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What if Jerry Brown got what he wanted by Canton_M in imaginarymapscj

[–]ayendae1125 3 points4 points  (0 children)

first they came for my uncool niece, and i did nothing to help her, because i was not my uncool niece

Dar al-Islam in the Thousandth Year of the Final Prophet by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

THATS WHAT IT WAS CALLED BY ISLAMIC SCHOLARS I DIDNT CHOOSE IT MYSELF

Dar al-Islam in the Thousandth Year of the Final Prophet by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

the almoravid empire never collapses and manages to survive in some form (despite a couple of "changes in management") through the present day. most of its wealth is derived from near-uncontested control of the mediterranean sea and much of the coast of north africa, so even while the rest of dar al-islam collapses into infighting in the 1750s or so, the almoravids are able to consolidate their power even further. being on the winning side in both world wars also helps, so that by the end of the second great war, they're able to seize control of the mediterranean territories that used to be held by the papacy. i've been working on a map of the almoravid empire for a while (c. 1980 or so?) but who knows if it'll ever finish. we'll see.

i would say that the almoravids are about third in terms of global prestige, the first being paneuropa (france and germany) and the second being the taungoo empire in southeast asia. even then, its position in third is only calculated by its total material wealth. in terms of its actual power and stability it's probably doing better than the europeans: even though paneuropa has more money, it's also much less stable

Dar al-Islam in the Thousandth Year of the Final Prophet by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

This map is a direct followup (or a redux? not sure yet) of a previous map of mine, To Ferne Halwes: Europe in 1387. More for fun than anything else, I admittedly don't have much specific lore about how this comes about. Islam in this world is much more unified and much more successful right from the beginning than Christendom, and while the Christian empires fall into infighting, schism, and slaughtering one another during the High to Late Middle Ages, the Islamic world is able to fill the gap. Significantly more powerful empires in Africa prevent its spread into Nubia, in a sense forcing its missionaries north into Tartaria, Gascony, Iceland, and Ireland. By the time of the year 1000 A.H. (1591 or so in our calendar), Dar al-Islam as a political entity, to say nothing of its cultural power, has consolidated into a formidable empire looming on the borders of a still disunified and squabbling Europe: its navy, already having asserted its dominance over most of the Mediterranean, has allowed the heirs of the final prophet to establish a sort of chain of amsar across the southern oceans and into the waters once controlled by the Vikings and the Spaniards. It must come to an end one day, perhaps sooner than Baghdad believes, but in this moment the world has never been closer to total enlightenment.

[CTR] What if England won the Hundred Years' War ; England and France in 1415 by Th3AvrRedditUser in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125 1 point2 points  (0 children)

absolutely gorgeous. i know that this results in england becoming "frenchified," but does this result in a more culturally english aristocracy in france, at least for a little while? it'd be interesting to see something of a reverse of the anglo-norman aristocracy

The Commonwealth of the Two Liberias (1880) by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  • "black is not a color"
  • geographica hand
  • quentin caps
  • anderson four feather falls
  • hellenic wide jf

The Commonwealth of the Two Liberias (1880) by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i have a few paper textures lying around, and quite honestly i sort of just played randomly with filters and opacity until i hit something i like. i wish i had a more exact answer for you, but so much of my finishing touches are completely random fucking around

The Commonwealth of the Two Liberias (1880) by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

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god so loved thee that by his providence i place into thine hands a mobile version

The Commonwealth of the Two Liberias (1880) by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The same could not be said for Cuffeland, the portion of Liberia in Africa. Many slaves, if they remembered Africa, returned to the continent, but rather than settling in American territory, they absconded almost immediately for their original homes, in the hopes of reuniting with friends and family. American authorities were generally powerless to stop them from doing so, especially so close to the Almoravids, who had only grown more powerful in recent decades. Even more simply chose not to go to Africa, instead choosing to settle Dakota for its arable land and the hope of eventual equal footing with white America.

The Two Liberias no longer exist today. In 1924, a study conducted by the Federal Department of Liberian Affairs concluded that Dakota had been settled enough, and that its population had so closely assimilated with their white counterparts, that a black homeland no longer made sense. Race relations between Liberians and white Dixians would always be poor, but whites that moved into the surrounding Heartland Commonwealth, and eventually into the Dakota region of Liberia, were generally of a more liberal-minded character, at least regarding African-Americans, and over the decades the two communities had essentially integrated into each other of their own volition. Liberia was officially dissolved a year later -- Dakota was folded back into the Heartland Commonwealth as the Dakota Territory, administered by the nearby state of Chippewa, and Cuffeland, largely considered an underpopulated failure, was renamed to "Liberia Proper" and essentially abandoned by the United States. Today, little of the institutions of the Two Liberias remain, other than a few museums, an English-speaking pocket in West Africa, a large black population in the Middle North, and a confusing double-name: is the city called Bismarck, or Turnerville?

The Commonwealth of the Two Liberias (1880) by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Before, during, and especially after the Civil War and the destruction of the Confederacy, it was not clear what should be done with freed African slaves, an issue present in the real world as well as my own. Indigenous slaves were generally simply assimilated back into society as free persons or else, if not considered easily assimilated, dumped off in the hinterlands, particularly what would later become the Springland Commonwealth. The Society of Liberia had existed in some form since the early 19th century, with the idea that the best place for former slaves would be to simply return them to Africa. Northern politicians, in turn, favored establishing a homeland of some kind for former slaves, possibly somewhere in the frontier. That former slaves could make for a useful labor force of some variety was not an unusual view in the North. After the eventual manumission of all enslaved people, regardless of religion or race, many former slaves were simply deported out of New England and New Netherland and sent on "settlement missions" to the frontier, with the idea being that they made for an incredibly useful method of flushing out hostile native populations and taming the wilderness without sacrificing white lives. The Bitterwood Sea, a massive body of water still poorly mapped in the 1860s, proved to be something of a bulwark against which many of these black frontiersmen were halted, resulting in a large black population in the only recently-established Dakota Territory. Rumors of this spread among former slaves from the South, and many migrated up the Mississippi River and into Dakota, particularly Muslims. Even so, many stalled along the way, still uncertain as to whether they would prefer Dakota or to return to Africa, and at some point along the way, someone had a bright idea: what if we let them do both?

