Interestingly, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera notes that rubber was produced using juice from a specific vine, and his works were available in Latin, French, German, and English by the mid-16th century. Along with other descriptions of rubber, I wonder if this could have spurred additional interest in...
Bitcoin was a revolutionary advancement in that field since it was both decentralized AND was the first major use of a blockchain. It would have the same uses as previous digital currency, but without the shadier aspects of them. Then you also have to consider that a wide number of...
Since there's been a few threads lately on this subject, I figured I'd start my own on some insights I found.
Anyway, Rubber usage goes back millennia in Mesoamerica, where the Panama rubber tree Castilla elastica was tapped for its natural latex and processed into various goods such as balls...
Thank you. I will extend it either this Thursday or next Thursday with the Chagatai's own civil war.
That is correct. The Chagatai Khanate now dominates northern India until roughly the border of modern West Bengal, but doesn't extend too far south of the Ganges and Yamuna, and even in that...
Denmark and the formerly Norse Scottish islands maybe, but one could imagine a pagan Sweden/Norway/Finland/Baltic remaining a continual threat to Christendom (and occasional trading partner of course) for quite some time just as the Barbary states did. The Barbary pirates did huge damage in the...
I wonder how that would work. It's a giant swamp prone to severe hurricanes, but it's also an area rich in shellfish that permits sedentary civilisation in areas. And it can't really connect well with the Caribbean (beside the Bahamas) since the currents and winds blow out to the Atlantic, hence...
Depends on a lot of factors.
He's still alive for now. But many of his Sufi brethren have met their demise.
That's certainly the case. They're still numerous and hold a lot of power, so Islam can still revive a lot of strength.
In Magadha it would be rather relevant, since the Pithipatis have...
Yes. Likely it would require a giant pagan Russia/Russia equivalent to the east. The Scandinavian market is too small for slave trading to be much of a thing and they'd have no ability to establish manpower-intensive industries in other colonies.
Which wasn't a problem in northern China or parts of Japan where wheat and millet were more common crops than rice. In medieval Japan, most peasants would rarely eat the rice they farmed since it was used for tribute, and said tribute was often sold to sake producers.
Processing such a rubber...
Here's the problem--the natural rubber content in the Kazakh dandelion is about 8-10x lower than modern rubber trees. I am not certain how much less it is than Castilla elastica, the rubber source used in Mesoamerica, but it probably is quite a bit less since after all, nobody used these sources...
For all we know, it might be the benevolent and democratic Japan dropping an atomic bomb on a city of the extremist and brutal United States of America. So much could change.
You do have to consider that Majapahit was the product of 2,000+ years of Indian cultural development in terms of statecraft and administration, and even regionally borrowed heavily from the traditions of how local Malay and Javanese states were governed (and IIRC also the Khmer Empire, the...
The Prester John legend was dying quickly in the 13th century, and the common perception thanks to Mongol invasions in Hungary and Poland was that they were soldiers of Gog and Magog (Europeans even believed the word "Mongol" came from Magog) set free as a prelude to the end of the world. The...
I agree the Tokugawa would not, but Oda very possibly could, and maybe Toyotomi as well, although he'd have to quell his ambitions regarding China. But in both cases, their colonial interests lay in Asia.
Hawaii is awkward to reach from East Asia because the winds and currents go much north and...