🌊 Ripple · counterfactual
What if the First World War had gone differently?
1914 · central-europe
Four years of industrial war break four empires and redraw the map from Berlin to Baghdad.
If it had gone differently: The old European empires are never shattered; the century's borders, grievances and revolutions all run another way.
What it made possible
Later turning points that leaned on the First World War. Change it in the game and the ripples reach all of these.
- 1917The Russian Revolution. Without it, The Russian monarchy reforms or muddles through; the century-long contest between communism and capitalism never begins.
- 1918Women win the vote. Without it, Half the population stays voteless into mid-century; mass democracy is only ever half a democracy.
- 1936Keynesian economics. Without it, Governments keep treating slumps as bad weather; the idea that the state can manage demand never becomes orthodoxy.
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