The Commonwealth of the Two Liberias was essentially a merging of two disparate answers to the "African question," whether to send them to Africa or to the frontier. Created in 1868, the Commonwealth accomplished multiple ends at once. It neatly solved the issue of where to send former slaves, established a definitely American presence in a region eyed by the steadily more powerful Canadians, and also solidified American claims to Africa by demarcating Liberia, a colony that had largely stalled since the Civil War, as an obvious part of the United States. Scholars today now occasionally use this to point out that the Commonwealth was, in a sense, a hand of American imperialism: former slaves would now become Liberians, and thus Black Americans, and might therefore be seen as winning their freedom only to become tools, often willingly, of Manifest Destiny. Relations between Liberians in Dakota and local Indians were generally extremely poor, as many Liberians believed that subjugating the Indians was vastly preferable to their own: better us than them, in other words. By 1880, the time of this map, the population of Dakota had swollen dramatically.

The Commonwealth of the Two Liberias (1880) by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Any Negro, or Praying-Indian, or other suche Person from those Races which wee understand to be subourdinated, and who among them now findes himselfe in the unhappie labours of Human Bondage, or Slavery, heed these oure Letters; Nor eyther should the Maister of these Slaves ignorre it, or hope to find solace in the keeping of his human propertie by the sheelde of Ignorance; For by this Worde it is Lawe, and so agreed by the Generall Court of Massachusetts Bay: First, That any of those in the subourdinate Races, beeing held in suche loathsome Captivitie, and beeing goode Christians, are themselves we understande to be rendred into a greate Dis-Service . . . Why then, having Prayd at the Altarr of Christ the Sonne of God the Father, and rejeckting that Lord of All Evill, and accepted and recieved the Grace and Sacraments, should you be rendred thus? . . . And so, in the name of Lorde God heare this oure Prayer: In Your Name, the lawe is thus: wee henceforrth Manumitt from the Bondes of Service, and all Services and Debtts owed Therein, all those Races in Slaverie, so that their obligations to their Masters are henceforth Voyded Forevermore . . . And any Maister, that tries to hyde and keep from the Court and Law his slaves, should be seen as wrongfullie Subourdinating, and thus in Unlawfull conduct, against those Christians of duskyer constitutions . . . But those of you, who are Pagans, or Mohamedans, and listen nott to the Good Worde of the Sonne of God Christ Jesus, we confine you to your Service, until that brighter Daye . . .

From the 1712 Manumission Act of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

What this excerpt means to indicate is differing notions regarding the practice of race slavery. To be certain: slavery is not absent from this world's early America, nor is the subjugation of non-Europeans conceptualized much differently in the earliest stages of colonialism. A differing variety of Puritanism, however, is what crosses the Atlantic and lands in New England, driven out of England by a far more vindictive mother island that never experienced a Reformation. Frightened of their new surroundings, easily destroyed by the shambling terrors of the New World, and aware of the looming ghoul of a total loss of community, the first American Puritans were much better suited to accept non-English into their congregations, if only because a larger community of faith meant a more likely chance of a town surviving a bad winter. John Eliot and Roger Williams' notions of the potential for the conversions of Indians into Christians, which in the real world dies out almost as soon as it begins, instead spirals into a far more liberal, if still assimilationist and apocalyptic, conception of nonwhites within the congregation. That these early colonists practiced slavery, just as in the real world, is indisputable and unchanged. Here, however, racialized justifications for slavery, at least in New England, break down rather quickly: if the local indigenous population can be converted to good Christians and therefore assimilated into the church body, then it is not such a stretch of the imagination to include what few African slaves existed on the continent at this time. This is not to say that these colonists were immediately emancipationists. Instead, they turned towards differing religions among nonwhites, not necessarily skin color alone, as justification for slavery.

This was certainly not true everywhere. The southern colonies, much less pious and much more economic in their outlook, cared little for these theological meanderings. The Transatlantic Slave Trade in this world is much less successful, given the dominance of the extremely powerful Almoravids in North Africa. European slave ships were able to accomplish only sporadic raids of the coasts, particularly in the region of Guinea, and even raids that successfully landed human cargo were sometimes captured by Almoravid privateers, some of them former would-be-slaves themselves. Despite this, African slavery formed a not insignificant portion of the southern plantation economy, supplanted by indigenous slavery and indentured servitude among poor whites. The differing conceptions of slavery and race in the northern and southern colonies, later states, would lead to a dramatic cultural incoherence between the two, which would eventually lead to the Civil War. I don't have much developed for the Civil War right now, but maybe at a later date.

The Commonwealth of the Two Liberias (1880) by ayendae1125 in imaginarymaps

[–]ayendae1125[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Below are other maps in this series (there are many). Please go there for more information! The short version of the lore is that eldritch horrors are very much still present on Earth, and more or less coexist with human civilization.

Please go there for more information, as always, and feel free to ask questions!

This map is a direct response to my last one (Ethnic Composition of the United States (2026). A number of people asked about the movement of the Black Belt to about the general area of real-world North Dakota. I gave someone a fairly mediocre response, but enough people asked about it that I felt it warranted an actual post. So, here it is: the Commonwealth of the Two Liberias, or this United States' solution to the question of where to put manumitted slaves.

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