There's a point to be made about what I think is the reason for that. The Spanish caste system distinguished between Europeans born in the colonies and Europeans born in Spain itself. It was intentionally designed to prevent the formation of local power structures that might opportunistically...
It must be noted that there was a bit more friction in some of these examples than people like to remember. General Jabłonowski was subject to some amount of racist taunting during his education in France, for example. But that's par for the course, given the time (Napoleon himself was subject...
That's basically OTL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesaropapism
Now, with that said, the control was never total. There was always some push-back against that kind of rule. Cementing it would require some harsh imperial-clerical feud--probably the Byzantine Iconoclasm?
Kristina also presented herself as a candidate for the Polish throne, so, per local custom, she'd reign there as Rex in such a timeline. Oddly enough, there's not necessarily a conflict with your Naples idea--Louis the Great was King of Poland and also ruled over Naples, so she could invoke that...
https://hal.science/hal-02318180/document
France's fertility dropped off a cliff around 1760. As to secularization, it seems there was simply a widespread loss of belief in Catholicism in the 18th century shortly before that. Looking at last wills, as the attached document does, there is a very...
It would also have implications for Austria. If Galicia is not joined to the restored Poland, then Poland becomes an enemy of Austria (perhaps even allied to the Tsar; IOTL pro-Tsar sentiment did exist after 1846), if it is, then it changes the balance between the various Slav nationalities in...
I would agree that this is the most plausible scenario for a successful November Uprising, but there’s a few added hurdles beyond British and French disinterest.
Per the French historian Louis Leger ("History of Austro-Hungary to 1889"), the biggest single problem is that Italy rose up in...
The issue with that is that Italian soil (and soil across much of the Mediterranean), fundamentally, doesn't have that problem. It's relatively thin. That's why Romans generally used scratch plow rather than heavier wheeled plow (though the latter were not unknown).
I say generally because...
Did any Spanish conquistador remark on the water-resistant quality of the clothing during the conquest of Mesoamerica? Pedro de Alvarado, given the rather large number of Aztec auxiliaries under his command during the subjugation of Guatemala, would seem to be the natural candidate for that. I'm...
Mexico's ability to project power into its northern territories was always flimsy, as was its willingness to invest in them--hence the Californios actually being somewhat open to US annexation by the 1840s simply because Mexico City was very remote from them. New Orleans, being downstream of...
There's a difference between promoting pogroms and speculating about whether they'd be amorally effective in achieving a certain goal. For example, one can say that, if the USSR had reorganized itself as a unitary (rather than federal) state and ethnically cleansed the Baltic countries, Ukraine...
IIRC, from other times this has been discussed, the answer tends to be "Yes, but it would have a hard time escaping the blast."
(EDIT: Though I wonder if you could address that problem by putting a parachute on the bomb itself, as was done for the Tsar Bomba test, to delay the blast and let the...
Wouldn't a balkanized US in the 1780s/1790s just get reabsorbed by Britain, if not outright politically than economically subjugated? New England drifting into trade and military agreements with the mother country, the rest becoming economically dominated like Latin America became? Louisiana...
The early Cold War will certainly look a lot different if the taboo looks different. The obvious change is that the US Army and Navy might not be drawn down as much as IOTL--leaving them more ready to react in Korea.
But that assumes the late 1940s progress in a recognizable way, which they...