Wow.

So I have been mentally chewing on an… uh… alternate historical solar/steam punk science fiction idea

Basically, modern world mad scientist is working on teleportation tech when something goes wrong and HE gets sent… only he doesn’t end up six feet to the left, he ends up about 200 years in the past in an alternate timeline.

Timeline is too different for him to predict historical events, but he’s presented with an opportunity to steer the Industrial Revolution and evade climate change.

The timeline divergence was SUPPOSED to be something that would eventually allow the Confederacy to outlast the Union in the civil war, and make the Union agree to negotiate.

But the more I learn and think about it, the more impossible that seems.

I think the confederacy really didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell, and here’s why:

The confederacy really couldn’t win without external help. They banked on cotton being able to bankroll the confederate war effort and strongarm Europe into formally recognizing the CSA, but Britain had Egyptian and Indian cotton to fall back on, and the European citizenry were so vehemently against slavery that they were willing to endure a whole-ass famine in at least one example. Britain was against slavery. France was against slavery. When THOSE two agreed on something, hoo boy.

Barring economic strong arming of Europe into CSA recognition, CSA had to undertake risky and flashy invasions of Union territory to appear strong enough to meaningfully oppose the Union indefinitely, encouraging Europe to offer to arbitrate (aka “ok kids, that’s enough”) or to intervene (aka “goddammit I said that’s ENOUGH”).

But the CSA had no international or domestic economic leg to stand on, a relatively small army, and shit diplomacy, because nobody liked slavers.

So Davis inevitably wound up overextending himself in a doomed attempt to impress Europe.

And even if he HADN’T, and had instead given non-critical ground to hold onto strategic ground, and dug in instead of strike outward, and essentially turned the CSA into a gigantic geologic fortress nation…

The places that would have wound up occupied by the Union long-term would have developed a stark economic contrast compared to the catastrophically poor CSA, and that would erode popular support.

So then you end up with a slaver fanatic Lost Cause Insurgency that can barely recruit, is practically giving the union propaganda opportunities, AND would have taken the heat off the South, making Reconstruction a whole lot less “fuck you, South” and more “Wow, South, the Lost Cause really fucked you up, let’s get you fixed up.”

So you’d end up with a much nicer replacement for the Jim Crowe era.

The South would have had to almost completely switch to grain crops somehow. Britain would need to have a different monarch that was more ambivalent about slavery at the very least. They’d then have to get around the Union naval blockade. THEN they’d have to compete with union grain prices.

The CSA really was over before it started.

So now I’m stuck trying to find something else to get what I want for the story; a severely weakened US that fails to generate the Standard Oil Company, due to a much less dramatic industrial evolution stateside.

No Rockefeller empire a long delay in good automobiles, airplanes, etc because either someone in the Middle East or Russia will have to figure out petroleum…

Middle East was dominated by a heavily declining Ottoman Empire, and sciences were also in decline

And Russia seems to have been torn between clinging to antiquated ideals and embracing modern ones, and looks like it was embroiled in a culture war rife with censorship, suspicion, and a weird national education system that prioritized religion? Shit seems to have been pretty fucked up, is what I’m seeing.

So I’m going to say neither of them produce a Petroleum Empire.

Without petrol, the world is stuck with steam engines, and the only air vehicles that could handle that kind of weight were airships.

And THAT’s where I want to end up. In a world where the protagonist can jump in and instead of killing the whale oil lamp with petroleum, he kills it with the lightbulb, powered by steam, boiled by concentrative solar power (aka gigantic mirror arrays).

Bypassing oil entirely. Solar Steampunk.

So if there’s really no believable way for the CSA to have lasted long enough to force arbitration, what else could I do instead to make the world I need?

Or, what would need to have been different for the CSA to have been in a position where success was possible?

CSA needed international recognition and money. International recognition would need to come from powerful slaver-friendly nations, and money would need to come from selling a crop other than cotton.

…Russia?

@GlytchMeister Did you ever read "Sahara" by Clive Cussler? You may have seen the movie, it was based on, Matthew McConaughey was DIrk Pitt? The book went into the CSA gold and the machinations behind it. If you haven't, I recc reading it.

The movie was VERY loosely based on the book. Almost unrecognizable to the point that Cussler sued the production company. Still, try that LOL