due to Malta’s later conquest.
[242] In OTL the Swedish East India Company finally became defunct in 1813.
[243] Modern OTL Serampore. In OTL it was named ‘Frederiksnagore’ after Frederick V, who died young in OTL and the throne instead passed to his brother Christian VII.
[244] Modern OTL Tharangambadi.
[245] Modern OTL Tainan, Taiwan.
[246] The Mascarene Islands consist chiefly of Île de France and Île Bourbon (modern OTL Mauritius and Réunion respectively).
[247] An ATL cousin of OTL’s Yuri Lisyansky, a Ukrainian-Russian explorer who was part of the first Russian expedition to circumnavigate the world in 1803-6, and defeated the Tlingit Indians at the Battle of Sitka in 1804. In TTL the Tlingit have not turned on Aleksandr Baranov’s Russian colony in Alyeska (yet) due to the increased number of Russians present thanks to the investment in the RLPC.
[248] Known as Walvis Bay in OTL.
[249] The Bravahul is the only river in modern Namibia noted on 18th century maps, and appears to be identified with the modern-named Kuiseb River which flows into Walvis Bay.
[250] In OTL he ran afoul of new strict censorship laws in 1799 and fled to France, where he became a famous geographer and journalist under the Frenchified name Conrad Malte-Brun. In TTL he has become an active explorer rather than solely a geographer and scientist and remains on good terms with the Danish crown.
[251] Modern OTL Tôlanaro. Madagascar in TTL is considerably more chaotic than OTL because Moritz Benyovsky (or as he is generally spelled in OTL, Móric Benyovsky) never came there and united the island. The great Madagascan native king who built upon Benyovsky’s efforts to establish a united kingdom, Andrianampoinimerina, also died young, and the result is that the tribes have presently exhausted themselves in a round of internecine warfare.
[252] No such addendum is found in the mission records, although this is more likely due to it being ‘accidentally’ shredded just prior to its mandatory declassification under the Freedom of Information Act, rather than actually being missing from the original transmission. Such incidents have proved to be depressingly common at the Thande Institute.
[253] TTL term for car (in the modern sense).
[254] This author also has a problem with mixed metaphors.
[255] This was a contemporary observation by Philip Bulkeley, as previously quoted in Interlude #10 by P.J. Hartley, but Pelletier (writing for a French audience less informed about British authors) does not appear to feel the need to clarify that he did not coin it himself.
[256] In this sense in OTL terminology one could describe the Bleus as technocrats.
[257] Again, an unattributed Bulkeley quote…
[258] The OTL Place de la Concorde.
[259] The OTL Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, after having gone through a couple of renamings and some dreadful ‘architectural redevelopment’ by the Lisieux regime still not reversed at this point.
[260] Le Marais(‘the marsh’) is historically one of the aristocratic districts of Paris, corresponding to parts of the modern OTL 3rd and 4th arrondissements.
[261] ‘Freebooter’ is the term usually used in TTL (the OTL term ‘filibuster’ which is preferred in America is actually the same word, just run through Dutch, Spanish and English transliterations).
[262] This happened in OTL as well, and was ultimately responsible for Texas’ colonisation by Americans (under very tenuous Mexican auspices) to fill the void.
[263] Despite this description, Ireland is getting off a lot better than OTL. This is because butterflies mean that the blight is hitting earlier than OTL and is a weaker strain. In the OTL famine of the 1840s Irish potatoes particularly suffered due to lack of diversity of varieties, yet some of these varieties had still been farmed as recently as the 1810s and this is also true in TTL. Also, increased trade with England and America means additional varieties of potatoes have been introduced, sometimes by accident. In OTL as much as 80% of the harvest failed, with catastrophic consequences.
[264] Which essentially represents more of a closed-off, self-contained government district than the Whitehall that had preceded it, in some ways attempting to evoke the old Whitehall Palace of ages past.
[265] Twenty years earlier than OTL, due to A) the earlier Russian and American exploration of the Oregon Country spurring the Spanish to invoke their claims, B) the fact that the Empire of New Spain is a unitary and relatively stable entity, unlike OTL’s Mexico which was still in its war of independence at this point and rather fragile, and C) the fact that Charles controversially moved the capital of Mexico to Monterey after the burning of the City of Mexico in order to deliver the northward focus he wanted. He got it. And he’ll soon regret it.
[266] Tressino’s pun is wittier in its context than it may sound to a modern resident of OTL, as the term ‘Byzantine Empire’ for the Eastern Roman Empire was still only bandied about by scholars, and the most common term for it in the West was the somewhat inaccurate “Greek Empire”.
[267] Note from Dr Bruno Lombardi: the obliterated word appears to have been blacked out by censors, which has been a problem with our recent acquisitions due to [CLASSIFIED BY THANDE INSTITUTE; SECURITY CLEARANCE LEVEL SIX REQUIRED]. Attempted reconstruction by Dr Pylos and myself recovered that the obliterated word began and ended with a lowercase letter N, i.e. ‘n———n’. Dr Pylos hypothesises, measuring the font, that the removed word was ‘nationalism’, which keys well with the other censorship we have seen.
[268] Dr Pylos reports that the censored word appears to be – somewhat absurdly and recursively – ‘censorship’.
[269] In OTL this continued throughout the nineteenth century, with predictably disastrous results.
[270] Lundy. Although it is somewhat debatable whether the forces in question (Barbary pirates out of Algiers) can be sai
d to be ‘Ottoman’, the writer here invokes the benefit of the doubt to support his point.
[271] In OTL the Janissaries indeed overthrew the reformist Sultan Selim III in 1807. They had previously overthrown Mustafa II and Ahmed III a century before.
[272] Today in OTL this region is usually just called Banat and roughly corresponds to eastern Serbia and western Romania; its capital was the modern Romanian city of Timișoara, also called Temesvár in Hungarian.
[273] The situation was different in OTL as Catherine was Empress of Russia and Poland’s partition was very different. However, a war was also instigated around this time which resulted in similar results – though the Crimea was later annexed, in violation of the original treaty, by Russia in 1783.
[274] The term used in TTL for an asexual person.
[275] This all happened in OTL as well in the early to mid 18th century. In OTL the Ottomans (mostly Muhammad Ali’s Egyptians) destroyed the first Saudi state in the 1810s.
[276] A very significant change to OTL is that Ali Bey Al-Kabir was never Mameluke ruler of Egypt and never rebelled against the Ottomans in the 1760s, and also that there was no French expedition to Egypt. Therefore Egypt is still under the eighteenth century system of being nominally under Mameluke rule (but in practice an integral part of the Empire) and the Ottomans have not significantly interfered with it. Also, the Rosetta Stone was never discovered and hieroglyphics remain a mystery as of the 1800s, meaning Egyptology is less popular in the nineteenth century.
[277] In OTL Sennar was conquered by Muhammad Ali’s son Ismail in 1821.