New Reality Seeds

[Rysith]

Originally Posted by ericthered

As a general thought, what type of divergences will completely kill off europe's rise to power? I'm not talking about bringing someone else to power, just not having europe's dominance come up.

Define "Europe". Barring some sort of major, long-term catastrophe people will move in / conquer it because it's got farmland and natural resources. The culture and so on might be completely different, but there will still be 'people in Europe doing things', even if they are more culturally similar to other areas.

As long as you're willing to accept divergence points that don't involve rending Europe uninhabitable, I can think of a few events (with no justification as to /why/, since I'm not actually that familiar with the history)

- Icelandic volcanos erupt, causing widespread famine and general distress in Europe. You'd likely want to choose a point a generation or two from when you wanted to use the world so that Europe was still recovering but not still filled with the starving.
- For whatever reason, the disease exchange with the New World goes the other way - Columbus or one of his crew are Patients Zero for something with a long incubation period, high eventual lethality, and enough of a mutation rate that it doesn't just sweep the continent once and go away. Maybe there is a new world equivalent of cow/chickenpox that gives resistance, or it's something like malaria/sickle-cell and the Europeans don't have the right genes. This not only causes depopulation, but it also prevents the exploitation and colonization of the New World, significantly limiting the countries that ended up as colonial powers.
- Related to the above, the black plague displays increased lethality, causing additional disruption and depopulation. Wikipedia says that it took 150 years for the population to recover, imagine something that killed off enough people that it would take more on the order of 6-800 years and Europe isn't going to rise as a world power.
- For a version that doesn't involve killing everyone in Europe through natural causes, some quirk of geology causes Europe to be metal-poor, especially in iron. You can allow tin (for Bronze) if you want pre-iron civilization to be similar, but without iron you're looking at copper / bronze tools and weapons, which will not provide the same sort of industrial and military boost that iron smelting did. You might need to extend the iron-poor area to prevent someone else figuring iron out and conquering everyone, but it should prevent Europe from growing much beyond a local power.

As mentioned, those all just keep Europe down, they don't do much to prevent someone else nearby from moving in and setting up in the same land area. Different time periods would have different groups setting up, but if all you do is keep Europe down it seems likely that someone else, likely either from North Africa or the near east, would end up taking over culturally if not officially.