🌊 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 set up
- 1917The Russian Revolution, The Russian monarchy reforms or muddles through; the century-long contest between communism and capitalism never begins.
- 1918Women win the vote, Half the population stays voteless into mid-century; mass democracy is only ever half a democracy.
- 1936Keynesian economics, Governments keep treating slumps as bad weather; the idea that the state can manage demand never becomes orthodoxy.
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