Der Kontinentalsystem

Not an artistic masterpiece, but I like the concepts, so up it goes.

Dedicated to B_Munro on AH.Com, whose particular style of quirky dystopias has kept my inner alt-historian entertained for the past few years.

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The year is 1937, one and a half centuries since the unfortunate death of George Washington at the Constitutional Convention. Without his advocacy of the Virginia Plan, the Union was unable to reach a conclusion, and the pro-Federation states seceded as "Federation of Columbian States" during the 1790s after an unsuccessful attempt to force the Jersey Plan on the country. Tensions between the two countries thawed towards the late nineteenth century, but took a turn for the worse in 1904 when an American was implicated in the death of the Columbian President - despite British offers of mediation, they engaged in a bloody three-year war. The stalemate was officially recognised with the Treaty of Montpelier, chosen for its location in the Vermont Free State, which declared a full status quo ante bellum. Columbo-American relations are still rocky, but they aren't actively trying to kill each other at the moment.

The leading power in this world is the Kontinentalsystem, or Kosys, the successor to Ney's Continental System. The Reichsverband - a German empire under the House of Wettin - created from the Confederation of the Rhine in 1874 - is by far the most influential of the Kosys states, having usurped French authority during the Second and Third Revolutions (responsible for removing the Emperor in the name of the Republic, and removing the Republic in the name of the King). France has since managed to climb back to second-in-command of the union, but clearly plays second fiddle to Germany.

The other main powers in the Kosys are the Kingdom of Italy (under a Wittelsbach cadet branch); the Kingdom of Portugal (the REAL thing, not those exiled pretenders in Rio); and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, reunited after Lithuanian independence was achieved in the First Great War. Austria is technically a power, but is struggling to hold on to what remains of its dynastic empire in the face of ethnic crises; Prussia was divided between Germany and Poland in 1873, at the Congress of Nuremberg.

One of the two main rivals to the Kosys is the British Empire and its "Commonwealth of Allied Nations" - notably, the Kingdom of Norden, which escaped the Continental System and dynastically united after the First Great War in the early 1870s; Japan, opened up by the Mexican Empire in the 1850s, only to go on the rampage; and the Brazilian Empire, the legal continuation of the original Kingdom of Portugal (thus preserving the Oldest Continuous Alliance). Great Britain itself is currently readjusting to democratic institutions, having been administered to directly by Mary III ("Bloody Mary II") for five years - the cost of the Second Great War proved too much for the civil institutions, and the country was thrown into bedlam by the ensuing Recession. Mary was deposed and executed in 1933, to be succeeded by her son, Frederick.

The other 500lb gorilla in the room is the Russian Democratic Republic, formed after the Russian defeat in the First Great War and the overthrow of the Tsar. Originally the Russian Socialist Republic, the socialist side has been pushed to one side, and the state ideology moved from proto-communist to plain fascist. The regime is still living off the PR of conquering Finland from Norden.

The mid-tier powers are the Mexican Empire, which made the transition from shaky Latin American dictatorship to liberal democracy; the Ottoman Empire, which has enjoyed a relatively prosperous century (the establishment of the Suez Canal by Murad V in the 1870s proved to be a license to print money, prompting an Anglo-Mexican project in Nicaragua); and Bolivaria, which has recently got its act together after a century of tinpotism and civil war, and seems set to rival its imperial neighbours.

The Chinese Empire fell apart in the late 1880s, and until recently was a land of feuding warlords, backed by foreign investors. But in the deep interior, a group calling themselves the Mandate of Heaven is rapidly becoming the dominant state...